The strangest part was that none of this made any sense. Ziara had looked up Thrawn’s records, and he was already far ahead of his classmates. The last thing he needed to do was cheat on a simulator exercise.

Still, while his normal simulator scores were consistently high, most of them were within or only slightly above the academy’s high-water marks. On this particular exercise, no one in Taharim’s history had ever gotten even close to Thrawn’s score of ninety-five. There had been only one logical explanation for such a high score, and Colonel Wevary had come to it.

Ziara shifted her attention to the accused. Thrawn was sitting stiffly in his chair, his face a rigid mask. He’d already pled not guilty to the charges, insisting that he hadn’t cheated but merely taken advantage of the parameters the exercise had set up for him.

But as one of the other panel members had already said, that was exactly what a guilty person would also say. Unfortunately, too many cadets in the past had gamed the system by secretly running practice sessions with their upcoming test parameters, a cheat the instructors had countered by making sure no simulations could ever be exactly rerun. That built-in limitation meant that Thrawn couldn’t repeat his technique and prove his innocence.

Presumably, the instructors could dig into the programming and change that. But it would take a lot of time, and apparently no one thought a single cadet was worth that much effort.

Mentally, Ziara shook her head. The other part of the problem was that the records of the exercise were limited to the points of view of the three attacking patrol ships. One of the records had gone blank at the wrong moment, showing nothing of the climactic encounter, while the other two simply showed Thrawn’s patrol ship vanishing for several crucial seconds.

A practical cloaking device had been a dream of Defense Force scientists for generations. It was unlikely that a cadet simulation would have made that elusive breakthrough. At least, not without an illegal tweaking of the programming.

And yet…

Ziara studied Thrawn’s face. He’d explained his tactics to the board at least twice, and they still didn’t believe him. Now, with nothing left for him to say, he’d taken refuge in silence. Ziara might have expected to find defiance or anger there, but she could see neither. He stood alone, without even his family to support him.

In the meantime, Colonel Wevary had asked Ziara a question.

“I have nothing to say,” she said. She looked at Thrawn again.

And suddenly an odd thought occurred to her. Something she’d glimpsed in Thrawn’s record, the story about how he’d risen from an obscure family to gain an appointment to Taharim…