She caught Taisen watching her do it, once, and neither of them said anything about it. There wasn't anything that needed saying. It was, she'd decided somewhere over the last month without ever announcing the decision to anyone, simply the job now, the same as it had been the job on every other ship, and she found, oddly, that doing it for a commander who'd earned it cost her considerably less than doing it out of pure obligation ever had.
Chief Warrant Officer Petra Holt kept an office that told you everything about her before she'd said a single word.
It was small, tucked into a corner of the annex's lower deck that smelled faintly of old paper and older recycled air, the kind of smell that settles into a room over decades rather than years, and every wall of it was lined, floor to ceiling, with physical filing boxes, hand labeled in a blocky, no-nonsense hand, stacked in a system that made no sense at all to Taisen's eye and, he suspected, made perfect sense to hers, the way a cluttered workshop makes perfect sense to the one person who built it and total chaos to everyone else who ever tries to find anything in it. Some of the labels were dates. Some were single words that meant nothing out of context: MISPLACED. SETTLED. DO NOT ASK AGAIN. One box, near the bottom of the far stack, simply read WAITING, in letters slightly larger and slightly more careful than the rest, as though whatever it held had earned that much extra attention.
A single tray of actual soil sat on the corner of her desk, dark and damp and out of place among the dry paper stacks, three thin green shoots pushing up out of it toward a lamp rigged at an angle no requisition form would ever have approved, wired, Taisen noted, through a junction box that had clearly never been intended to carry a load like that.
She looked up when they entered, a broad, weathered woman somewhere past sixty with grey hair cropped close and the particular unhurried patience of someone who had long ago stopped being impressed by rank, and did not stand, did not so much as shift her weight in the worn chair that had clearly molded itself to her over years of exactly this posture.
"Commander," she said, before Taisen had said a word, glancing at the insignia on his coat and then, longer, at his face, as though matching it against something she'd already half expected to see arrive through that door eventually. "I wondered how long it would take someone to actually walk that chit in here instead of just holding onto it like a lucky coin, the way most people do with things they were told to keep and never told what for."
"You know why I'm here," Taisen said.
"I know a man handed me a routing code eleven years ago and told me that if anyone ever presented it in person, along with three specific words, I was to treat them as though he'd sent them himself, and that I was never, under any circumstance, to ask him afterward who'd come or why," Holt said, folding her thick, ink-stained hands on the desk in front of her, the small green shoots trembling faintly in the draft from the door Camaro had just shut behind them. "I've had exactly one other person walk through that door with that chit in the whole eleven years, and it wasn't him, and it wasn't for anything as serious as whatever's brought a Commander with a hand like that through my door in person. Say the words, Commander. I'd like to be certain before we go any further, and I don't enjoy being wrong about certainty at my age, not with a hand like that sitting across the desk from me either."
Taisen did not ask how she'd noticed the hand, tucked as it still was inside his coat. He suspected, looking at her, that there was very little in this small crowded office she failed to notice.
"Still standing," Taisen said. "Watching."
Holt was quiet a moment, studying him, and something in her weathered face, careful until now, eased by a fraction, the particular loosening of a person who had been braced for a lie and found, instead, something she could work with.
Her eyes moved once, briefly, to Camaro, standing half a step behind Taisen's shoulder with her weight settled easily over both feet, hands loose and ready, scanning the room's two exits without seeming to look at either one directly. Holt's mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
"You brought muscle," she said, not unkindly. "Good. Means you took this seriously enough to plan for it going badly, which tells me more about you than the chit does, Commander. A man who only brings hope to a meeting like this one is a man who hasn't lost enough yet to know better."
"I try not to make that mistake twice," Taisen said.
"Good," Holt said again, and something in the single word carried more weight than its length suggested. "Sit down," she said. "All three of you. I've got exactly one pot of something that's technically coffee, brewed off beans three years past their labeled shelf life and considerably better for it in my opinion, and I'm not sharing it with anyone who's going to waste my time first pretending they don't need to sit down."
She listened to the whole of it in silence, arms folded, expression unreadable, while Taisen laid out only as much as he judged necessary: a Fleet Marshal missing, a failsafe fired, a chit that had led here and nowhere else, and a question he did not yet know how to ask without sounding, even to himself, like a man reaching for a thread that might not hold any weight at all once real pressure was put on it.
"I'm not going to insult either of us by pretending I don't know who Fleet Marshal Zhang is," she said, when he'd finished, unfolding her arms just long enough to pour three chipped mugs of something dark and bitter smelling from a battered pot on the corner shelf, "or that a missing Fleet Marshal isn't exactly the kind of thing that would send someone digging through a two-year-old chit looking for a door that doesn't run through his own office. I'll tell you plainly what I can and can't do for you, Commander, before you spend one more word convincing me, because I don't need convincing. I made my decision about you the moment you said those three words correctly. I need to know what you're actually asking, specifically, so I don't waste either of our time guessing at it."