Tabitha Dimitrova
Role: Crisis officer with the Empiral Special Incidents Team, the empire’s black-bag response to anomalous events. Affiliation: Galactic Human Empire — direct chain to the Marquis’ apparatus; authorised to execute at her own discretion. Era: Late empire, contemporaneous with the Vasily Incident.
Summary
Introduced aboard the flyer ferrying medics up from Orb Ertia to the wreck of the Vasily: an official toga with crisis-worker stripes, elaborate hand gestures that conjure empire dust-images, mass-globule willtech on her suit that the civilians cannot figure out. Competent, brittle, and obviously too senior to be running a boarding party personally. She oversees the boarding, the airlock test, and then follows the surgeon back to the Shienae emergency room where Ivan Tellinger is being worked on.
In the surgical storeroom she threatens the surgeon with a scalpel and with extra-judicial execution, then — when he stalls by invoking “machines back on Aerth for that sort of thing” — pulls up a black-market-tier lookup of his genealogy and threatens the surgeon’s great-great-niece Eda Hamebe by name, promising to “take young Eda Hamebe into empire custody and ensure that her final days are utterly miserable.” Instead of leveraging the threat for information, she unexpectedly folds and tells him what the empire actually knows: the three TZ-exit spheres, the deliberate hollowship-placement policy, the 70% c, the composition matching across decades.
The surgeon reads her as emblematic of a late-empire official class that is tired and guilty, not cruel: “The empire is old already, wearing thin at the edges of its influence. Great unkindness is now necessary to preserve the state of things.” She never revisits him. No retaliation against Eda ever comes.
Appearances
- Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Oversees the Vasily boarding, threatens the surgeon, leaks the truth.
Related
- The Ertian Surgeon, Ivan Tellinger, Eda Hamebe
- Galactic Human Empire — her employer.
- Vasily Incident, The Dictionary
Open questions
- Why did she break and tell him? The surgeon’s explanation — fatigue and guilt — is a guess.
- Is the Empiral Special Incidents Team a single standing body or an ad-hoc convention?
- Does her career survive the leak she didn’t-quite-prevent?