“Caught embezzling money,” Tennal said. “Arrested. Deposed. From what I can gather, they had a bunch of people loyal to them on the station, so their supporters kicked off and started a riot. Tried to put the governor back in office. That was when the army came in to restore order.”

“Ah,” Surit said. He had that frown between his eyebrows again.

Tennal remembered belatedly that Surit’s parent had led the most spectacular failed rebellion in recent history. Attempted coups were probably a sensitive topic. Tennal changed the subject. “Come and see the office they’ve given us.”

Tennal had been set up in a wing of the station’s District Hall. The hall was the seat of government found in any Orshan province, though it was small compared to the Codifier Halls that Tennal was used to. Shrines to Guidances and to other deities nestled along the side of the building. Some of them were dark and shuttered.

Inside the hall, the staff barely looked up when Tennal entered. The offices he’d been given were cramped but bright, with a strip of glass windows at head height and colorful banners and stickers littering the staff workstations. Most of the stickers were smaller clubs or obscure sports teams. In Exana, all of those would be affiliated with a division. Here, it looked like the staff had intentionally steered away from announcing any affiliation.

There were whole rooms of people here, dealing with all the steadily turning wheels that made a city of people run. None of them paid attention to Tennal, and Tennal didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have liked an incompetent prat parachuted into management either.

“I’m a figurehead,” Tennal explained to Surit. He led the way into the back room they’d given him, which had two dozen workstations in it and was completely empty. Decorative banners had been ripped off the wall as people moved out. “The staff members are all civilians. Their executives were too close to the coup and got fired. The supervisors they have left all talk to me in monosyllables, and I don’t have a military staff. Well, now I suppose I have you.”

Surit looked at the empty office space, with the sad remains of old decorations on the wall, and said, “Hm.”

After that, Tennal’s empire grew fast.

The first thing Surit did was co-opt two of the fastest civilian administrators from the office outside and immerse himself in the pile of work that had been accumulating since the attempted coup. It was a stack of things Tennal had ignored as unimportant: hauler permits, contract disputes, complaints about soldiers, inquiries about why the district shrines were still shut. Surit started answering this pile of nothing.

Tennal had planned to spend the day trying to find out who issued galactic travel permits for his eventual escape. Instead he kept getting pings from Surit with painstaking case summaries of trivial local problems.