Chapter 4: Two Wardens Dispatched to a Problem That Is Not the Problem

The dispatch orders arrived at the eleventh hour of the evening calibration cycle, which was either coincidence or the kind of timing that a man of Vael's experience had learned to regard with the stillness he brought to all things he did not wish to examine too quickly.

He read them once. He set them on the calibration table beside the resonance tuning forks—three of them, arranged in their customary descending order of frequency, the largest no larger than a man's palm—and he looked at them for a period his personal log would record as four minutes and which he likely did not experience as any duration at all. Then he read them again, not because he had failed to comprehend them the first time, but because there is a quality of bureaucratic language, impeccably formal and precisely vague in the manner of documents composed by those who do not wish their implications fully legible, that rewards a second examination not for the information it yields but for the information that its most careful omissions organize around.

The orders directed Senior Resonance Warden Cion Vael and his assigned apprentice, Owan Callis, to undertake an expedited investigative deployment to the Nubis system in connection with the pattern of trade-lane disruptions and the associated political circumstances, the orders' phrasing being sufficiently artful to contain both the blockade and the attacks on Concordance vessels within the term associated without explicitly naming either. This was standard bureaucratic caution, the language of administrators who wished to commission an investigation without committing to a conclusion. Vael had received orders written in this register before. He had, on those previous occasions, found the omissions professionally interesting rather than personally significant.