Eight Million for a Scrap Battery

“Because you recovered a genuine starship fragment, and you can’t do anything with it.” Silence struck the room. Gu’s cane froze above the floor. Lin leaned closer. “That fragment is destroying itself. Within forty-eight hours, it becomes the ordinary titanium-iron alloy described in your report. Hanhai needs a result to prove to its board that it didn’t return empty-handed. My battery gives you a story.” It was not a guess. Ten minutes earlier, Lan-Zero had sensed a piece of *Far Tide* armor beneath the facility and remotely triggered its information purge. Lin had just learned how frightening “core authority” could be. Gu studied him like a predator reconsidering an animal it had mistaken for helpless prey. “Eight million is excessive.”