Sunniva Holm

Sunniva Holm is a Field Officer who stands the operations watch, and the record holds her at one posting: the boundary-proximate post on the outward frontier that Luke Valerius answers for, in the late autumn of 2825 UCSD, about a month after she came to it. She had stood the operations watch on three posts before this one and had been told at her briefing that this one was known for its unclassified transients.

What the Record Holds

She had the desk through the whole of a Type II dominance window that should have turned by fourteen hours and ran thirty-one, with the divergence between the post's two reference housings climbing from its standing twenty-six seconds to four minutes and nine. She gave the figures to the log rather than to the Starwarden, upper leading, with the time against each from both housings.

From the twentieth hour she ran the paired callouts he ordered for the Union salvage hull Fair Return, working the approach's permitted edge: every transaction given from the upper housing and then the lower, and read back in both. At the sixth hour she had asked him which clock was right, and he had asked her whether she meant right at the housing or right at the hull, and she had not had an answer. When the hull lost timing lock in the twenty-ninth hour and came in off the edge under callouts, she logged each pair, including the one the master's second read back in the wrong order and read again. The hull made the inner marker in the thirty-first hour with four aboard and one tether cut, and eight minutes later the window turned. It was the first turn she had watched. She logged it against both clocks.

In the hour after, awake for thirty-one hours, she saw one field trace settle into a narrow, gentle harmonic band while the rest ran ragged. She checked the instrument's mount, found it sound, and pulled the anomaly register, which had an old field-signature entry describing the band to the width, under a name a watch had once given it rather than a classification. She reported the trace by entry number and did not say the name aloud on his post. At his word she logged it as an unclassified transient, by band and duration, with the entry attached and its name left off. It lasted about fourteen minutes. She noticed that he had written nothing in the hour since the turn, which she had not seen him do in her month on the post.

She wrote the name on her own pad under the entry number, so that she would know which one it had been, then tore the sheet off, put it in her pocket and did not file it, because it was his post. She was off watch before he wrote the window up. See Which One First (S01E00C07).

What the Record Does Not Hold

Her home world, her age and what she looks like. Her road into the Corps, her service track, and which corps the operations watch she stands belongs to. The three posts before this one, and how long she stayed at this one. What the post is called. Whether she still has the sheet, and whether she ever learned what the Starwarden saw in the hour after the turn, which the record carries only as his. The record holds her where it found her, at the desk with the log, and has not been asked for more.

See also

• Starwarden Luke Valerius
• Boundary Zones and Concordant Edges
• The Star Rangers Safety Corps