The chief of staff suddenly looked thoughtful, but her reaction was lost in the infuriated backlash from around the table as three people at once told Tennal why that was a ludicrous idea. Tennal smiled viciously, bile still sitting in his stomach, and made up two obscure past cases where they’d done just that. Because he was doing badly at being convincing today, someone tried to look it up on the ship’s databases, and the meeting divided over whether they believed him or not.

“Will you all shut the hell up!” the chief of staff snapped. “This is a meeting, not a zoo.” Into the moment of silence that fell—they were soldiers, after all—she said, “Does anyone else have something of value to add? If not, I’m declaring this the shit show it is and putting it on Commander Vinys’s desk when he boards.”

“If I may?” someone said from the back of the room. Tennal didn’t immediately recognize the voice, but he recognized the blank space in his reader senses: Surit Yeni.

Surit was sitting with a couple of other very junior officers in observers’ chairs at the back. They’d been asked to fetch coffee a couple of times and were occasionally allowed to participate. The chief of staff waved permission for him to speak.

“It would work,” Surit said quietly. “Given sufficient authority for reclassification. But the problem is that you would then have to provide your ‘livestock’ with a suitable environment, which in absence of prior documentation means human-survivable conditions. So you couldn’t operate them as spaceships. You’d lose the import license, and Archer would have grounds to seize them back.”

For some reason his artificially calm voice annoyed Tennal more than all the people who hadn’t really thought about it. “Do you memorize regulations for fun?” he said, over whatever the chief of staff was attempting to say. “What’s your alternative? Launch a fucking missile strike on Archer Link Station?”

It was the wrong tone of voice, he’d sworn in front of senior officers, and he’d talked over the chief of staff. All rookie mistakes. He was braced before she even rested her hands on the table, said, “I’ve had enough,” and wrote him quiet.

Or tried to. The chief of staff wasn’t a weak architect, but her write command slid off Tennal’s defenses like most of them did. For a brief, destructive moment, Tennal considered pretending he hadn’t heard, but he couldn’t afford to get thrown out. Instead, he said, “My apologies, sir,” in the flattest voice he could summon, and looked away. He felt her flash of annoyance that it hadn’t worked. Still, she wanted to finish up more than she wanted to waste time on him. Tennal kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.