Deep in space, around the orbits of a certain blue looking planet, in a room where the fate of a certain civilization is decided, a meeting was being held.
Conference Chamber One on the Ark seated three hundred. Today it held two hundred and thirty, which meant seventy seats empty and every person present acutely aware of why. The Seventh Fleet. Green Crown's garrison. The three battalions that had gone into Red Hollow and not come back out. Empty chairs had a way of making attendance feel like a privilege nobody had earned.
The Supreme General sat at the head of the table in his beast armor, helmet on the surface beside his right hand, his face in the shadow that forty years of this room had carved permanently into his expression. The holoprojector in the center of the table ran through colony status updates that nobody needed the display to understand. They all knew the numbers. They had been living inside the numbers for years.
