Alala

Orbital Five-O's roster is short, trusted, and answerable to Commander Kai Larsen personally — and one line of it has feathers. Alala is carried on the task force's establishment as Field Observer (Aerial), with a service number, a personnel file, and a leg band bearing the unit's flash. In five habitats where a Five-O visit is never entirely welcome, she is frequently the first part of one to arrive: overhead, visibly banded, making no secret of anything.

The contrast with the other institution that fields Smart Pets is the point. The Undercover Pets Detective Agency stations its animals where nobody looks twice at them; Five-O does precisely the opposite, on Larsen's own standing rule. He resigned a Survey Corps commission over walls that let cases die quietly, and enforces his unit's jurisdiction on himself as strictly as he ever enforced boundary protocol — and an observer nobody knows about is, in his assessment, exactly the kind of quiet he resigned over. So when Five-O works a habitat, the Commissioner's office is notified that Alala is flying, in writing, in advance. What she watches is public space, and everyone has been told so. That a raven overhead stops being noticed in about ninety seconds is not something Five-O arranged; the notification is filed, and the forgetting is done entirely by people.

Her cognitive subsystem is certified to the same standard as any Smart Pet's, fitted to a corvid cognition that was opening latches and caching evidence-grade trinkets long before anyone offered it a harness. The candidacy assessor's note has followed her through every posting since: subsystem functions, in part, as a second opinion.

Character Notes

Because Five-O's authority runs across all five Orbital Habitats Compact member habitats and not one metre further, Alala's welfare oversight rotates through five separate habitat-level authorities — she is the only Smart Pet on record whose file is maintained, in five house styles, by five offices each of which believes it knows her best. The certification body further up the chain has declined to rule on which of them is right.

The name is for the ʻalalā, the island crow of old Earth — the same islands the unit's nickname walked in from. Larsen has never confirmed choosing it, which the task force has correctly filed as confirmation.

She perches, during briefings, on the observation-deck rail behind Larsen's chair. He does not raise his voice; she has never needed him to.

Whether the detective agency has ever tried to recruit her is not on anyone's record — which the agency would consider correct filing, and Five-O would consider an answer. Agent Barsik's file, characteristically, says nothing either way.

See also: Commander Kai Larsen, Governor Petra Voss, Smart Pet, Orbital Habitats Compact.