Chief Commissioner Dorian Calloway (Human)

He had told Larsen the truth, which was easier than most people assumed once you'd built a career on the principle that a coordination office survives exactly as long as its inputs are honest ones. What he had not told Larsen — because it wasn't yet a fact, only a shape he didn't like the look of — was that Threnody Logistics' account had crossed his desk a second time since the reconciliation discrepancy, three weeks ago, attached to a routine cross-habitat freight authorization that Calloway had approved without a second read.

He pulled his own copy of that authorization now, alone, the way he did most of his actual thinking. Five habitats' worth of paperwork moved through this office in any given week, most of it exactly as dull as it looked, and the post only worked because Calloway had trained himself to trust the dullness until something specific told him not to. Six weeks ago, a rounding discrepancy that resolved itself. Three weeks ago, an authorization that had needed his signature and gotten it, because nothing about a freight manifest asks a Chief Commissioner to reread it twice.

He read it a second time now.

The authorization had been requested and countersigned at the Commissioner level — not Eden's, one of the other four, filed with a habitat seal Calloway recognized without needing to look it up, because recognizing every one of those seals on sight was, again, the entire job. It was not, on its face, anything but ordinary: cross-habitat freight authorizations crossed his desk daily, and a Commissioner countersigning one for a contractor already operating a legitimate route was not, by itself, a fact that meant anything at all.

It was, however, a fact that connected a name to a contractor Larsen was about to start pulling apart in earnest, and Calloway had spent two years building this office on the principle that he read his own inputs closely enough to catch the discrepancies before they became someone else's emergency. He had failed that principle once already this month.

He was not going to fail it twice by sitting on this the way he'd sat on the reconciliation notice — but he was also not going to hand Larsen a Commissioner's name on the strength of one countersigned authorization and a rounding error that had resolved itself too cleanly to be nothing. That was a conclusion, and Calloway's entire professional discipline ran on the difference between a conclusion and a fact that hadn't finished arguing for itself yet.

He made a second note instead, in the file he kept for exactly this kind of half-formed thing, and reached for the intercom to arrange a very ordinary, very unremarkable call to one particular Commissioner's office — the kind of call his post made a dozen times a week, and the kind that, this time, he intended to listen to rather more carefully than usual.