Governor Petra Voss (Human)

The call came through Calloway's office before it reached Voss directly, which was the correct order and also the one she trusted least — by the time anything crossed Calloway's desk, it had already been smoothed into a shape convenient for four other people's schedules. She read past the smoothing anyway. She'd had two years of practice.

Orbital Five-O has opened an inquiry into a cross-habitat supply discrepancy originating at Eden. Estimated scope: undetermined, pending Larsen's assessment. Calloway's note beneath it was shorter and more honest than the summary above it: He wouldn't have opened it if it weren't worth opening. You know how he is about paperwork he doesn't need.

She did know. It was, in fact, the entire reason she'd hired him.

Voss had spent two years arguing to anyone who'd sit still for it that the Compact's five habitats needed one investigative line that answered to nobody's local convenience — not because the habitats couldn't police themselves, but because nothing built to police one habitat could ever be expected to notice a pattern that only existed across all five. She had commissioned Larsen on that exact theory, over the quiet objections of three Commissioners who considered a Governor's personal task force an insult to their own competence, and she had not once, in two years, regretted overruling them.

She regretted it slightly less this morning, reading a report that began at Eden and had already, before lunch, stopped being Eden's problem.

A supply discrepancy that could be explained by one habitat's sloppy accounting stayed exactly that — a filing matter, beneath a Governor's notice by design. A discrepancy that required someone to make a routing code deliberately unreadable was not sloppy. It was maintained, by someone with the standing to reach into a courier manifest and keep it that way, and Voss had governed the Compact long enough to know that "someone with that standing" was a very short list, none of whom would enjoy Larsen's attention.

She drafted no formal response. Larsen didn't need one; he needed the space to keep pulling the thread without four Commissioners deciding, individually and simultaneously, that it had wandered into their jurisdiction and required a committee. That was the entire point of Orbital Five-O, and the entire reason she'd built it to answer to her and no one slower.

She wrote back a single line, mostly for Calloway's benefit, since he was the one who'd have to field the calls: Let him work it. Tell the Commissioners I said so.

Then she sat with the report a moment longer than she needed to, because five habitats was a great many places for eleven crates to have gone missing from, and she had learned, the same two years she'd learned everything else about this job, that the ones that mattered never announced themselves as more than a filing matter until it was already too late to have caught them earlier.