Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

Calloway's message was three sentences long and said, without quite saying it, that he'd just talked to someone who'd known exactly what to say before being asked.

Larsen had commanded a boarding team long enough to recognize the shape of that report even in someone else's careful phrasing. It wasn't evidence. Calloway hadn't claimed it was evidence, which was itself the most useful thing about the message — a man who'd spent two years training himself not to overstate a finding wasn't going to start now, and the fact that he'd sent anything at all, on three sentences of instinct, meant the instinct had cleared whatever bar Calloway set for himself before bothering a Governor's task force commander with it.

He read the message twice more, then pulled up what the Compact's own registry held on Halcyon — not much, by the standard of a Governor's task force that had spent two years working almost exclusively out of Eden's jurisdiction. A habitat like any of the other four: self-governing, a Commissioner, a Mayor, a civil bureau running its own ordinary caseload, none of it built with an eye toward ever hosting a Five-O visit.

That was, in fact, the entire problem. Larsen's authority ran to all five habitats equally, on paper, and had been exercised at exactly one of them in two years, because the gap Five-O existed to close only opened when a case actually crossed a line — and until eleven crates and a reassigned routing code, nothing had. Going to Halcyon in person wasn't a courtesy call. It was Five-O doing, for the first time since its founding, the one thing its charter had always technically allowed and its caseload had never yet required: showing up somewhere that hadn't asked for it, on the strength of a Chief Commissioner's hunch and a contractor's suspiciously clean paperwork.

He thought about Voss's line, delivered two years ago at his own commissioning and repeated often enough since that he no longer needed to look up the wording: the limit is real because you enforce it, not because anyone's watching to see if you will. Halcyon was inside that limit. He wasn't crossing anything by going. He was, for the first time, actually using the whole of what the charter gave him.

He drafted the travel request, copied Calloway, and — after a moment's consideration that he did not examine too closely — copied the Governor's office as well, not because procedure required it at this stage, but because Voss had told him once that she'd rather hear about a Halcyon trip from him than from Duarte's Mayor asking her why a Governor's task force had shown up unannounced.

Going to Halcyon myself, he wrote. Nothing formal yet. Want to see Duarte's face when I ask the second version of your question.

He sent it before he could decide that was an unprofessional way to phrase a travel authorization, and found, checking the outbox a moment later, that he did not particularly regret it.