"It Is Only a Patrol Ship," They Said — Then the Seventh Ranging Answered

For forty-one years, the Druhai Sovereignty laughed at the single human patrol ship holding orbit above their conquered colony — too small to threaten, too stubborn to leave, classified in every official record as functionally inert. When the Sovereignty finally sent forty thousand warships to erase the embarrassment, they discovered, eleven minutes and forty-four seconds too late, that the ship was never a warship at all. It was a lighthouse. And the Seventh Ranging had been listening to it for years.