Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

By the time they returned to Threshold Station, the sky over Dock Seven had gone from black to the colour of old steel. Nobody suggested sleep.

Thorne stood at the operations table while Rook-7 projected three overlaid traces: station chronometer drift, the residue pattern Aldera had captured at the causeway, and the grove signal from the oldest dryadic tree.

They lined up.

Not perfectly. Not point-for-point. But in the way that mattered — phase families and recurrence intervals — they lined up enough to stop pretending these were separate problems.

"Say it plainly," he said, looking at Syra. "What are we looking at?"

She did not hesitate.

"Coupled harmonics," she said. "The station drift and the grove anchor are in different layers, but they are exchanging coherence pressure. You have been treating one as instrumentation error and one as folklore. They are the same structure seen through different constraints."

He had expected something like this. Hearing it said this cleanly still made his shoulders tighten.

"And this affects transit?"

"Directly," she said. "Quantum Space Harmonic Wave transit is a lock problem. If local coherence is ambiguous, lock duration shrinks. Your safety margins become fiction."

That landed harder than anything else in the briefing. There were ships due through this sector in two days.