Star Captain Asteria Wessex (Human)

A Star Captain had no business on a relief run, and Asteria Wessex had made a point, for most of a long service, of knowing what her business was.

The posting answered up one of her lines, through a Line Captain who had never once needed her to come and look. She had come and looked. She had told the Line Captain it was a familiarisation, which was a word the Corps kept for exactly this use, and the Line Captain had written it down and asked nothing, and she had been grateful to him for that in a way she did not examine.

The station's relief list was on her table, and she had read it twice, because the second column was the one the Corps did not discuss.

Six on the station. Three going home on the Steerage Way, two at the posting's full term and one, a Section Lead on the Planetology side, at four months of it. Against the Section Lead's name, in the Medical Corps' column, was the ground the Medical Corps stated: radiation. Asteria had the station's dose log beside the list, as she was entitled to have it, and the log showed what the log had shown for four years, which was a platform at a quiet point in an ordinary system taking the ordinary dose. She had read it twice too.

A medical finding was the Medical Corps' and no rank could overwrite it. That was not a courtesy to her; it was the rule every specialist corps ran under, and the one she would have defended against anyone. So she countersigned the list, as the ladder asked, under the word the Medical Corps had chosen, and she did not write beside it what she thought of the word, because what she thought of the word was not a finding either. The Section Lead had asked for nothing. The Section Lead had been seen, by two separate officers whose statements were in the file, standing at the viewport in the station's night with the chart in her hand, and had answered, when asked, that she was fine, in a voice both officers had described with the same word, and the word was polite.

Nobody on this station was afraid. Asteria had checked, which was a thing she knew how to do, and the thing she would have found if it were there was not there. They were courteous and tired and good at their work and they rotated home early, and the word for why sat in a column, and it was the wrong word, and nobody had a right one.

She went down to the pilot deck at the fourth hour because the launch was at the fourth hour, and she had no reason to be on the pilot deck that she would have accepted from a subordinate.

The Senior ran it clean. Asteria had commanded a boundary hull for most of her service and knew what clean looked like from the back of a deck: the lattice brought up in the order that could be audited, the front launched with the full signature as if it would be met, and then the pilot's whole attention on the fall, not on the fault register, which was where a less good pilot would have looked. The register had nothing to say. The medium had everything to say and said it quietly, and the Senior watched it to the end, and a minute past the end, and logged the figures.

She did not ask the Senior what she had seen. She noticed herself not asking, and noticed that the Senior had noticed, and left both where they were.

What she thought, with the hull's own clock keeping a date no loop would ever close, was the thing the file declined to think on her behalf. The design was coherent. The system around the station was as fertile as systems were; the chart on the table was a chart of worlds no more or less promising than any sky's. Nothing in it read as damage. Somebody had made a universe with no doors between its stars, and made it well, and the file on why was one line long and would stay so, because there was no instrument that read intent and she had spent a career refusing to pretend there was.

What she did not think, because it was not hers to think, was what a sky like that did to the people who had to look at it. The Medical Corps had a word. The word was wrong. She countersigned under it, and the ladder did not ask her to do more, and for once in a long service she wished it did.