But sending peaceforcers to bring in the principals of a Deyzara company could further exacerbate the current political situation. At the very least, there would be an outcry that the Commonwealth Authority was singling them out without any hard evidence to back up whatever accusations it might be thinking of making. Giving the local Deyzara the impression that the Authority even suspected some of their own of such a crime carried with it the automatic, and dangerous, corollary that the Authority favored the Sakuntala. That was not the kind of sentiment she wanted to spread right now. As always, it was vital that her office be perceived by both sides as being impartial. If that perception was lost, she risked sacrificing any ability to influence the Deyzara. They would respond by sending appeals to higher Commonwealth authority that bypassed her—if they hadn’t begun to do so already. The volume of anxious space-minus communications between the local Deyzaran community and their ancestral home of Tharce IV had risen noticeably since the beginning of the Sakuntala uprising. She had no way of knowing whether any of those coded private communications included attempts, either direct or veiled, to undermine her authority on Fluva.
She would have drummed her fingers on the desktop if she hadn’t been so tired. Instead, she banished the square of floating facts. Addressing the desk’s pickup, she asked to be connected to the skimmer port, maintenance division, chief mechanic’s office.
Bergovoy was out on the floor, supervising work inside a cargo skimmer. His portable conveyed a tridee of its owner from the shoulders up, detailed down to the sweat on his forehead, as her call was automatically forwarded to its intended destination.