Space Commissioner Zara Wayland (Human)

The letter reached Wayland before the thing it described, which in two years of the task force had not happened once.

It was not that Five-O came unannounced. Calloway's office kept a liaison line for exactly that, and the line worked: a visit reached her as a courtesy from the Chief Commissioner's office, usually on the day, occasionally the day after, in the flat register that office used for anything it would prefer not to be asked about. She had never minded. A Governor's task force with authority across five habitats was going to arrive on her dock from time to time, and the dual line she held had been designed by a Governor who understood that a Commissioner told afterwards was still a Commissioner told.

This was a letter from the Commander himself, a day ahead, and it was unlike anything the task force had sent her because it had nothing in it.

She read it twice, the second time for the sentence she could object to. A transient notice from the oversight, by reference. A berth log, by reference. A night, two berths, an office, a span of ninety minutes, and a list of things the Commander would not do on her dock, which was longer than the list of things he would. No case opened. No finding stated. No request. Nothing about the dock master's rota, which she had seen because the bureau's note on the oversight's notice had gone up through her office on its way to the Chief Commissioner's, with Albercombe's not Eden's on it, and which she had thought about for longer than the two words deserved. Nothing about the two tugs beyond their berth. The letter said what a man would do and when, and left the dock exactly as it had found it.

She could not object to it because there was nothing in it to object to, and she noted that this was not an accident of the drafting. A letter that asserted something about Eden was a letter she would have had to answer, upward and sideways, in two versions that said the same thing. This one she could send on unchanged.

She sent it to the Mayor's office, identically, with the time. She sent it to Oyelaran for information, since the bureau had already had the notice and would prefer to have the rest. She wrote noted on her own copy and the hour she had read it, and did not write that it was the first time, because the file was not the place for that and she had no other place.