The war room aboard the Sovereign Dawn buzzed with tense energy. Holograms of fleet positions floated above the central table, illuminating the darkened chamber in shades of blue and red. At the head stood Leon Varick, cloaked in a long, sleeveless coat bearing the golden insignia of the Galactic Exchange—a trader's scale embedded in a swirling vortex.
Across from him, standing upright and calm as an obsidian tower, was Envoy Talvas of the Grey Concord, a mysterious and fiercely independent coalition of worlds that had long resisted contact with the Exchange. They valued isolation, tradition, and control of their native voidmineral deposits—resources that Leon's analysts now flagged as critical to powering interdimensional gates and sustaining prolonged wormhole jumps.
