High Captain Karla Wender (Human)

Wender read the second screen once for content and once for what it was for, and the first reading took no time at all.

Fleet priority on sixteen. Good catch. She had initialled the flag in the early autumn with four clean lines under it, watched the officer who wrote it move to item seventeen without a change of pace, and decided not to ask. She had built that decision on purpose, over four years. She had paid for it once in public, in the late autumn, on an inquiry file, beside a name that was not present to mind and a coordinate the Union's register put on land held under that name. She had been right both times, and being right had never told her what was under the silence, because that was not what the doctrine was for.

Three lines told her. Water, wood, dusk. She had never heard them and did not need to have. A rule kept the way a flag's grounds were kept — stated, and nothing further — was the exact shape of the thing Shepherd had been carrying over item sixteen, and it had reached this desk by the only route it could ever have taken: not asked for, and not disclosed, but sent, by the one person entitled to send it, inside a signal the record had been calling a loss for a season.

Wender looked at a detail she had declined to be told, arriving unasked from a woman the record called lost, and did the arithmetic she'd built a career on. Contact was real. Rescue was not on offer and might never be. The levril could hold the door and not open it. What came through the door, if anything did, had to be Shepherd's to send.

She did not write enough is enough at the foot of the account. The sentence closed a file, and this file was not hers to close. Written in her hand it would have been the citation again, in plainer words.

"Send her the account," Wender said. "All of it. The true version. Don't soften it and don't finish it. She's spent a season generating every certain thing she has. Send her one she doesn't have to make up — and then let her tell us what she wants, and let that be the order, because the one thing we do not get to do, after all of this, is decide for her what it meant."