The hookup to Athoek Station’s dock was largely automated. When the pressure equalized and Five opened the shuttle hatch, Lieutenant Tisarwat and I pushed ourselves over the awkward boundary between the shuttle’s weightlessness and the station’s artificial gravity. The bay was dingy gray, scuffed, like any other bay on any other station.

A ship’s captain stood waiting there, an ancillary straight and still behind her. Seeing it I felt a stab of envy. I had once been what that ancillary was. I never could be that again.

“Captain Hetnys,” I said, as Tisarwat came up behind me.

Captain Hetnys was tall—taller than I was by a good ten centimeters—broad, and solidly built. Her hair, clipped military-short, was a silvery gray, a stark contrast to the darkness of her skin. A matter of vanity, perhaps—she’d certainly chosen that hair color, wanted people to notice it, or notice the close cut. Not all of the pins she wore in careful, uncustomary rows on the front of her uniform jacket had names on them, and those that did I couldn’t read from this distance. She bowed. “Fleet Captain, sir.”

I did not bow. “I’ll see the system governor now,” I said, cold and matter-of-fact. Leaning just a bit on that antique accent any Mianaai would have. “And afterward you’ll explain to me why your ship threatened to attack me when I arrived.”

“Sir.” She paused a moment, trying, I thought, to look untroubled. When I’d first messaged Athoek Station I’d been told that System Governor Giarod was unavoidably occupied by religious obligations, and would be for some time. As was, apparently, every station official of any standing. This was a holiday that came around on an Athoeki calendar, and possibly because of that, because it was merely a local festival, no one had seen fit to warn me that actually it was important enough to nearly shut down the entire station. Captain Hetnys knew I’d been told the governor was unavailable for some hours. “The initiates should be coming out of the temple in an hour or two.” She started to frown, and then stopped herself. “Are you planning to stay on the station, sir?”

Behind me and Lieutenant Tisarwat, Kalr Five, Ten, and Eight, and Bo Nine hauled luggage out of the shuttle. Presumably the impetus behind Captain Hetnys’s question.

“It’s only, sir,” she went on, when I didn’t answer immediately, “that lodgings on the station are quite crowded just now. It might be difficult to find somewhere suitable.”