Thomas Rook

Thomas Rook meets the crew at Wave Rise behind a yellow pressure door, wearing a faded Federal quarantine jacket and the expression of a man whose equipment has been lying to him since breakfast.

He is a tall human with a bad right knee, close-cropped white hair, and a nicotine patch stuck precisely where regulations say it should not be visible. Twenty-eight years in Colonial Health. He knows every interdiction buoy by serial, drift habit, and favorite obsolete threat code. He also knows the public chart is wrong enough to kill somebody.

Rook does not care whether the report embarrasses Colonial Affairs. He cares whether an inbound med tender follows a safe vector tomorrow. He will walk the crew through the live telemetry, flag personal quarantine records for lawful redaction, and stamp a report that tells the ugly truth. Bring him a scrubbed contractor version and he voids it. Bring him raw patient data on an open chart and he voids that too.

He keeps the station running with spare parts, black coffee, and a list of maintenance calls the contractor claims it made. The list is longer than the physical evidence. Much longer.