Ysolde Maren Pitch

Ysolde Maren Pitch wrote three hundred and forty pages, and the committee answered them with a footnote of sixteen words. Eleven years later the charter quoted her by name. What happened in between is the founding of the Star Rangers, and she stayed at her desk for all of it.

She was Eden Space Habitat's senior scientific authority when its instruments found a natural fold route passing close by the habitat, and her analysis identified it for what it was and carried a navigation model for entering and traversing it with modified Eden hardware. She submitted it as supplementary material. The Military Space Command's reviewing committee cited it fourteen months later, in a footnote, and left it there, which is the classification that let it sit unactioned without ever being rejected.

Known History

• Chief scientist at Eden through the eleven years of anomaly reports that nobody read in time, and the author of the analysis and the model the whole sequence turned on.
• In 2712 UCSD she signed the model over to Captain Beatrix Kilbride at twenty to four in the morning, station time, an hour nobody official kept, which was the point. You understand this doesn't make it authorised. It makes it correct. I have no data on what those aren't the same word for. She did not go to the docking ring. She stayed at her desk and began drafting the report she expected to write afterward, in whichever tense turned out to be true. Supplementary Material (S00E01C01).
• In 2714 UCSD she did not go to the docking ring either, when Wren Okafor took Patience First out on the same model with six names on the manifest. Okafor had asked to see her first. By then the model was cited, quietly, in briefings she was not invited to; it had been correct enough, once, to become a kind of faith, and she had not built it to be believed in. She had built it to be checked. Beyond MSC Liability (S00E01C02).
• She had not travelled off Eden in eleven years when she read the charter's preamble on Signing Day, 2723 UCSD, at Solar Command on Mars: Founding assets: the Constant Margin navigational data; Dr. Y. Pitch's declassified fold-mechanics analysis; eleven years of documented anomaly observation at Eden Space Habitat. Declassified. Not supplementary. Not see also. No Longer Supplementary (S00E03C02).
• Her own verdict that evening is the one the record keeps beside the citation: I built a model that got you there and back. I never built anything that could have told Okafor whether it was safe to go further. I still haven't. Eleven years, and I still haven't.

Character Notes

The model's standing is exact and she kept it so. It predicts a stable transit, and it is empirically confirmed for the corridor transit and for nothing past the terminus, which nobody had measured, tested or confirmed when either ship went. The caveats are on page one hundred and ninety, and Okafor could quote them. Pitch never let the model be read as more than it was, and never let it be read as less, and the distance between correct and authorised is the one she spent her career standing in.

The record places her nowhere after 2723 UCSD, and gives no dates of birth or death.

See also

• The Founding of the Star Rangers, where her analysis is a founding asset
• Eden Space Habitat
• Eden's Fold Route Confirmed (2712 UCSD)