Rodriguez called immediate, comprehensive council session, understanding that whatever response the alliance offered required exactly the unified coordination Kharn's devastating warning suggested this genuinely different threat category demanded.
"I want every civilization's formal position before we respond," he said, addressing the full assembled representatives. "Not individual reaction. Genuine, coordinated strategic consensus."
Kharn, working through his own difficult recognition with characteristic honest directness, offered specific counsel drawing on generations of painful, accumulated wisdom. "I want to name something my people learned through devastating experience," he said. "Individual, fragmented response has never succeeded against this threat. What might genuinely prove different — what we've never previously possessed opportunity to test — is coordinated, unified strength across multiple civilizations simultaneously."
