Anne de Courtney

The Kingdom granted the Survey Corps a single standing delegation on Vellamar and nothing else. Anne de Courtney has spent her tenure making sure that stays exactly what it is, which has required declining considerably more from her own side of the table than from the Kingdom's.

She holds the delegation as a Chief Ranger — a general operational section, in the Corps' own accounting, of a size that would be unremarkable at a boundary post and is the entire Solar System presence on this world. What she answers for is a compound at the edge of the capital, the people working out of it, and a relationship nobody has written the rules for yet.

Known History

• Certified through the Survey Corps' ordinary ladder and posted to boundary-adjacent survey work before the Five Islands assignment, which is her first standing delegation and her first posting on an inhabited world with a government of its own.
• Took the delegation on its establishment and has held it since, through the whole of the translation effort and none of the diplomatic progress that would ordinarily be expected to accompany it.
• Has forwarded no request for expanded access to the court: not a second delegation site on Aduine, not sampling rights on the terraces, not instrument placement on the caldera rim, all of which have been proposed to her from the Solar System side and none of which the Kingdom has refused, because none of them has been put.
• Keeps the charter's withdrawal clause — that Rangers may enter a self-governing world by invitation only and must leave when the invitation is withdrawn — posted in the delegation's working room, where it has been since her first week.
• Has never sought a royal audience beyond those the court itself offered, and has not been inside the Elder Grove.

Character Notes

Her reasoning, when a Science Corps request comes back declined for the third time in a season, is always the same and she has never varied the wording of it much: the Kingdom gave one thing, and a delegation that asks for a second before it can reliably read the first is not being diligent, it is teaching a court that a grant is a lever. She does not argue that the requests are unreasonable. Several of them she has said plainly she would like granted. She simply will not be the officer who spends a first-contact relationship on soil samples.

This has cost her, in the ordinary way such positions cost people. The atmospheric analysis confirming centuries-old engineering across all four islands was made from ambient readings, and the people who made it would like very much to date the soil layers directly; their view of de Courtney is that she has confused restraint with policy, and that the record is poorer for it every season she holds the line. She thinks they are probably half right and has not changed her practice.

What she does instead is unglamorous and takes up most of her time: she reads every translation the delegation files before it goes to the Archive, not for the language — Strozzi is better at that than she will ever be and she says so — but for whether a sentence claims to know something the delegation was not told. She has sent back more of her own people's work than the court has ever refused her.

She is aware, and has said in writing exactly once, that the arrangement she is protecting is one the Kingdom could end in an afternoon and that nothing she does makes it durable. Her position is that a relationship you cannot secure is still a relationship you can decline to spend, and that these are not the same thing, whatever the Archive's periodic reviews imply by pairing them.

See also: Ernesto Strozzi, Emma la Chapelle, Abbess Ilsabet Marrowtide, The Kingdom of the Five Islands, Rank and the Chain of Command, The Founding of the Star Rangers.