Chapter 12: Kael's First Use of the Force as a Weapon

The shuttle from Veth Corris Station to the Tamnor administrative hub took four hours and forty minutes, and Kael spent the first two of them reviewing Commander Edris Thane's service record with the particular attention he had learned to give to the spaces between official commendations — the gaps where a man's actual character accumulated in the absence of recorded performance.

Thane was sixty-one. Forty years of regional security administration across three outer systems, the last eleven posted to the Tamnor Hub, which governed judicial appointment ratification for a corridor of seven systems that Darian's redistricting initiative required to certify cleanly or not at all. His record was the kind that required no apology: decorated in the Velith border incidents, cited twice for institutional efficiency, the sort of man the Confederation had built its administrative competence on for three generations. No known political affiliations outside his regional service charter. No debts the investigation team had been able to locate. No leverage the standard operational approach could use.

This was, his father had explained with quiet precision, exactly the problem.