Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

The referral had been sitting in Eden's queue for six days before anyone thought to call it interesting, and even then, nobody thought to call Larsen. He heard about it because he made a point of hearing about everything that sat in a queue for six days.

Detective Inspector Wendell Albercombe met him at the bureau's side door rather than the front desk, which told Larsen most of what he needed to know before either of them said a word. A man who wanted an audience walked you through the lobby. A man who wanted this over with met you by the stairs.

"It's a ration-manifest discrepancy," Albercombe said, handing over a data slate like it had personally inconvenienced him. "Eleven crates, logged out of Eden stores, never logged in anywhere. I'd have closed it as spoilage and moved on, except spoilage doesn't usually route itself through four transfer stamps and come back missing a fifth."

"Four transfer stamps."

"Four transfer stamps I can read. There's a fifth somewhere I can't, because it's not Eden's paperwork anymore once it leaves Eden's dock." Albercombe said this in the tone of a man reciting a complaint he'd already made twice to people who couldn't do anything about it. "Superintendent Oyelaran's read is that it's somebody else's problem the moment it crosses the boundary. I agree with her. I just also don't know whose."

That was the whole shape of it, and Larsen had heard the shape often enough to recognize it without needing the details spelled out further: a thing that started inside one habitat's tidy jurisdiction and ended somewhere the tidiness didn't reach. Compact courier manifests didn't lose five stamps by accident. They lost them because somebody along the route had a reason to make the sixth one illegible, and reasons like that rarely stayed contained to a single habitat's paperwork.

"You did the right thing sitting on it," Larsen said, which was as close as he ever got to thanking someone for admitting a case had outgrown them. "This is what we're for."

Albercombe's expression suggested he'd heard that line before and remained unconvinced it made the paperwork easier. He didn't argue it, though. He handed over the case file, the transfer logs, and — with the specific reluctance of a man surrendering the last thing he'd hoped to keep — a thermos.

"Tea," he said. "Not for you. For whoever's waiting for you outside. He gets tetchy if the visit runs long and he's had nothing to pour anybody."

Larsen had not, as far as he knew, brought anyone with him. He said as much.

"You will have," Albercombe said, already walking back toward his desk, "by the time you're done reading that file properly."

He was, it turned out, entirely right — though it wasn't a person waiting by the door when Larsen came out reading the fifth transfer stamp's absence for the third time. It was a domestic-model intelligence, addressed by nobody as anything but Jeeves, standing exactly where a man might stand if he'd learned, over some years, precisely how long a case review took and had timed his arrival to the minute.

"The Inspector asked me to see you found the lift," Jeeves said, in the tone of a man delivering the least significant fact in the room. "He also mentioned you'd want to know that the fifth stamp isn't missing so much as reassigned — the manifest software doesn't delete a routing code, it just stops displaying one it's told isn't relevant anymore. Eden's own systems wouldn't know to look. I understand the Compact's do."

Larsen looked at the transfer log again. Then at Jeeves. Then, because it seemed only fair, at the thermos.

"He tell you to say that, or did you work it out yourself?"

"He told me to see you found the lift," Jeeves said. "I understood the rest to be implied."

He relieved Larsen of the thermos as he said it, with the settled air of a man reclaiming his own property, produced a cup from somewhere about his person, and poured. The tea was exactly the right temperature — which, after a corridor wait timed to the minute, it would be — and Jeeves presented it in the manner of someone resolving, quietly and without comment, the question of who it had been for all along.

Five habitats, one line, and apparently one very well-informed household intelligence who wasn't on anybody's roster and had no business knowing what a Compact-wide routing code looked like from underneath. Larsen decided, on the strength of eleven missing crates and a stranger's unreasonably good tea, that this case had already earned itself a second look.