Tennalhin was watching him, that sharpness still gleaming in his eyes like the arming catch on an incendiary. “I see,” Surit said stiffly. He switched to a non-military form of address. “My apologies, Sen Tennalhin. I’m sorry for disturbing you.” He didn’t look any further at Tennal’s bed partner, who still had his head under a pillow, or at the rest of the cluttered cabin. He went to salute, realized Tennalhin wasn’t a uniformed soldier, and touched his own throat in a civilian gesture instead. “Excuse me.”

He saw a flash of surprise in Tennalhin’s face, then the return of that sharp defensiveness. The door closed between them.

Surit picked up his bag, turned around, and went straight to the ranker cabins. The logistics officer was surprised at his request for accommodation, but they were still running with a skeleton crew, and she found him a bunk in a dormitory. Surit stowed his things swiftly and went to seek out the highest-ranking officer currently on board the ship.

“What do you mean, you can’t carry out orders?” the chief of staff said. “He’s right bloody there.”

Surit maintained his salute until she belatedly answered it. She’d activated the privacy field around her desk when Surit mentioned this was regulator business, but Surit checked the blue line on the floor was glowing before he spoke. “There’s been a mistake in my briefing,” Surit said, though he was almost certain whatever cock-up had happened was intentional. “Fifty-Six—I mean, Sen Tennalhin has not agreed to sync.”

“We’re not supposed to be throwing his legal name around,” the chief of staff said irritably. “Orders. Why’s he not syncing? He was dumped on us from your people in the regulators. I was told he’d sync as soon as you turned up,”

“I’m not privy to all the details,” Surit said carefully. “My briefing pack from the regulators was minimal.”

The chief of staff muttered something that sounded like fucking regulators. “Report back to your seniors, then, and await orders. Who do you even report to?”

Surit pulled up a mental image of his briefing. “My acting CO is the commander of this ship,” he said. “Until I’m notified further, the regulators say.”

The chief of staff cast a harried look at the calendar glowing on her desk, as if she could hurry up the commander’s rendezvous date. “Then bring it up with Commander Vinys,” she said. “The moment he steps on the ship. Please fucking Lights he’s had a better briefing than they’ve seen fit to give me, because if he doesn’t have a solution, I’m going to throw that bloody reader into a nova.”

Surit almost opened his mouth to ask why, but then had a sudden flashback of Tennalhin’s blazing presence inches away, his finger pressing into Surit’s chest. Maybe he didn’t need to ask.