Chapter 3 #2
TRENDING HOLONET LABEL: “EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED LIAISON.”
I feel my stomach drop.
Drax’s face does not change, but her eyes flick once to the topmost alert, and I see the moment she calculates the damage.
“What is that?” I ask, and my voice is too quiet.
Drax taps the screen with two fingers, expanding the media feed.
My name is there.
My face—official tribunal ID photograph, the one taken under harsh lighting that makes everyone look guilty—is there too, framed by sensational overlay graphics.
ARCHIVAL AIDE LOST PARENTS IN KIRELL DISASTER — CAN SHE BE NEUTRAL?
Below it, a senator’s clip plays on loop, their expression carefully outraged.
“This tribunal cannot be a revenge theater,” the senator says. “If staff assigned to prosecute Rhyx Varos have personal vendettas, then we risk delegitimizing the entire process.”
Another senator follows, voice oily with performative concern.
“We all grieve Kirell, but the tribunal must be above emotion. The people deserve objective justice, not personal catharsis.”
I stare at the projection until my eyes burn.
“Someone leaked my file,” I say, and it sounds absurdly simple compared to the chaos it implies.
“Yes,” Drax replies. “And they did so strategically.”
My hands unclasp behind my back without my permission. My fingers curl, then uncurl. “Who has access?”
Drax’s gaze sharpens. “Many people. That is the price of institutional scale. But the timing suggests intent.”
I swallow. The air feels too thin. “They’re trying to get me removed.”
“They are trying to control the narrative,” she corrects, and her voice is colder now, edged with irritation that is not directed at me so much as at the audacity of the move. “Your presence threatens a clean prosecution. If you are discredited, they can proceed without inconvenient questions.”
I hear my own voice before I think it through. “Because I flagged the timestamp.”
Drax’s eyes flick toward me. “Because you might keep digging.”
My chest tightens. The office seems suddenly too bright. The capital skyline beyond the window blurs slightly as my vision adjusts around the spike of adrenaline.
“What happens now?” I ask.
Drax straightens. “Now I convene an emergency ethics review.”
She touches her compad, and a secure channel opens with a sharp, clipped tone. “Ethics panel. Immediate convening. Chamber C. We have a personnel neutrality breach in public perception.”
She ends the call and looks at me again.
“Ardent,” she says, “I will be blunt. If I remove you, the Senate will applaud. The media will frame it as responsible. The tribunal will regain superficial legitimacy.”
“And the record?” I ask, my voice low.
“The record will continue without you.”
I hear how that sounds, and something sharp twists in my chest. Not pride. Not ambition. Something else—something closer to grief, but sharpened into anger by the idea of being erased from the place where my parents’ names finally surfaced in raw truth.
I take a step forward, stopping at the edge of her desk. “High Arbiter, with respect, if you remove me after this leak, it will look exactly like intimidation. Like someone can smear a staff member and force the tribunal to obey.”
Drax’s eyes narrow. “You are not wrong.”
“And Varos’s request is already filed,” I add, and now I hear the steadiness in my own voice, the way discipline can become defiance if you let it. “He argued that removing me after the leak would signal interference.”
Drax exhales slowly through her nose. The sound is small, but it carries exhaustion.
“He did,” she says.
The ethics review convenes fast, because the tribunal knows how to move when its own legitimacy is threatened.
Within minutes, Drax and I are seated in Chamber C, a smaller procedural room with a curved bench and embedded recording nodes that hum faintly as they activate.
Three ethics officers sit opposite, their robes crisp, their expressions guarded.
The room smells faintly of warmed circuitry and the bitter edge of recycled air.
One officer, older, with silver hair braided back in a severe knot, looks directly at me. “Junior Liaison Ardent, do you acknowledge that your parents were casualties of the Kirell corridor collapse?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you acknowledge that this constitutes a potential conflict of interest in a tribunal proceeding against Fleet Commander Rhyx Varos?”
“It constitutes a personal context,” I answer, forcing myself not to bristle. “It does not constitute procedural misconduct.”
Another officer leans forward. “Have you made any statements indicating intent to seek revenge?”
“No.”
“Have you altered any data?” the first officer asks.
“No.”
“Have you shared restricted materials with outside parties?”
“No.”
The third officer, younger, watches me as if trying to decide whether to pity or distrust me. “Do you believe you can remain impartial?”
I breathe in and let the air fill me, then answer the same way I answered Drax, because it is the only honest answer I have.
“I believe I can remain disciplined,” I say. “I believe I can remain accurate. I will not bend the record for anger or sympathy. I will follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads away from the story everyone wants.”
The older officer’s gaze flicks to Drax. “High Arbiter?”
Drax’s posture remains rigid, her hands folded on the bench.
“Fleet Commander Varos has filed a formal request that Liaison Ardent remain assigned, citing continuity of reconstruction and technical specialization,” she says, and her voice is pure tribunal steel.
“His request further argues that removal following the leak would constitute the appearance of tribunal intimidation.”
The ethics officer’s mouth tightens. “How convenient.”
“It is filed,” Drax repeats, and there is something in her tone that suggests she will not allow anyone to dismiss it as mere convenience without consequence.
A communications alert pings again. This time, the chamber’s wall screen auto-displays a live Holonet feed: senators speaking in front of microphones, each face carefully shaped into public concern. The captions below them repeat the phrase like a cudgel.
EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED.
TRIBUNAL NEUTRALITY.
PUBLIC CONFIDENCE.
I feel my cheeks flush, not from shame but from the indignity of being flattened into a label.
The younger ethics officer looks at me again. “If we retain you, you will be under supervision. Your access logs will be reviewed daily. Your communications will be monitored.”
“I already assume they are,” I say, and my voice carries a colloquial edge I do not usually permit in tribunal rooms, because I am tired of pretending that surveillance is a courtesy rather than a weapon.
The older officer’s expression twitches, not quite amused, not quite approving. “And if evidence emerges that you have acted out of bias?”
“Then remove me,” I answer immediately. “Not because senators are whining for optics, but because the record will show I failed.”
Silence spreads.
Drax looks at the ethics officers, then at me, and I see in her eyes a calculation that is not merely legal.
She knows that if she removes me, the tribunal looks clean but becomes vulnerable to the exact accusation Varos just lodged.
She knows that if she keeps me, the tribunal invites political fury and media spectacle, but it also signals that procedure cannot be bullied by leaks.
At last, Drax speaks, and her voice carries across the room with reluctant finality.
“Liaison Ardent will remain assigned,” she says. “Under supervision.”
The decision lands like a gavel.
The older ethics officer nods once. “So entered.”
I exhale, slow and controlled, feeling the tension ease only slightly, like a strap loosened but not removed.
Drax turns to me. “You understand,” she says quietly, now that the official record has been made, “that they will come at you harder now.”
“Yes,” I say, and my throat feels raw. “They already are.”
Her eyes sharpen. “Then you will be careful.”
I meet her gaze. “I will be accurate.”
She holds my stare for one beat longer, then nods, barely.
“Return to your reconstruction,” she orders. “And Ardent—”
“Yes?”
Her voice drops, low enough that only I can hear it. “Do not give them a real reason.”
I swallow, feeling the weight of that warning settle into my bones.
“I won’t,” I say.
When I leave Chamber C, the corridors feel louder than before—not in sound, but in attention.
I can feel eyes tracking me, feel whispers curl behind my back like smoke.
My compad vibrates again with another media alert, another headline, another senator shaping my grief into political theater, and I resist the urge to throw the device against the wall only because the tribunal would call that “emotional instability” too.
I head back down toward the vault, toward the cold light and the corridor map that does not care what senators say.
If they want to call me compromised, fine.
The record is still sealed in twelve minutes of missing truth, and now I have both permission and obligation to keep looking, because someone powerful enough to leak my file is powerful enough to have something worth hiding.
And I am done letting anyone else write the clean version.