Chapter 13: Vreth Stops by the Work Station

The food distribution case had come in at 0731.

It was a class two. Outer colony, designation Perith-6, a civilian supply coordinator's oral testimony transcribed by a field collector and logged against the official Imperial Harvest Cycle broadcast for that administrative quarter. The broadcast cited full quota completion across the Perith cluster. The testimony cited shortfalls in three of the seven distribution nodes, with supplemental detail on the third node — a farming settlement of approximately four hundred registered residents — where the coordinator noted that the quarterly allotment had not arrived at all. Not reduced. Absent.

Kael had cross-referenced the supplemental testimony against two secondary sources available in the archive — a colonial census update and a regional logistics routing record — and both corroborated the coordinator's account, which placed the case in the upper range of class two, near the threshold for a three-tier classification. He had reviewed the classification criteria twice. The case qualified as a class two. He logged it as such.