Surit had been characteristically quiet, but he looked up as they stepped into the bustling rotunda of the ship dock. The space was an enormous spiral of walkways with offshoots to individual bays where large ships touched gantries or sent shuttles, and small ships nestled like birds coming home to roost.

It might just have been because Tennal had eaten and slept now, but he could feel the disturbance of chaotic space acutely, waiting behind the layers of metal hull like a stirring beast.

“It’s a tiny shuttle,” Surit said, sounding happier now that they were done with the lying and he could get on with being a shining beacon of an upright staff officer. “Twenty people. They’ll be staying on the Note—the shuttle doesn’t have permanent quarters—but I sent an order for a muster before everyone disembarked. This is my second command,” he added, apropos of nothing. Tennal realized that Surit was nervous for reasons that had nothing to do with the sync. The mindset of a career military officer was like an alien artifact to Tennal.

“Get in there, O Glorious Leader,” Tennal said. “Bowl them over with your encyclopedic knowledge of the regulations.”

It was a small ship, for something that carried twenty people for days on end. When Tennal ducked in through the hatch of the shuttle, he found himself in an operations room barely large enough to contain the three rows of workstations squeezed into it. It was walled on either side with the bare metal of the shuttle’s hull. Through a door there was a cramped mess room with pull-down beds lining the walls; this ship was clearly only made to house people during hops from one mothership to another.

It should have been crowded with nearly two dozen of Orshan’s finest in there. But there weren’t twenty soldiers. Instead a single first-class ranker—tall and solid enough that the chair was a fraction too small for her—huddled in a chair and stared at a screen. Tennal got her gender reference from the flint button in her cuff. She’d collected styli from the empty desks and made a pyramid out of them on the desk in front of her.

Surit looked around the room, examining the empty chairs with the same blank expression he’d worn the whole morning. When Tennal had first seen it he’d assumed that Surit was putting on a look of noble aloofness to impress his commanders, but now that he’d had some time to study him, Tennal was starting to realize that was just what Surit’s face defaulted to.

The ranker hadn’t seen them. “What a shame, Lieutenant Yeni,” Tennal said. “My first unit muster and nobody’s here. Or is this a unit of one?”