The leak of Nova Technologies' partnership emails rippled through global trade networks before noon, and by evening every government on Earth understood that something foundational had been shifted without their consent.
They had not received a message. That was the first thing, and in some ways the thing that stung most. Nova Technologies had written to the largest companies in the world and had written to no government at all.
The most consequential commercial event of the era had been arranged in a single day, between a stateless entity in orbit and the corporate champions of a hundred nations, and the nations had learned of it the way the public had: from a leak, secondhand, after the fact, reading terms they'd had no hand in setting.
Nowhere was this realization felt more acutely than in Washington.
