Okash does not answer. Instead he takes a palm-sized device and places it on the table, activating it with a push of a heavyweight key. A fragmented hololith flickers to life, populated with what looks like shreds of parchment, scattered to the winds.

‘What am I looking at, shipmaster?’ Elivia asks.

Okash’s eyes are locked on those slivers of green light.

‘The Navy picket line,’ he says. ‘Or what’s left of it.’

‘Mercy and grace,’ Quinn mutters.

‘It would seem both have been in short supply out here,’ Ravara says, then she looks at Okash. ‘Can you say what killed them?’

Okash shakes his head. ‘Not with certainty.’ He reaches out and presses the hololith key again, and the projection flickers a second time, resolving a closer look at one of the broken ships. Despite the distortion, I can see how violent the ship’s death must have been. How swift.

‘From what is visible, I would hazard a guess at lances and cannons.’ Okash rotates the hololith with a slender hand and frowns. ‘Going by the dispersal of the wreckage and the degree of destruction, whatever hit them did so with a great deal of power and accuracy. They blew straight through the line.’

Ravara’s eyes go back to the hololith, and the rotating wreckage of the Navy ships.

‘And where did they go, after they blew straight through the line?’ she asks.

Okash shakes his head. ‘Impossible to say,’ he says. ‘There are no signs of any warp-wake, and the remains of the picket have drifted too far to determine anything much else. Even accounting for how we might have affected the wreckage with our own arrival, the dispersal pattern suggests that the damage is weeks old. Months, even. And that is without adjusting for time and spatial dilation. Whatever it was, it’s long gone now.’

‘I suppose we should count ourselves lucky,’ Quinn says. ‘We’re in no shape to fight.’

Ravara shakes her head. ‘There is no such thing as luck,’ she says. ‘There is only destiny. A thousand paths might take you to it, but the ending is already set.’

‘Inescapable,’ I say.

Ravara looks at me through the hololith. The green light recasts her amber eyes in jade.

‘Before she died, the Lady Oraylis told me that she should not have been able to find the way through the darkness, but that she did anyway. That it felt like the pull of something inescapable.’

Zoric frowns. ‘That sounds ominous.’

Ravara ignores him, still focused on me. ‘Did Oraylis say how she did it?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘All that Oraylis said was that she knew exactly where to place her feet, even though she could not see the path.’

Ravara’s hand goes to her collar and rests there a moment.