Lieutenant Rutger Voss (Human, Military Space Command, Casualty Correspondence Office)

He had asked for this posting. That was the detail he had never once told a visitor to this office, because it sounded, out loud, like exactly the kind of thing an officer says to make himself feel less useless at a desk that existed to say no to grieving families in language careful enough to survive a legal review.

He had asked for it because the alternative postings available to a junior lieutenant fresh off training were further from the file, not closer to it, and Voss had wanted, for reasons he had not fully examined even now, to be close to the actual paper this particular institutional failure generated rather than reading about it secondhand the way most of the officer corps did.

Adaeze Okafor was the fourth family member to sit across this desk from him in eleven months, and she was, so far, the only one who had made the trip to Mars in person rather than trusting the correspondence channel to carry anything real. He had not told his superiors he found that decision more credible than the other three families' patience. He suspected they would not have received the observation as useful.

"I'll be honest about something else, since you've earned that much for making this trip," he said, once she'd finally taken the chair. "The classification isn't wrong on its own terms. Patience First genuinely wasn't authorised. I've read the file closely enough to know the MSC isn't lying to you about that specific fact, whatever else it's failing to do about everything the fact doesn't cover."

"That's not comfort, Lieutenant."

"I'm not offering comfort. I don't have standing to offer it and wouldn't insult you by pretending otherwise. What I can tell you, because it's true and because nobody in this office has said it to a family member yet in writing, is that you are not the only one asking this question, and the file this office keeps is getting heavier every time someone else asks it the way you just did. That's not nothing. It's not an answer. But an institution that keeps refusing to answer the same question, from six different families, in writing, for years, is building a record whether it means to or not."

She looked at him for a long moment, the particular look he was coming to recognise as the moment a visitor decided whether he was worth continuing to talk to or just another desk.

"Then keep the record," she said. "Since apparently that's the only thing either of us actually has the authority to do."

He did. He filed her visit, verbatim where he could manage it, into a running correspondence log the office kept for exactly this purpose and forwarded to no one who had ever asked to see it. He did not know, writing it, whether it would matter to anybody above his own desk. He filed it anyway, the same way he suspected Adaeze Okafor would keep writing letters nobody answered — not because either of them expected the next one to work, but because stopping was the one thing neither of them had come this far to do.