Tove Strand

Tove Strand flies ice. That is the whole of her trade and she would not thank anyone for making more of it: a Knarr Line hauler on the far-edge prospecting allocation, out past the last of the Belt's worked claims and back, a leg long enough that the crew gives the hull a name before the registry does.

She was born on Knarrheim, in one of the residential rings, to a family with roots there deep enough to do what such families do with a newest crew generation: send it to Saltvik first. She worked a full season on a claim-tender in the rubble field, where no two charts agree from one season to the next and the approach lanes are the hardest routine piloting in Belt-registered space, and by the custom the Line keeps without ever writing down, nobody has questioned her piloting anywhere else in the fleet since.

The far-edge run is the one on which, two generations ago, a Line ice-prospecting convoy found a moored hull with lights in it where the charts had nothing: the Tally. Strand has flown the heading for several seasons. When the Tally invite the Survey Corps out to be shown the ledgers, the Survey's readers ride the Line's prospecting run to the mooring and back, at the Line's ordinary rate, because it is the traffic that goes there; which of those seasons were hers the record does not say. She has seen the lights from a docking distance. She has not been aboard, and the record does not say whether any Line crew has.

Known History

• Born on Knarrheim; Norwegian and Danish are her working languages, as they are the station's, with the Swedish of Saltvik's refinery floor from her season there.
• One full season on a Saltvik claim-tender as her first crew posting, which by Line custom is nearer a rite of passage than an ordinary posting, and which closed the question of her piloting for good.
• Hauler pilot on the far-edge ice-prospecting allocation in the record's present, 2826 UCSD. Her hull goes by the saga name its crew gave it; the record holds its registry number and not the name.
• Not a delegate to the Thing. Her habitat's delegation is counted by crewed tonnage, and she is one of the crew the tonnage counts.

Character Notes

Her craft is estimation. A Saltvik season teaches it or ends the career: the field's charts disagree, so a tender pilot flies on the last survey's chart corrected by her own eye, and she keeps the habit on every heading since. It is the one thing about her that the people at the end of her run would find indecent, and she knows it, and finds it funny rather than otherwise; she has said that a Tally ledger would have her down as a rounding error.

She keeps the common-berth tradition on the long legs. A far-edge leg is the kind the old knarr crews' tall stories were made for, and she tells them as the Line tells them, long, deliberately improbable and updated for vacuum. The Archive notes, without a reading, that she has never told one about the lights.

What she thinks of the hull at the end of the run she has not said on any record the Archive holds. What she does is exact and small: she brings the convoy in to the mooring's standing-off distance, holds it there for as long as the Survey's readers are shown what they came to see, and takes it home.

The record gives her no age, no family beyond the ring that sent her to Saltvik, and no history before that season. It places her on the far-edge run in 2826 UCSD and nowhere else.

See also

• The Knarr Line, Knarrheim and Saltvik
• The Tally, the people at the end of her run
• Tare, who turned the pages
• The Survey Corps