The trip back from the dead world was quiet.
No one really felt like talking, and that was fine. Aurelian stayed silent for most of the way, and Rhoswen didn't push him to say anything either.
The place they had just come from stayed in his head the whole time, not in a negative way, but with a bit of second-guessing about whether leaving them there was the right call.
Before, those four cruisers had been nothing more than a clue, something the system pointed toward, something useful but still distant.
Now they weren't just an idea anymore. He had seen them. Broken, buried, half-lost in that dead space, but still there.
And that changed how he thought about them.
Not enough to change what had to happen first, because priorities were still priorities, but enough that he couldn't treat that ruined field like some optional thing he might deal with later.
It had moved from "maybe" to "real," and that alone gave it weight in his planning, whether he liked it or not.
