Starwarden Luke Valerius (Human)

He wrote the window up at the thirty-fourth hour, and it took him the time it took.

It said what the instruments carried. Window of thirty-one hours against a logged maximum of fourteen. Divergence from twenty-six seconds to four minutes nine, with the time against each figure from both housings. Permit for the Fair Return not withdrawn, on the stated reasoning. Lock lost at the twenty-ninth hour; hull brought in under paired callouts; four aboard, one tether cut, no injury. Turn at the thirty-first hour; twenty-six seconds within the hour; lower leading. One unclassified transient in the hour after, by band and duration, register entry attached. He classified nothing. The Safety Corps would decide whether a thirty-one-hour window was a Type II interface doing a new thing or a Type II interface becoming something with a different number, and that was theirs, and what he owed them was on the page.

Nothing else was. He had considered, for the length of time it took to consider it, whether a Starwarden who had stood at a viewport for an hour and could not account for the hour owed the record a line saying so, and had concluded that a line with no scope was a sentence still waiting for its subject, and had not written it. The record of his command would carry one more transient and no account of it. That was accurate. He was prepared to be asked why it was accurate, and knew nobody would.

Holm had gone off watch. Her relief had the desk and had not been on the post for the thirty-one hours, and read the log the way a relief does, for what was still open. Nothing was still open. The master of the Fair Return had sent her thanks to na Maoir Réalta, which was the Union's own name for the Corps, and he had entered them as sent.

In the morning, which on the post was a word for the second watch, he stood at the bench before he went to the viewport, and read the lower housing, and then the upper. The figure between them was twenty-six seconds. He did not write down which he had read first, because the log had never asked for it and he was not going to be the one who added the column. He noted that he had done it. He noted that he had no procedure for telling whether it mattered, and that the absence of one was not evidence either way, and that both sentences were correctly formed.

Then he went on filing.