Auditor-Major Petrescu

Mihaela Petrescu and her partner Tobias spent four years tracing a kickback through the Combine's munitions division. Someone at the top of the scheme arranged for Tobias to die in a reactor accident on a verification visit. Petrescu finished the audit alone. The report ran twelve hundred pages, named seventeen senior officers, and was buried by the board inside a week.

She was given the Burn Rate and told to be useful somewhere quieter. She decided useful meant continuing the audit by other means. She still has the names. She picks fights with subsidiaries whose books look wrong, and with fleets running munitions she ties to Tobias's case. The Combine knows, and lets her, because the alternative is the report. She would like a buyer with no equity in keeping those seventeen names quiet.