Commander Voss stood before the assembled expedition, her amplified voice cutting through the nervous chatter like a blade through silk. The sound carried with unnatural clarity, reaching even the furthest members of the gathering with perfect articulation. "Listen carefully. Entry will be organized—groups of fifty, staggered by ten-minute intervals. This prevents bottlenecking and ensures we don't have a thousand people crammed into unknown space if something goes wrong."
She paused, letting the implications of that statement sink in—the acknowledgment that things would go wrong, that it was a matter of when and how badly, not if. Her gaze swept across the assembled awakened with the kind of assessment that came from years of command experience, cataloging who looked ready and who looked like they were already breaking under the pressure.
