Chief Ranger Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

Dock Seven kept two times, and the watch log had one line for it, and she had no business with either.

She had come down at the hour she had always come down, which was no hour a cadet could learn, and the cadet had learned it anyway, because the cadet was on her feet before Shepherd was through the hatch. The cadet looked at the collar. The cadet said, "Chief," and on this dock that word had meant one person for as long as the cadet had been standing on it, and Shepherd heard the word go somewhere it had not been before and did not correct it, because it was correct.

She told the cadet to sit, and the cadet sat.

The two chronometers were where they had been, one above the pressure seal and one above the inner hatch, the station's and the other one, each of them certain. She did not look at them yet. She read the log standing, from tonight's line back, page by page, at the speed she read anything she was going to initial, and the time line carried one reading, every watch, marked station time, left-hand instrument, in a cadet's hand. Under each line the cadet's initial. Under the summer's lines a second, hers, at hours no roster had set. Under tonight's, nothing yet.

She had the stylus in her hand. She noticed that the way she noticed most things, afterwards, by the shape of it.

The section was a Principal's tonight, pending a Lead. The log would go up at the turn of the station's day to the Chief's desk, and the desk was not hers; it had never been hers, and from this hour it was not even the desk she answered to. A Chief who initialled a section's watch log on a dock she did not answer for had not checked anything. She had made a claim, under a cadet's initial, about whose dock this was, and it was not the case, and the Chief upstairs would read the claim at the turn of the day the way she read everything, for its edges.

That was the summer's sentence, in a different uniform. A Section Lead who wrote the right-hand reading into the time line had made a claim about what the dock was for. A Chief who wrote her initial under a watch that was not hers had made a claim about whose it was. Both true. Neither the log's. She had learned the first on this sill in the summer and she was learning the second on it now, and she found that the learning had the same shape both times: a sentence already drafting itself in her hand, and the hand stopped.

She put the stylus down.

What she had been handed in the summer, she had taken for the dock. The watches hers to set, the people hers to answer for, the window hers to state. Not present, and entirely responsible, which was the Principal's manner, copied and then understood. She had thought a Chief was that manner one rung further out, and it was; but she had thought the rung went outward from the dock, and it did not. It went outward from being there at all. A Chief answered for a Lead who answered for a watch, and the Lead's noticing arrived late, and the Chief's arrived later, and the one thing in the whole arrangement a Chief could not do was come down at an hour nobody could learn and read the log standing and put her initial under a cadet's. That was the first thing the rank took, and it took it the hour it was given, before the department existed to be answered for.

Then she looked at the right-hand instrument.

Forty seconds. She had counted it on forty-one nights as a cadet and had not needed to count it since, and it had not moved. Thirteen years the station had carried it, outside the log by standing practice, and in the summer she had gone up the stair telling herself the practice was hers now to let stand. It had been, for a summer. It was a Principal's tonight and would be a Lead's in the spring, and it had been nobody's for longer than a posting since the day a reporting officer wrote the first forty seconds down, which was what standing meant, and she had not known that until the stair. Nothing she had been handed in the summer had been the dock. It had been the length of time the dock was hers.

She told the cadet the watch was in good order, which it was. She closed the log with the time line carrying one reading and one initial, and went up, and the right-hand instrument read forty seconds later than the log as she went, as it had on every night it had been hers, and on every night it had not.