Section Lead Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The tab came off with a thumbnail, the way it was built to.

Six bars, pale grey-green, the Survey track's colour, the colour her collar had carried since the rotation began, read by nobody at Halyx who had not already read the order it came with. She had it in her palm before the transport was on approach, because the order had a second page and she had read the second page on the first night out and every night since, and it said the same thing each time. Section Lead, general operations, Threshold Station, effective on taking up the post. The post was hers when she reported. She was not on duty until then, and the collar was bare, and that was the whole of the interval the Corps gave a person between one rank and the next: the length of a dock.

She seated the new one. Seven bars, slate blue, the colour she had worn on this collar two years ago with two bars on it, and had worn with three at Eden before the Survey had taken her sideways. The magnet took and the tab sat proud of the cloth, visibly removable, as the charter required, so that nobody could mistake it for something sewn.

Seven, Tobble said, inward, before she had asked. Counted twice. Still seven.

She had not asked. She had not needed to; counting a thing twice was his, and he did it whether or not anybody wanted the number. She was not on duty until she had reported, and she had not reported, and so she let him.

The colour, she said.

Slate. It was slate before Halyx. The record shows a return to a previous value. Then nothing, which was his way of saying a matter was closed, and she left it closed.

The transport put her off at an inboard dock and the air told her where she was before the signage did. Trace ozone, a fraction above station standard, the thing the crews called Threshold Stink and visitors called nothing because it had gone by the second breath. Two years, and the air had not changed. She stood a moment with her kit at her feet and let it go by, and then she picked up the kit and went to find the Chief Ranger's office, which she had never once had cause to enter when she was a cadet on this station, and which was now the first door the order required of her.

Her file had come ahead of her. She knew what was in it, because she had written most of it, and all of it was shorter than the rotation it covered, because the rotation had held a great deal she had not been entitled to file and she had not filed it. Somewhere on the Halyx record a telemetry log stayed unmodified under her name. Somewhere further off, a council that spoke in chemistry and percussion had thanked her for a method that cost nothing to receive. Neither was coming to Threshold. The Survey track kept its own files, and she had rotated off it in the length of a dock.

The certifications stayed. A track was assigned and a certification was held, and the Survey's examinations she had sat were hers whatever colour the collar said. What she gave up was not the standing. It was the queue, and the ear's work, and the right to be asked about a pulse under her own name by an office that would never ask her again.

She knocked, and was told to come in, and went in.