He was counting on the fact that his aunt worked at the highest levels and so had probably only briefed the ship’s commander, who wasn’t here yet. When he focused his reader senses on the chief of staff, he found that had been a safe guess: she was suspicious but confused, and the mention of the legislator had thrown her off. “Take your feet off the table,” she said as she took the top chair. Tennal widened his senses to sample everyone else’s reactions. Mainly they were mildly irritated or distracted, thinking about the meeting. The warrant officer near the foot of the table was spiking with fury but not going to overrule the chief of staff. Tennal smiled and removed his feet.

The meeting got very quickly into dull details of ship maneuvers and mapping chaotic space. It took Tennal all of ten minutes to figure out ways to relieve the boredom. He waited until two members of the meeting had a dispute, then he dropped in an obscure fact or metric—true or made-up—that supported the weaker side, then sat back and let them forget he hadn’t sourced the data at all.

Finally, one time Tennal spoke, a mid-ranking officer looked at him with deep suspicion and said, “Why is he here unsupervised? Isn’t he a reader?”

“I’m the legislator’s nephew,” Tennal said blandly. He’d always been careful not to name-drop before, mindful of her position, and it gave him a sharp satisfaction to do it now. “Is there a problem? You don’t have something against readers, do you?”

“He’s under regulator orders and his architect’s on the way,” the chief of staff said, in the irritated voice of someone who wasn’t entirely pleased with the situation but didn’t know what to do about it right now. “Can we get on? We’re overrunning our time.”

It was two hours before the meeting finished, largely due to Tennal’s helpful contributions. He thanked the frazzled officers sitting next to him and bowed to the warrant officer on the way out, touching his throat in an aggressively civilian gesture.

Half the rules on a ship were custom, not military law. Tennal had talked about that with Zin once, back when they’d regularly eaten dinner at the legislator’s table. Now that fact got him onto the bridge, where he helped steer any discussion he heard into an unproductive spiral. A couple of times someone tried and failed to write him quiet. The first time it happened it gave Tennal a nasty shock, suddenly aware of the priming in his head, but it turned out the priming didn’t have exactly the same effect as enhancers. Tennal was still hard to write. Just not, presumably, hard to sync.