Nobody in that gallery moved for eleven seconds, and the plate went on stamping through all of it.
Marek stood on a mounted frame with the registry plate humming behind his shoulder. Three people faced him across nine meters of cold floor with nothing resembling a plan.
Yeda read the frame before anybody said a word, since that was what she did under pressure. What she found was not a wall she could open with her hands.
The mounting frame carried three national seals laid across it in sequence. Every one of them had been applied under military authority within the last two hours.
A seal of that kind is not a lock, and no seam runs through a legal instrument. Ardent had put the plate behind a document rather than behind a door.
Vasa read all three seals off her slate and reported them without softening a line.
