Nox made the decision in under a minute and refused to let anybody dress it up. Vasa put the number on the channel, he asked two questions about the corridor, and then he answered her.
The barrier was an asset, the contracts were assets, and one of them was currently worth more than the other. A field standing over a school did nothing for seven cities holding a network of promises he had signed with his own name.
"I am not doing this because it is noble," he said on the certified channel, "since a barrier over a reputation nobody can trade is worth less than twelve minutes across four anchors."
Vasa entered the reasoning verbatim, as she did with every decision of that size. A record that keeps only the outcome teaches nobody anything about how the outcome was reached.
Nobody at the Citadel argued the arithmetic, and two people argued the timing hard. Both of them had spent a year building the thing he was about to switch off.
