Tennal had heard no enough times in his life to recognize it. He leaned forward in his chair and discarded his attempt at sincerity. “That sounds fun,” he said. “Go on.”

Oma ran a hand over her shaved head. “Thanks to the attempted coup,” she said, “I have much more on my plate right now than I thought I would. To be blunt, I think you’ve been wasted.”

“In so many senses,” Tennal said brightly. “What can I do for you?”

Oma looked over at her desk. “I have had some … staffing problems recently.” Tennal followed her gaze. He hadn’t noticed it, since the room as a whole looked undisturbed, but the surface of the desk was newly marred. There was a long, ugly burn mark right in front of where the desk’s occupant might sit, gouged deep into the wood. Somewhere you might fire a burn gun right in front of the governor’s face, if you had a lethal weapon and you wanted to intimidate her.

Oma turned back, the stars a milky background to her steel-trap presence. The thrumming in Tennal’s bones grew stronger as his gaze was unwillingly drawn past her, out to the distant link. He had to look away. It must be something to do with the reader mutation. He hated not knowing what was going on in his own head.

“I’d like you to take a position as one of my aides-de-camp,” Oma said briskly. “As a trial. Just to see what you can do when you’re given scope for your talents.”

“For how long?”

“Yes,” Oma said gently, “or no?”

Tennal could play along with a fake military role if he had to. The last one hadn’t killed him. He pushed himself to his feet. “Give me a deadline,” he said. “It can’t be a trial if it goes on forever. And I want a promotion on paper. I’m not spending one more day as a ranker.”

“Two weeks,” Oma said, as if this were her trump card in the negotiation. She strode over to her desk. Tennal followed. “Rank of captain. Wide-ranging responsibilities for keeping the peace. You’d have your own staff. Let me be clear,” she added. “I consider what was done to you illegal. You have sanctuary on Archer Station if you want it. But it will take me a while to arrange passage for you through the link, and I’d like to see what you do when you’re not being used as a tool for piloting ships.”

Giving Tennal any kind of authority seemed like a bad plan, but that was her problem. “Two weeks,” Tennal said. Twenty galactic-standard days. “Very precise. I like it.”