Syra (Krenyi)

The station was exactly as the approach data had described and entirely unlike what the data had implied.

In a century and a half of navigating human-built environments, Syra had learned the difference. Data described surfaces. Implications described pressures. The data said: mid-grade shore station, boundary-proximate, crew complement forty-seven, mixed species. The implication said: everyone here is waiting for something to go wrong, and they have all agreed not to say so.

She could feel the boundary through the station's hull. Not as sensation exactly — more as a faint discontinuity in her own coherence. A slight lag between intention and action. A breath held somewhere behind the physical.

She filed it. Not a threat. Information.

The human in the survey coat was watching her. She had been watched before — it was a standard feature of arriving anywhere — but he was watching in the specific way that meant I have worked with your kind before and I am deciding whether to update my model. She found this preferable to the other kinds of watching.

She noted the robot behind her in the reflection of the dock window. Rook-7's sensor arrays had been active since they cleared the pressure seal. Good. That was the correct response.

"You're the team lead," she said to the human. It was not a question.