Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

The dock smelled of ozone and old metal. Galahad had learned this combination years ago: it meant boundary proximity, though no one in the Survey Corps used that term. They called it Threshold Stink. He had stopped correcting them.

Dock Seven was the furthest point out. The instruments here never quite agreed.

Two chronometers on the wall showed different readings — barely forty seconds apart, but you noticed forty seconds when you lived here long enough. The survey office had filed three incident reports about it. The station administrators had filed two responses explaining there was nothing to file reports about.

He adjusted his coat and watched the new arrivals come through the pressure seal.

The tall woman came first — pale, unhurried, moving with a quality of attention he had learned to recognise at boundary postings. She was not scanning for threats. She was reading the space. Her eyes moved across the dock like a hand moving over a page in the dark, feeling for the letters.

Krenyi. Certain. He had worked with three before.

Behind her: a bipedal robot — civilian chassis, older by the joint-casings, but with sensor arrays that were emphatically not standard.

He checked the roster on his handheld. Three new transfers. All assigned to the boundary survey. He was apparently now their team lead.

This was going to be interesting, and not in the way his supervisor had promised.