Mara Keene

Mara Keene runs the Colonial Affairs Frontier Survey desk with two screens, six active injunctions, and a chipped mug that says PROCEDURE IS A LOVE LANGUAGE. Nobody has been brave enough to ask who gave it to her.

She is a compact human woman with iron-grey curls, amber reading lenses, and the blunt patience of somebody who has spent twenty-five years explaining that a quarantine buoy can be obsolete and dangerous at the same time. Wave Rise is her problem this month. The Federation chart shows a clean approach. Live telemetry shows interdiction markers drifting on old codes around an A-berth that needs to reopen.

Mara hires the crew because their chain-of-custody record is clean and because local government hulls would make the survey look like a foregone conclusion. She gives them current health codes, old exclusion maps, and one warning: record what the buoys do, not what the maintenance contractor says they should do. Then she asks them to keep the public upload calm. That's where the trouble lives.