Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

The survey office occupied a corner of the station that nobody had bothered to give a window. Galahad had decided this was intentional. Windows on this side showed the boundary shimmer on bad days, and the shimmer had a documented tendency to make new arrivals ask difficult questions before they had the context to ask them well.

He spread the incident reports across the table. Eleven years of them.

"The official position," he said, "is that the chronometer discrepancy is a calibration issue that has proved difficult to resolve. The unofficial position—" He paused. "Is that we stopped trying to resolve it after Year Three, because every time we recalibrated, it came back within forty-eight hours."

Syra was reading the reports in sequence. Not how most people read reports — most people skipped to the conclusion. She started at the earliest entry and worked forward, occasionally returning to re-read something.

Rook-7 had not sat down. It stood near the door with its sensor arrays pointed at the wall — at the section of wall, Galahad realised, that backed onto the boundary-proximate section of the station.

"Eleven years," Syra said, without looking up. "The first report predates the last major boundary survey by three years."

"Yes."

"There is no note in the record connecting those two facts."

"No. There isn't." A pause. "I noticed that too."

She looked up then. Something in her expression shifted — not warmth exactly, but a recalibration. A slight upgrade in her assessment of him. He found, to his mild surprise, that this mattered to him.