Chapter 8 · Chapter 8 - The Bomb III - Blind Spot

Sana Brevin disliked famous defendants.

Not personally. Fame, like height or poor judgment, was not in itself a legal defect. The problem was what fame did to everyone else.

It made ministers discover deadlines that did not exist. It made committees confuse public appetite with evidentiary sufficiency. It made survivors reasonably impatient with distinctions no decent person should ever have needed to make, and politicians unreasonably certain that those distinctions could be eliminated by conviction. Most dangerously, it made prosecutors begin thinking about history before they had finished thinking about proof.

Grand Admiral Thrawn had been back in the known galaxy for less than a month and had already produced all of those effects.

Brevin sat in an office in the judicial wing whose architects had apparently believed prosecutors required neither views nor natural light. She had been assigned the larger office when the provisional war-crimes unit expanded, an honor she would have appreciated more if the additional floor space had not immediately filled with evidence crates.

There were fourteen of them now.

Imperial personnel archives. Recovered Seventh Fleet records. Lothal submissions. Batonn. Civilian casualty assessments. Command structures. Intelligence summaries.

Three boxes whose labels included the phrase POTENTIAL ATROCITY EVIDENCE — UNVERIFIED, which Brevin had turned toward the wall because she was tired of visiting officials reading them and acquiring expressions.

She was a human woman in her late forties, tall without appearing imposing, with warm brown skin and dark hair in which the first gray had begun to show at the temples. She wore it cut just below the jaw, largely because anything more elaborate required time in the morning she had not possessed for several years. Her clothes were good, plain and professionally anonymous. Her only jewelry was a narrow ring on her right hand and small metal studs at her ears.

People who met her for the first time often mistook the absence of ornament for severity. People who worked with her knew better.

Brevin was not severe. She was tired of nonsense. There was a difference.

At the moment, the nonsense was arranged across three displays in front of Senior Legal Analyst Doran Keel, who had been standing beside her desk for long enough that Brevin had begun to suspect he was hoping proximity would improve the answer.

It had not.

“Say it again,” she said.

Keel shifted his datapad. “We cannot locate a complete naturalization record for Mitth’raw’nuruodo.”

Brevin looked at him. Keel was a good analyst, which was why she did not immediately ask whether he had searched correctly. Instead she asked, “Define complete.”

“No Imperial citizenship petition. No final naturalization decree. No ordinary species-status determination attached to the personnel file. There are references later in his career that assume civil capacity, but I have not found the instrument that establishes it.”

Brevin leaned back. Outside her office, someone pushed an evidence trolley past the open door. Its repulsor unit made a faint uneven pulse every fourth second. She listened to it pass. “Fine,” she said. “Archive loss.”

“That was my first assumption.”

The fact that he said was made her look at him again. Keel transferred the chronology to her main display. Thrawn’s Imperial career unfolded in neat administrative bands: Academy. Commission. Promotion. Ship assignment. Promotion. Command. Classified access. More promotion. More command. The final promotion to Grand Admiral.

It was, Brevin thought, an impressively complete career for a man whose legal beginning apparently did not exist.

Keel enlarged the earliest section. “The Academy record is also irregular.”

“How irregular?”

“No standard alien admission request. No normal sponsorship sequence. No clean placement approval through Academy administration.”

“Yet he attended.”

“Yes.”

“Graduated.”

“Yes. In a single year.”

“Was commissioned.”

“Indisputably.”

Brevin rubbed two fingers slowly across the bridge of her nose. “Doran.”

“Yes?”

“Please tell me you are about to show me the document that makes this less annoying.”

“I am about to show you several documents that make it more explainable.”

“That was not what I asked.”

“No.”

She gestured for him to continue.

He brought up the first Palace authorization. Then another. And another.

Exceptional Academy placement. Waiver of ordinary eligibility review. Continuation of service despite unresolved species classification. Access authorizations granted above the normal competence of the issuing naval offices. Promotion confirmations routed through the Palace.

By the fourth, Brevin had stopped touching her face. By the sixth, she had folded her hands on the desk. “That is a great deal of Palpatine.”

“Yes.”

“Do we know why?”

“Not from these records.”

“But every time ordinary administration appears to encounter a problem, the Palace resolves it.”

“That is the pattern.”

Brevin studied the chronology. She had prosecuted enough former Imperial administrators to know the mistake younger lawyers often made when looking backward at the regime. They assumed dictatorship meant the absence of law. It did not.

The Empire had possessed extraordinary quantities of law.

Regulations. Codes. Tribunals. Administrative review. Procurement rules. Personnel procedures. Jurisdictional boundaries. Entire ministries staffed by people whose careers consisted of deciding which stamp authorized which cruelty.

The law had mattered. Until Palpatine did not want it to. Then his preference became a category above the categories.

Brevin exhaled slowly. “All right. Find the legal authority for the Palace waivers.” Keel hesitated. That was the second thing she did not like that morning. “You already did?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It depends how far back you want to go into Imperial constitutional structure.”

“As far as necessary to avoid Caro Antilles explaining it to me in open court.” Keel’s mouth moved. Brevin looked at him. “Was that a smile?”

“No.”

“Good.”

It had been. She allowed it.

Keel replaced the personnel chronology with a constitutional digest. Emergency powers. Executive military authority. Sovereign appointment prerogative. Delegated command. Special commissions. Several overlapping statutes whose original purpose had been narrower than the uses Palpatine subsequently made of them. And, layered over all of it, the practical reality of the Imperial sovereign.

Brevin read quietly. “This is going to end with Vader, isn’t it?”

Keel looked mildly surprised. “I had not reached Vader yet.”

“But you were going to.”

“Yes.”

Brevin closed her eyes. “Of course.”

Keel brought up the file.

LORD VADER.

Even after years spent professionally cataloguing what the Empire had done, there were names that changed the temperature of a room.

This was one of them.

Brevin opened her eyes again. “Show me his commission.”

“There is no conventional commission matching the authority he exercised.”

“His Navy personnel file.”

“None in the ordinary sense.”

“Formal military rank?”

“Not one that maps cleanly onto the command powers documented in operational records.”

Brevin looked at him.

Keel continued more carefully. “Vader exercised military authority by direct delegation from the Emperor. Naval commanders obeyed him because Palpatine had empowered him to issue orders, not because Vader occupied a conventional place in Naval Personnel Command.”

“And no admiral successfully objected that he was missing paperwork.”

“Not that I have found.”

“I imagine that objection had poor career prospects.”

Keel wisely did not speculate on how poor.

Brevin looked back at Thrawn’s chronology. The problem had shifted. Not disappeared. Shifted. She stood and walked to the larger wall display. “So we have been asking the wrong first question.” Keel waited. Brevin enlarged the gap before Thrawn’s Academy entry. “We have been asking what ordinary Imperial mechanism made this man eligible to become an officer. Perhaps none did. Perhaps Palpatine decided he was going to become one, and every institution below the Palace spent the next several years regularizing that decision.”

Keel nodded slowly. “That is consistent with the records.”

“Consistent is not established.”

“No.”

“Keep saying things like that.”

“I generally do.”

“That is why you still work here.”

She moved forward again through the chronology with one finger. Academy training. Commission. Pay. Promotions. Increasing command. Fleet authority. Grand Admiral. “Whatever the origin, the later record is strong.”

“Very.”

“The Navy treated him as an officer.”

“Yes.”

“His subordinates treated him as a commander.”

“The surviving operational material supports that.”

“Palpatine treated him as possessing authority.”

“Repeatedly.”

“And by the time he reaches the Seventh Fleet, nobody appears to be treating his position as provisional, honorary or decorative.”

“No.”

Brevin rested her hand against the edge of the display. That mattered. It mattered enormously. Because the case she was building did not depend merely on proving that Thrawn had worn white and frightened people. Command responsibility required command. Effective authority. The ability to issue orders. The capacity to prevent, alter or punish acts performed by subordinates, where the relevant legal standard reached them. The prosecution needed a chain. And now, inconveniently, the first links of that chain appeared to have been forged according to the constitutional doctrine of the Emperor wanted it that way. Brevin returned to her desk. “This does not weaken effective command.”

“No.”

“It may complicate formal command.”

“Yes.”

“And Antilles will find the difference.”

“Oh, almost certainly.”

“Veyr will find it first, though.”

Keel considered that. “Possibly.”

Brevin gave him a look. “Talia Veyr will find it first. Antilles will enjoy it more.” That was not formally part of the prosecution assessment. It was nevertheless accurate.

Brevin sat again. “What about citizenship?”

“Still unresolved.”

“Keep it separate. I do not want anyone writing that absence of naturalization invalidates his command.”

Keel made the note. “Because it probably doesn’t?”

“Because we do not know, and because it would be an extraordinarily stupid argument for us to make.”

Keel looked up.

Brevin pointed toward the Seventh Fleet structure. “We are preparing to hold him responsible for decisions taken by forces under his authority. We cannot spend one page arguing that he exercised command so completely that subordinate conduct attaches to him, and the next implying he may never have possessed legal authority to command anyone.”

“The defense might.”

“The defense is allowed to be annoying.”

“And we are not?”

“We are paid to be differently annoying.”

Keel’s mouth moved again.

This time Brevin ignored it. She opened the Grand Admiral appointment material. “Find me the strongest surviving legal instrument associated with this promotion. Not ceremony. Not rank confirmation copied into later records. I want whatever the Empire itself would have pointed to if an admiral had asked why Mitth’raw’nuruodo was entitled to give him an order.”

Keel began sorting. Brevin watched. After several moments he said, “There may not be one.”

“There will be something.”

“Why?”

“Because military institutions care about precedence even under dictators. Particularly under dictators. Someone had to know whom to salute.”

That produced a genuine smile. Very brief.

Then Keel found another file. His expression changed.

Brevin noticed immediately. “What?”

“I found the species-status material attached to the earliest contact record.”

She held out a hand. He transferred it.

The document was older than the Academy material and considerably less complete. Naval frontier reporting. Xenological classification. Initial contact assessment.

SPECIES: CHISS

IMPERIAL CIVIL STATUS: UNDETERMINED

Brevin read it. Then read it again. “That is unpleasant.”

“There is more.”

“There always is.”

Keel opened the field report: Captain Voss Parck.

Brevin recognized the name from Thrawn’s early career summary but had never examined the original contact record closely. There had been no reason to. Until now, the prosecution’s interest began with Imperial service, not with the circumstances by which an unknown alien had reached Coruscant.

She read the passage. Stopped. Went back. “Is this wording original?”

“As far as we can establish.”

Brevin’s eyes remained on the phrase.

A gift for the Emperor.

For several seconds the office was quiet. Then she said, “I need the full legal status of nonrecognized alien species under the Empire at the date of first contact.”

Keel did not move. Brevin looked up. “You already checked.”

“Preliminarily.”

“And you disliked what you found.”

“Yes.”

She leaned back. “Tell me.”

“The Empire maintained several classifications that permitted compulsory labor, custodianship, penal service and sharply restricted civil capacity for populations outside recognized legal categories,” Keel said. “The terminology varies by jurisdiction and period. Chiss do not appear to have had a settled category at all.”

Brevin’s face became very still. “So at first contact we do not know what protections Imperial law thought he had.”

“No.”

She looked again at Parck’s words. The phrase might mean nothing more than an officer congratulating himself on bringing the Emperor an unusual discovery. It might describe a captive, an intelligence subject, a foreign sentient under temporary military control, or simply the casual dehumanizing language Imperial officers had often used when no one expected them to justify the noun later. None of those possibilities improved the record.

“Do not characterize it yet,” Brevin said. “I want the law that applied at the moment Parck took control of him. Detention authority. Custodial authority. Treatment of nonrecognized sentients. Whether he could refuse transport. Whether anyone was required to advise him of a status or destination. And when military service first appears, I want to know what Imperial law required for consent, oath and commission from someone in that category.”

Keel made the notes. “If there was no recognized capacity to consent?”

“Then the circumstances under which he entered Imperial service may have been coercive, irregular or both.” Brevin tapped the Academy chronology. “That would matter. It would not tell us what his legal position was a year later, much less twenty. Do not let an ugly beginning become a conclusion we have not proved.”

“No.”

Brevin read the phrase once more. A GIFT FOR THE EMPEROR. “Parck.”

“The captain?”

“He is the only person in this file who may know what he meant when he wrote that, and what actually happened before the Palace records begin.”

Keel was already opening the personnel search. Brevin stopped him. “No. Give it to Investigations. Quiet search. I do not want an official request carrying the prosecution’s name anywhere near a potential witness until we know where he is and what his status is.”

“I’ll route it.”

“Current employment, surrender status, detention, death registry, pension, property, border movement, known associates. No contact.”

Keel made the note. Brevin looked once more at the name VOSS PARCK, then closed the early-contact file. “Back to command.”

Keel blinked. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“We may have found that his entry into Imperial service began under a legal status nobody had properly defined.”

“We may have found missing paperwork, an unresolved species classification and a naval officer with a regrettable vocabulary thirty years ago.” Brevin’s voice remained level. “If the facts establish more, we follow them. Until then, I am not allowing ambiguity at first contact to consume the part of the case we can actually prove.”

Keel gave a small nod. This was why she liked him. He did not mistake caution for lack of interest. Brevin reopened the Seventh Fleet command structure. There was the case she could build: not white uniforms, not mythology, not whatever commentators meant when they said mastermind. Authority. Knowledge. Decision. Consequence.

Brevin pointed to the structure. “For each operation under review, I want the command chain built separately. Do not assume Grand Admiral means every action reaches him. Show me what he ordered, what he knew, what reporting mechanisms existed, what discretion subordinate commanders retained and what capacity he had to intervene.”

“Lothal first?”

“Yes. Batonn separately.”

“Because the record is weaker?”

“Because the record is different.”

Keel nodded.

“And Doran.” He paused at the door. “If anyone from the Chancellor’s office asks whether we have established that Thrawn’s entire Imperial career was unlawful, the answer is no.”

“I assumed.”

“If anyone from the Senate asks whether the irregularity means his rank was illegitimate, the answer is that we are reviewing the record.”

“Yes.”

“If anyone from the press asks—”

“I have never spoken to the press.”

Brevin looked at him. “Excellent. Continue not doing that.”

The door closed behind Keel.

Brevin remained at her desk for several seconds, listening to the evidence trolley make another uneven pass somewhere beyond the office. The command structure Keel had left open still occupied the wall. She looked at Lothal again. It was going to create problems she had not yet listed. Brevin rose, crossed to the display and expanded the material beyond the naval units into the other Imperial organizations operating in the sector: Army, planetary administration, special projects, intelligence, security.

A name appeared halfway down one branch. ALEXANDR KALLUS — IMPERIAL SECURITY BUREAU

Brevin stopped. “Oh, hell.”

There was no one left in the office to appreciate the precision of the legal analysis. She enlarged the record.

Kallus had not been a naval officer. That distinction mattered. The ISB possessed its own hierarchy, its own statutory authority, and a longstanding institutional habit of considering ordinary military chains of command suggestions whenever convenient. But institutional independence did not answer the practical question. During portions of the Lothal campaign, Kallus had operated inside the command environment controlled by Thrawn. Orders moved through overlapping structures. Operational priorities converged. Effective authority did not always respect the neat organizational diagrams administrators produced afterward.

Which meant Keel was going to find his name. He had to. Brevin stared at it.

Then she opened the current Thrawn case-access roster. That was considerably worse.

Kallus had helped reconstruct Thrawn’s arrival on Coruscant. His intelligence division had reviewed evidence recovered at surrender. He had participated in the initial legal notification and conducted the first custodial interview. His office remained heavily involved in evaluating Thrawn’s claims, Imperial records and whatever external threat had brought him back.

All of that made excellent practical sense.

Kallus was competent. He understood Imperial intelligence from the inside, Rebel intelligence from the other side, and Thrawn from personal experience. Removing him from the problem would mean deliberately discarding one of the Republic’s most useful people. Unfortunately, legal cases had a particular talent for turning sensible arrangements into exhibits.

Brevin returned to her chair.

If the prosecution argued that Thrawn exercised effective command at Lothal, and the evidence placed Kallus within that effective command structure, then Kallus ceased to be merely the Republic official investigating the defendant.

He became part of the historical facts. Potentially a witness. Potentially a comparator. Possibly something worse.

Brevin opened Kallus’s current personnel summary and stared at the transition that everyone in the Republic already knew in broad strokes: ISB officer. Fulcrum. Defector. Rebel intelligence asset. New Republic service. Director.

There had been a legal bridge somewhere in there. There had to have been. Cooperation agreement, immunity determination, prosecutorial declination, wartime amnesty, formal review—perhaps several of them. Kallus had not simply changed uniforms one morning and wandered into a Republic intelligence office until someone gave him a desk.

Whatever that bridge was, Caro Antilles would eventually ask to see it.

Brevin leaned back. Not because Thrawn and Kallus were equivalent. They plainly were not. But equivalence was not necessary to make the question dangerous. If the Republic intended to argue that service inside an unlawful Imperial system carried personal consequences, the defense would be entitled to ask why one former Imperial officer was sitting behind a prosecution table while another former Imperial officer was helping to assemble the evidence.

The answer might be excellent.

Kallus had defected. He had assisted the Rebellion at enormous personal risk. He had supplied intelligence. His later conduct might justify every legal distinction the Republic had made.

But everyone knows he changed sides was not a legal firewall.

Brevin opened a new internal note.

KALLUS — CONFLICT / CASE-SEPARATION REVIEW

She sat with the heading for a moment. Kallus could remain involved in the external-threat assessment. Probably. That work existed independently of any eventual prosecution. The historical case was different.

If he appeared in the old command chain, he could not simultaneously help decide what that chain meant for Thrawn. If his own Imperial conduct became relevant, he could not participate in charging theories that implicitly categorized it. If the prosecution needed him as a witness, someone outside his current intelligence chain would have to interview him. And anything his office had already collected for the criminal case would need independent review before Brevin relied upon it.

A firewall.

She began typing. No Kallus participation in charging decisions concerning conduct during his own Imperial service. Independent sourcing of Lothal evidence wherever practicable.

Separate treatment of historical witness status and present intelligence function. No use of personal recollection as a substitute for documentary proof. Independent review of the Thrawn custodial interview before evidentiary use.

Brevin stopped.

That last one bothered her. The interview had already happened. It could not be unhappened, and she had no reason to believe Kallus had done anything improper. That was almost beside the point. If Antilles could plausibly argue that the interrogating officer had once operated under Thrawn’s effective authority and now had a personal stake in how the Republic characterized former Imperial service, the prosecution needed to have identified the issue before the defense did.

She looked again at Kallus’s name on the access roster. There were too many entries. For the first time, Brevin considered the possibility that a firewall would not be enough.

Removing Kallus entirely from the Thrawn-specific criminal investigation would be costly. Intelligence would object. The Chancellor’s office might object. Kallus himself would almost certainly object, probably with considerably better arguments than most people Brevin removed from anything.

None of that made the concern disappear. She did not question his loyalty. She did not question his competence. That was precisely why she did not want either issue to become part of the litigation.

The moment the Republic found itself arguing but Kallus is one of the good ones, they would already have surrendered the legal point.

Brevin opened a secure message to Keel. Add to tomorrow’s research queue: full legal disposition of Alexandr Kallus following defection. Imperial service, Rebel cooperation status, immunity/amnesty/declination materials, postwar review. Restricted handling. Do not contact Kallus or his office.

She read it once before sending.

Then added a second line.

Also flag every instance in which Kallus appears in the Lothal command material. Do not infer subordination. Documentary relationship only.

She sent the message.

The office became quiet again. On one display sat Thrawn’s name. On another, Kallus’s. One former Imperial Grand Admiral being investigated in part by a former Imperial Security Bureau officer who might himself appear inside the very command structure the prosecution was about to reconstruct. It was exactly the sort of arrangement that made perfect practical sense until a lawyer described it slowly. Brevin looked at her unfinished conflict memorandum. For several seconds she considered writing:

PROTECT THE CASE FROM ITS OWN WITNESSES.

She decided against it. Instead she typed:

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT — FORMER IMPERIAL PERSONNEL

Less satisfying but much safer.

The new heading did not make the problem smaller. Brevin looked again at Kallus’s name, then at the Lothal files still open behind it. There was another name she had been deliberately avoiding. Not because it was less important.

Because it was louder.

She closed the Kallus memorandum and opened the correspondence index attached to the Lothal submissions.

GENERAL HERA SYNDULLA.

Brevin sat back. For a few seconds she simply regarded the name. Then she muttered, “Of course.”

Syndulla had every right to care about the case. More than most people did. She had fought at Lothal, lost people there and lived through the occupation whose legal consequences Brevin was now being asked to sort into admissible pieces. As Hera Syndulla, she could make a statement, submit evidence, retain counsel, petition the government, complain publicly or demand that prosecutors take the matter seriously, and Brevin would defend her right to do all of it.

The difficulty was that she was also General Syndulla. Rank changed the effect of ordinary acts. A general could obtain briefings other witnesses could not, call intelligence directors directly, and make inquiries that junior officers treated as instructions even when no instruction had technically been given.

Brevin opened the contact history. Requests for information. Follow-ups. Communications with Intelligence. Questions about Thrawn’s custody, evidence preservation and whether particular incidents were being included in the review. Nothing individually improper. That was almost worse. Impropriety was easy: one found it, labeled it, stopped it. This was accumulation.

Kallus appeared repeatedly.

Brevin stopped scrolling. Hera’s distrust of him required no historical explanation; his name belonged to the same Lothal record Brevin was now reconstructing. More importantly, Brevin had independently reached the conclusion that his present investigative role required separation from his historical one. The last thing the prosecution needed was a principal witness creating a public record from which Antilles could argue that the Republic itself considered its investigator compromised.

She opened one of the recent exchanges again. Not evidence. Not quite. But enough to establish a pattern if someone collected it. The defense could ask whether Kallus’s investigative decisions had been challenged internally, whether Syndulla believed him biased, whether their disagreements concerned evidence, and whether the prosecution had relied on material developed by an officer one of its own witnesses distrusted. Then Kallus could be questioned about Hera, Hera about Kallus, and instead of trying Mitth’raw’nuruodo everyone could spend three days relitigating the moral rehabilitation of Alexandr Kallus.

“Wonderful.”

Brevin opened another note.

SYNDULLA — WITNESS / INSTITUTIONAL ROLE SEPARATION

Any submission relating to Lothal, she wrote, had to come from Syndulla as a witness, complainant or evidentiary source, not through military command authority. No tasking of Intelligence personnel connected to the prosecution. No privileged access to prosecution strategy by virtue of rank. No involvement in charging decisions. No circulation of other witnesses’ statements. All substantive communications concerning Thrawn preserved.

That last requirement mattered because Hera was almost certainly going to be a witness. Perhaps not on every theory, perhaps not in the first tranche of charges, but if Lothal entered the case seriously she was too central to its history to remain outside the evidentiary structure. Every effort to shape the investigation now could become material for later cross-examination.

Brevin looked toward the ceiling. “You are going to make yourself discoverable, General.” The ceiling offered no advice.

A witness could be angry. A witness could despise the defendant. Neither fact made testimony unusable. A witness who actively campaigned inside the government for a particular prosecutorial outcome created a different problem, especially when that witness held military rank. Brevin could already hear the questions.

General Syndulla, how many officials did you contact before the prosecution adopted this theory?

How many of those officials were subordinate to you?

Did you discuss Director Kallus’s role in the investigation with any of them?

Brevin opened her eyes. No. Absolutely not.

She added another instruction: witness contact with investigative personnel to be routed through a designated liaison once formal Lothal review began. That would annoy Syndulla. Brevin could live with that. The harder question was implementation. She could control her own office and request that Intelligence separate Kallus from prosecutorial work; she could not issue orders to a New Republic general. That would have to go through military command or the Chancellor’s legal office, framed carefully enough that no one mistook witness management for an attempt to silence a celebrated Rebel officer.

Politics. Fame again. Always fame.

Brevin opened a draft advisory and wrote: General Syndulla should be informed that, due to her likely evidentiary role in any Lothal-related proceeding, continued operational involvement in the investigation creates avoidable disclosure, credibility and command-influence concerns.

Too gentle.

She added: Her military rank should not be used, directly or indirectly, to obtain information, direct investigative activity, or influence prosecutorial assessment concerning matters on which she may later provide testimony.

Better.

There was still the part no memorandum could solve. Hera was angry. Brevin did not hold that against her; anger was not a character defect in someone who had lived through occupation and war. But anger made people careless, and Hera Syndulla’s determination to ensure that Thrawn did not evade accountability was beginning to create exactly the kind of procedural noise that could help him.

Brevin looked again at the communication log. “If you keep doing this, Antilles is going to send you flowers.”

The thought was unfair. It was also probably true.

She leaned back and considered the two names now occupying separate memoranda. Kallus had to be protected from the prosecution because his past made him too entangled with its facts. Hera had to be protected from it because her determination to shape its future risked entangling her with its development. Each made the other problem worse.

What had been an uncomfortable possibility when Brevin first opened Kallus’s access record was beginning to look like basic containment. If she recommended removing him from the Thrawn-specific criminal investigation, however, the reason had to be his evidentiary position, his former place in the Imperial structure and the integrity of the prosecution—not Syndulla’s objections. Brevin would not allow one witness to choose another’s investigator.

She added one final line to the note: Consider formal separation of both Kallus and Syndulla from ongoing prosecutorial development: Kallus as potential historical witness; Syndulla as likely Lothal witness.

She read it twice. There. Not punishment. Not mistrust. Roles. That was what the entire morning had become.

Brevin had begun the day trying to establish one defendant’s place in a chain of command. By early afternoon, she was mostly trying to keep everyone else out of it.

She saved the memorandum.

Then, after a moment, reopened the message she had already sent Keel and added a postscript.

Tomorrow: I also want a complete log of General Syndulla’s contacts relating to the Thrawn investigation. Do not characterize this as a misconduct review. It is not one.

She considered adding yet. She did not.

Brevin still had standards.