Inside the room, Kael was signing a document.
He handled this sort of thing with practiced ease—even though the document came with a full one hundred and seventy pages of material that he had to verify personally.
His expression was relaxed and natural, even carrying an inexplicable sense of relief.
He spent precisely fifteen minutes on the document, not a second more or less. Finally, at its end, he dipped a quill into ink and wrote down his name.
Kael Lohars.
Two lines: one in High Gothic, one in Nostraman.
Then he raised his hand and passed the document to the servitor that had been waiting all this time. It reached out to accept it, issuing a brief, hurried sound of acknowledgement from its throat.
Having received no further orders, it left with the document in its arms.
Its metal replacement legs clicked crisply against the floor. Its body was not heavy; this was not a combat servitor, and thus had no steel plates or other bulletproof materials embedded within it. Its internal organs had been completely removed, and its brain was only a third the size of an ordinary human's.
A laboratory-grown embryo, born to be used by others for such simple tasks.
Kael pursed his lips but said nothing.
He knew where it would go. In only two days, he had become intimately familiar with the Nightfall, just as he knew every grim alleyway in Quintus. However, he did not know where these documents would be sent.
The logistics fleet would not arrive for another fifty-eight days—strictly speaking, fifty-seven. It was already 1:45 in the morning on Terra.
If you wanted to know the time, you would have to ask the clocks hanging in every corridor aboard the Nightfall. Who knew who had established that tradition?
Though somewhat