“Well, then, Win,” Carter said with a smile of his own, “when we’re off-duty or otherwise out of sight, my friends call me Lee.”
“Thank you, Lee.”
“Nick, are you doing okay after Cally’s little debacle yesterday?” Carter asked. “Do you need to take today off and spend some time with her at home? Is she okay?”
“No, sir, I’m okay this morning, and today she’s cool as the proverbial cucumber… though she did cry for a little while last night,” Ashton said, shaking his head with a wry grin. “The female of the species is, arguably, deadlier than the male.”
“It sure seems like it sometimes,” Carter agreed with a chuckle. “Especially with our females.”
The three men laughed.
Upgrades
The next morning, about mid-morning, Director Carter called a meeting of the Investigative division. Once everyone was in the briefing room, he tapped Ashton, Peabody, and Stone on his way down the aisle, and gestured them to the front of the room with him, pointing to his right; they rowed up there and stood quietly. Carter stepped to the podium.
“All right,” he said. “We have a few matters of business in the division, and I felt it behooved me to call a little meeting to tell you about them.”
Curious, slightly uncertain murmurs went around the room.
“Now, now,” he said with a little smile, holding up both hands. “Hear me out.
“First off, there’s a little matter of some promotions. As you may or may not know, Winston Peabody was promoted to Investigator Level 3 some months back, after risking his own life to infiltrate the ‘oldies’ conspiracy and bring us back intelligence information on their activities. This kept me and Detective Ashton, here, alive, along with our wives, who are detectives for ICPD.”
Polite applause went around the room.
“Now, I know that his background may make some of you uncomfortable, but Ashton, here, and myself have been very pleased with his performance and his trustworthiness. I think it is safe to say that you can trust him as much as you would us. And I do not make that statement lightly.”
The applause grew more pronounced.
“So today I would like to announce that Mr. Peabody has officially been promoted to Detective, Level 1, as of yesterday,” Carter announced.
The room clapped enthusiastically, and a few whoops and calls of congratulations went up. Then suddenly, it all stopped, as the possible ramifications hit them. The room grew dead quiet.
“Oh, I’m not done,” Carter said with a mischievous grin. “Because Detective Ashton, who has been showing some excellent work, not only in investigation, but in leadership, is coming up soon on time in grade, and I’ve made the decision to move that up a bit. As of yesterday, he was promoted to Detective, Level 2.”
Thunderous applause rattled the room.
“And no, it’s not time for Mr. Stone to be promoted quite yet, though it’s closer than he thinks, because he’s been doing good work as well,” Carter said, “but he’s up here for a reason, too, and you’ll all see in a moment. Because the next announcement I have to make is that it was recently called to my attention that some of our regulations are outdated, despite a recent overhauling in the light of the new org chart. Specifically, we have had an issue with the regulations pertaining to the requirements for placing an officer into a division or branch lead. The regulations are written far too inflexibly for the circumstances in which we have found ourselves, and that has proven to extend down to at least the sector level, as Detective Ashton could tell you from firsthand experience.
“So I spent a good deal of time last night, working with Consul Saaret and his excellent advisor, the Lady Empress Amanda, on updating those regulations, and those updates were formally approved this morning, by both of those worthies...and His Majesty himself. We now have new regulations governing who may be placed in charge of a division or branch, and that information will be going out to all divisions at the end of this meeting. In fact, we’ve decided that the entire body of regulations needs reviewing, revising, and drastically cutting, and we’ll start that next week… though probably not with the Consul and the Empress involved.”
Carter paused, and a hand went up.
“Yes, Ms. Thomas?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the regulations changes, sir. What were they like, and what do they say now?”
“All right, let me use the Investigations division as an example. Under the old regime, to run the Investigations branch – which included several other groups, such as Forensics and Crime Scene and Evidence, so it was indeed more like our Field branch, sort of – you had to be at least a major. To run ‘just’ a division, such as Forensics, you had to be at least a captain.” He paused, while they all took that in. “Now, when the Emperor wiped out the previous regime – save for a few of our more trustworthy sorts,” he glanced at Peabody and smiled, “it left us in a bit of a bind. We ended up making everyone prove him-or herself, and busting those who had worked in that old regime down several grades, just to be sure. The equivalent of the ranks in the old regime would mean that the Investigations division would need to be run by, at a minimum, an Inspector, Level 1. And a branch would need at least an Inspector Level 2, if not Level 3.”
“But we didn’t have any of those,” Johnson Burke observed. “And we still don’t.”
“Exactly. So what we have done is we have removed hard rank or level from the requirements in the
