Captain Beatrix Kilbride (Human, Constant Margin)

Three names on the manifest, and Kilbride had personally overseen every hour of hauler modification listed under all three, which was not standard practice for a cargo captain and was, in her judgment, the only way she'd sign her own name to what came next.

Renner had the aft compartment sealed and cross-checked twice before Kilbride asked him to. Dez ran the drift-corridor telemetry a third time after the second pass had already come back clean, and did not apologise for it, and Kilbride did not ask her to. Nobody aboard Constant Margin was doing anything twice out of nerves. They were doing it twice because the model they were flying on had never been flown before, and the difference between correct and confirmed was exactly the distance they were about to close.

The MSC's monitoring officer had come by the docking ring an hour before undock, not to stop them — he had neither the authority nor, Kilbride suspected, the actual technical grounds to know whether stopping them was warranted — but to note, for the record he was required to keep, that the hauler's manifest listed a transit profile inconsistent with any authorised operational envelope on file. Kilbride had signed the note. It changed nothing about the undock schedule. It gave him something to file, and filing something was, she had come to understand watching Eden's compliance apparatus for three years, most of what the institution actually knew how to do with a problem it could not move fast enough to solve.

"Last chance to be the fourth name that isn't on this list," she told Renner and Dez, once, at the airlock, because it needed saying once and would not need saying twice.

Neither answered that as though it required an answer.

The drift corridor read exactly the way Pitch's model said it would, which was the only reassurance Kilbride had ever been promised and the only one she had ever actually needed. No message could outrun the hauler once it cleared the threshold — that had been true of every transit anyone had ever attempted and would stay true of this one, model or no model, authorised or not: nothing carried faster than the ship carrying it. Whatever Constant Margin found on the other side, it would be Kilbride's own voice, hours or weeks later, that carried the finding home, not a signal racing ahead of her to announce it first. That was not a flaw in the plan. It was the entire shape of the world the plan operated inside, and she was, this pre-dawn, the first person about to test how large that world actually was.

The corridor closed around the hauler at the exact threshold the model predicted, to within a margin so small Kilbride would spend the rest of the transit deciding whether to be grateful for it or unsettled by how precisely one buried footnote had just rewritten what her ship was.

There was no further chance to reconsider after that. She had known this going in. She had wanted it to be true anyway — some decisions were only real once the door that let you take them back had already sealed behind you, and Kilbride had never yet found a way to want a decision that still had a door.