The count was final.
Vayne sat at the chart table in the Ashcrest's operations room for the third consecutive morning and read the damage assessment that his fleet surgeon had compiled overnight. The room smelled different now. Three days of battle had replaced the chart-paper-and-lamp-oil smell with something denser, something that clung to the timber and the ventilation slots and the officers' uniforms and that nobody named because naming it meant acknowledging what it was made of.
Forty-three Kesseth warships sunk or scuttled. Twenty-six interned on the two volcanic islands. There were 3,160 Kesseth sailors in the holding positions, fed from the Dominion's emergency provisions, guarded by marines who had been fighting them seventy-two hours ago. Sixty-one ships retreating east, too damaged for further engagement, too numerous to intercept without extending the Dominion's operational reach past the strait. Four unaccounted.
One of the four was the Tarevel.
