High Captain Karla Wender (Human)

Wender got it at 0447, third-hand and eleven hours stale, which was the ordinary condition of command and had never once stopped being intolerable.

She read the Triumvirate log twice. The first time she read it as a High Captain, checking whether three officers had convened a thing they were entitled to convene, and they had; the clause was satisfied in each of its parts and each part had been made to stand alone, which was Shepherd being Shepherd — not building a case, building a structure, so that anyone who wanted to pull it down later would have to say which specific piece they were pulling.

The second time she read it as somebody who had taught the doctrine it was written in.

An order is sound if it is correct given what is currently known. She had said that to rooms full of officers for four seasons and believed it every time, and here it was, applied by a former cadet without a wasted word, to a situation Wender could not have improved on from the chair she was sitting in. Everything Shepherd had done was right. Wender checked it twice looking for the place where it stopped being right and did not find one, and the not finding was the part that made her set the pad down and sit for a moment with her hands flat on the desk.

Because the order was correct, and Wender was eleven hours away, and the ship was already in.

She keyed the relay and said, "Countermand nothing. Get me the boundary desk," and if her voice did anything unusual on the first two words, the log did not preserve it.