Over the next couple of days, he kept an eye out for Surit around the ship. The lieutenant was easy to catch sight of because his walk was distinctive: careful and oddly silent for his build. Tennal saw him coming in and out of the gymnasium, or the showers, or the tiny study terminal closets provided to stop soldiers from going mad in their rooms. He seemed to be on facilities duty a lot, a dull chore usually given to a ranker. Tennal checked his schedule and realized Surit had signed up for extra chores—in the time slots, it looked like, that were assigned for him to test Tennal’s abilities.

It was Surit’s presence, in the end, that made Tennal overstep in the next strategy meeting.

He had taken his last two soothers beforehand, but that was just to calm himself. He had the pressure-chamber feeling that was usually the harbinger of his biggest mistakes. Soothers aside, it still gave him a caustic pleasure to have his feet on the table while the chief of staff dealt with the logistics officer, to sip his coffee noisily enough to annoy his neighbors, to ask nitpicky questions about the topic at hand.

It was the day their new officer, Commander Vinys, was due to board, so everyone was on edge and trying to pretend everything was under control. The morning meeting was frantically worried about the new scanning ships that were supposed to be joining the fleet. The ships, Tennal gathered, were Resolution-loan technology, imported through the link from the wider galaxy, and they were apparently stuck at Archer Link Station because Archer Division wouldn’t clear them for import.

There was no love lost between Archer and Cavalry. Tennal could recognize and admire obstructive fuckery when he saw it.

He couldn’t give a shit one way or the other, personally, but it was fertile ground for argument. It was cheating to read the table just to figure out the best way to keep the members of the meeting at one another’s throats. He did it anyway.

“Do you have a better idea, Sen Tennalhin?” the chief of staff finally said, rounding on him in exasperation. “We’ve been through five proposals now, and you’ve undermined all of them. Give me yours.”

Tennal sat up straighter, taken aback. The way she was looking at him suggested he hadn’t been nearly careful enough to hide what he was doing this time. “I—” he said, then looked more closely at the import regulations on the screen. “Okay. Reclassify all the scanners as livestock. They’re Resolution tech, so they’re weird as shit. I bet nobody on Archer Station can prove they’re not alive. Send in the vets to check them for foot mites or whatever, clear them, and bang, you’ve got your scanners.”