Dr. Wren Okafor (Human, Patience First Boundary Analyst)

Six names on this manifest instead of three, and Okafor had insisted on every one of them personally — not because she doubted Fenwick's judgment as captain, but because a boundary analyst who let someone else pick the crew for a first-of-its-kind terminus approach was an analyst who deserved whatever the crew turned out to be short of.

"Pitch thinks we're one step past what her own data covers," she told Fenwick, once, in the cramped analysis bay, because it needed saying to the person who'd have to act on it and would not need saying twice.

"Is she wrong?"

"No," Okafor said. "She's not wrong. She's telling me the corridor's confirmed and the terminus isn't, and she's right, and I've known that since page one hundred and ninety, and I'm still recommending we go." She had turned the sentence over enough times in the last week to trust the shape of it now. "The MSC has had two years to tell us what's allowed past a confirmed fold corridor. They've told us nothing, because there's no committee built to answer a question this new before someone's already answered it for them. That's not an argument for waiting. Waiting hasn't produced guidance in two years. It's produced three more monitoring officers standing at a docking ring with nothing to monitor."

Fenwick didn't answer that as though it required an answer, which Okafor had learned, over four years working under her, meant the captain agreed and saw no benefit in saying so aloud before departure.

The MSC's liaison had filed the same note his predecessor filed for Constant Margin, nearly word for word, and Okafor found something almost funny in how little the institution's imagination had grown in two years: manifest lists a transit profile inconsistent with any authorised operational envelope on file. True both times. Consequential neither time. An institution that answered a first-of-its-kind question with the same boilerplate it used for the second-of-its-kind one had, in Okafor's private assessment, stopped being an institution capable of answering anything at all — which was, more than ambition, more than curiosity, the actual reason six people were about to do its job for it.

She thought, walking the last corridor to the airlock, about Pitch's exact words — I can only tell you nobody has ever been in a position to tell you it isn't — and found she could carry that sentence without it changing what she intended to do next. Uncertainty was not the same thing as danger, whatever an older scientist's caution made it sound like from the outside. Someone had to be the first person in a position to answer the question properly. She had spent four years wanting that someone to be her, and had never once needed to lie to herself about wanting it.

The corridor took Patience First exactly the way Constant Margin's logs said it would, precise to the same margin Kilbride's crew had recorded two years prior — the last data point, Okafor would reflect afterward if there proved to be an afterward at all, that anyone back at Eden would ever be able to confirm against her own instruments before the ship went further than anyone's instruments had ever gone.

There was no data past that point yet. There was only the going.