Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

The case arrived the way Larsen's cases always arrived: as a document nobody was worried about.

The Chief Commissioner's office reconciles the five habitats' berth registries once a quarter. It is an administrative exercise — ledgers laid beside ledgers, a clerk confirming that the Compact's records agree with themselves — and it investigates nothing, because reconciliation was never designed to find wrongdoing. It was designed to find arithmetic. Which is why, when a clerk in Calloway's office found maintenance drone CM-4471 berthed at Eden and at a second habitat in the same hour, the finding went into the reconciliation report as an entry discrepancy, referred for correction, and would have died there, corrected, if reconciliation reports did not also cross Larsen's desk.

He read it twice. Then he pulled the quarter's full comparison and found it three more times. Four incidents, one drone identity, two habitats, zero overlap in either habitat's own ledger — because each ledger, read alone, was perfect. Eden's showed CM-4471 berthed, powered down, drawing keep-alive current, exactly where it said. The second habitat's showed CM-4471 arriving, working, departing, exactly when it said. Five competent registries, five hard edges, and a fact that only existed in the space between two of them.

That space was his jurisdiction. It was, in fact, the whole of his jurisdiction — the Governor had built Five-O for the cases that lived between the habitats' edges, and had never once needed to explain what that meant, because the cases explained it quarterly.

He sent the notifications the same afternoon. Both Commissioners, in writing: the case, the drone identity, the berths in question, and — on the Eden letter — the standard annex stating that Five-O's field observer would be flying the dock ring, dates attached. Larsen had heard every argument against announcing an investigation to the people being investigated, most of them from investigators he respected, and had the same answer for all of it. The habitats' own bureaus were not suspects; they were owed the truth about what was moving through their registries. And an observer nobody knows about was exactly the kind of quiet he had resigned a commission to get away from. If the fraud was clever enough to go still because a raven was announced, it was clever enough to have gone still already.

Privately, he suspected it would not go still. Whoever had built this had built it out of paperwork, and people who trust paperwork to hide them share a blind spot: they stop imagining that anyone will go and look at the thing the paper describes.

So he sent someone to look at the thing.