They argued for three hours over whether the ship had arrived.
Not whether it was damaged. Not whether it needed aid.
Whether it was there at all.
Half the board insisted the signal was a reflection—ghost data from a decommissioned relay. The other half pointed to thermal drift and said something was displacing the cold.
By the time they voted to investigate, the orbit had shifted.
There was nothing left to find.
No wreckage. No survivors. No record clean enough to close.
Just twelve families asking the same question in different ways.
Where were they?
Elia Voss did not attend the memorial.
She remained in the observation chamber, replaying the conflicting logs in silence.
Each version made sense.
That was the problem.
She opened a new framework instance and cleared the input channels one by one.
No external testimony. No committee weighting. No delay for consensus.
Only record.
Only resolution.
The system processed the remaining data and returned a single state.
Arrived.
Lost.
Closed.
Voss watched the output for a long time.
Then she annotated it.
This will not be argued again.
Within six months, every harbor in the ring was running Voss's resolution protocol. No one called it the Lattice yet.