Meret Kolhaas

Meret Kolhaas settles bills. She is a claims officer of the Farline Courier Guild's claims and indemnity office, on the Threshold circuit, and she says in her own document that she has no standing to say anything about the Cosmic Cascade and no interest in acquiring any. By 2831 UCSD she had adjusted claims for thirty-one years.

The Guild is not chartered to the Star Rangers and takes no direction from them. That is why her one document matters more than a bill usually does: it is the only contemporaneous account of the Dock Seven action by somebody who was neither a Star Ranger nor a witness with a stake in the Corps' version.

Known History

• 2831 UCSD, Mid-Autumn: wrote the Statement of Proximate Cause — Dock Seven, Guild claims file TC-2831-4471. At 0447 three Guild hulls, Ninth Draft, Reasonable Notice and Held Open, were diverted at the request, not the order, of Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd to a position forty kilometres off Dock Seven. The masters agreed before a rate was discussed. The tariff was signed against the Line Captain's personal account, which Kolhaas records as not irregular and as the second time in thirty-one years she had seen it.
• The file records eleven crew recovered off the Sufficient Cause in four lifts across forty-one minutes; hull stress on two of the three hulls; no claim in respect of any vessel registered to the Hyperfold Yield Combine. That the Line Captain did not come off is recorded plainly, so that the question of why eleven and not twelve is answered rather than asked.
• Over the Guild's counsel's advice, given twice and recorded as sound, she entered Dragons as proximate cause, because all three masters and eight of the eleven crew gave that account without conferring, and all three masters declined to sign the standard boundary-event formula. She records what the witnesses agreed and the one thing they did not, Master Roon's distinction between being let go and never being taken up, and adjudicates neither.
• The claim was settled in full against the Threshold circuit indemnity pool and paid. The tariff was waived on the Guild's own motion.

Character Notes

Kolhaas writes as an adjuster: what was chartered, recovered, lost, caused and paid. Her reasoning for the one word everyone asked her to change is a claims officer's and not a believer's: a claim signed by nobody settles nothing, and she would rather file a word her counsel dislikes than a form her witnesses say is untrue. She notices, in passing, that nobody who was not there finds Roon's distinction comfortable and nearly everybody who was there arrives at it.

She is human. Beyond that the record holds nothing of her but the Guild and the file: no origin, no other claim. The record places her on the Threshold circuit in 2831 UCSD, in the thirty-first year of the work, and nowhere else by date.

See also

• Statement of Proximate Cause — Dock Seven
• A Material Account of the Dock Seven Event, filed beside it
• Dock Seven, the Last Stand (S05E02C03)
• Tissadelle Shepherd
• Threshold Station