High Captain Karla Wender (Human)

She sent the account at 0610 station, in her own hand, and then did the thing the order she had given left her to do, which was the paperwork.

The Council would have the account within the week. It would go with the reconciling desk's note under it, because that was what a copy for the binders carried and because she wanted it there. A desk that had read her account against the station's own instruments had said, by what it found and what it did not, more than a High Captain could say in a page, and the Council knew the desk's hand even if it had never traced the hand to a name.

She knew what the note would look like, because she had read a hundred of them. Two things set side by side, and the cost of the gap between them, in a hand that did not vary, over a line left blank. She had never once minded the blank. A note nobody had signed was a note nobody could be ordered to withdraw, and she had spent four years building a doctrine out of officers who stated their grounds and said nothing further; the blank line was the same discipline in a different corps, and she had not asked for it, any more than she had asked Shepherd about item sixteen.

She would collect the copy at the end of the shift. She did not expect it to have changed.