“Did I hear my name mentioned?” Pelham asked, his voice echoing from the ready room, to which he had retreated to attack the paperwork storm.

“Yes, Senior Chief,” Roger answered. “We have a freighter that just left. I ran full tracking on it. Jingfei’s analysis shows that it had warship level real-space drives with a better power curve than the Imperial Fleet gets. So I am dutifully writing up a report which will doubtless go into someone’s inbox and perhaps be read one decade or another.”

“Wait!” Senior Chief Pelham said. “Front-end, show me what happened.”  He waited while Roger and Jingfei led him through the display and analysis. “Now you get a lesson in how to do things and get ahead, and how the Imperial Fleet actually works. If you file a report saying that someone flew a warship through here, even a disguised warship, someone up the paygrade line will read it, have conniptions, possibly even apoplexy, throw three kinds of fit, and send an Imperial Audit team that will insist on inspecting everything, down to the usage of toilet paper in the Flag Officers Residence Hall. To justify their trip, they have to find things that are wrong, so they will, whether they were wrong or not. That’s ignoring that someone might complain that we failed to notice that this freighter was actually a warship, assuming it was, which seems extremely unlikely, since assuredly Customs and Immigration it a full and thorough inspection of the freighter, confirming that it really was a freighter.”

“I see, sir,” Roger said.

“No, what we do,” Pelham explained, “since for sure it is what actually happened, is to file a report that our tracking instrumentation malfunctioned and claimed that this primitive faster-than-light freighter was in fact a highly-advanced warship of the Invincible Empire of the Orglons. Having filed that report, which says that our instrumentation is old — that’s for sure true — and showing occasional signs of failure, for which we can doubtless find evidence someplace in the files, we then ask for replacement units and backup spare parts.”

“But what if it was a warship?” Roger asked.

“It wasn’t,” Pelham said firmly. “If you keep saying you think this freighter was a warship, someone will eventually conclude that you should have a Outstanding rating on your next quarterly review, instead of the Superlative or Incomparable rankings that in a few years will give you a promotion in rank and pay. I mean, we have thirty-seven levels of Quarterly Evaluation, and I would rather not have to explain why someone on my watch was anywhere but in the top two, an event that has not happened in over a century.”

“Oh,” Jingfei said, “I understand perfectly now. Thank you very much for educating me, Senior Chief.”

“Understood,” Roger said.

“Honorable Senior Chief,” Jingfei asked, “on this station, do people actually receive Quarterly Evaluations other than Incomparable? It is certainly correct to do so, if someone deserves this, but does it actually get done?”

Pelham did not quite laugh. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “Of course no one ever gets anything other than an Incomparable rating. Why if I had to give someone a lower rating, say a Superlative, it would reflect badly on me, the Station Commander, the Imperial Fleet Squadron Commander, and eventually the Planetary Prime Minister. All those senior people would want to make emphatically sure that the guilty party took the blame for this horrible failure, the guilty party in this case of course being me. Therefore I don’t do such a thing. After all, that’s the Solarian Imperial Fleet way.”