Adrian Cole

Adrian Cole posts research contracts in sentences that sound as if they have already survived committee review.

He's a Colonial Affairs infrastructure director, forty-six, tall and narrow, with sandy hair thinning at the crown and rectangular glasses he does not need but keeps because people stop interrupting when he looks over them. His Khesret desk handles Federation rim maintenance beyond Lacera. Oath Post is one of the cheap colonies: old berth, dense air, stressed water lines, black stone that carries vibration farther than anybody budgeted.

Cole needs a Rank 1 hull, an acoustic surveyor, and seven days of field time. Escort Nina Torres through Ee'la transit, map the berth and mesa infrastructure, log instrument serials, deliver the mechanical dataset. Honest money. Dull work. The sort of job everyone ignores until a buried pipe ruptures beneath recruit housing.

He also knows the vendor kit's wide-band profile can reconstruct voices through stone. That warning sits in Appendix D, where bad news goes to die. Cole insists crews read it because the annex shares a wall with Oath Hall counseling rooms. He does not care about gossip and cares very much about admissible data. Bring him a clean mechanical map with protected speech redacted and disclosed, and he pays before the coffee cools. Bring him a raw personnel buffer and he locks the file, the fee, and your hull's access to federal survey work.