The dispatch arrived at the fourteenth bell, nested inside seventeen other items in Neth's daily intelligence intake.
Routine format. Whisper-quartz transcription, relay station four, southern sector. The quartz network processed approximately six hundred communications per day through the Morreth corridor — military dispatches, trade confirmations, garrison rotation schedules, mining output reports, weather observations from the coastal stations. Most of it was infrastructure. The breathing of a civilisation going about its business.
Neth read all of it.
