Deputy Officer Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The instruments had agreed with each other every ninety seconds for eleven days, and on the twelfth, at ring's night, they agreed about something.

Shepherd saw it because the agreement log was the one thing on the watch a Deputy could read without being told to, and she had been reading it since the first shift — not because anyone had said to, but because it was there and it was a record. Nobody on the watch read it; Smith had said so on the first day, in the same flat voice she had used for the event has not come in my tenure, and Shepherd had taken that as a description of the watch and not as an instruction to her. The instruments read it themselves. That did not stop a person reading it as well.

What they had agreed about took eleven seconds. All six carried it, each on its own principle, and all six had filed it under the same word, which was not event. It was transient, with a class beside it from the second column of a table Shepherd had learned in her first week: artificial, drive-band, inside the approach. A thing a vessel does. The table did not say what vessel, because the instruments did not know what a vessel was; they knew the approach, and something had crossed it with its drive lit, for eleven seconds, at an hour for which the oversight's clearance list — which the watch held, and which was the one list a Deputy was told to check — had cleared nothing.

Fourteen minutes past three, ring time. She knew the hour. That was the part she sat with.

A year before her intake she had sung on the dock circuit, in a room under the ring where the late set ran until the dock's shift changed, because that was when the loaders came in and the room filled, and the band played its last set to people who had just stopped lifting things. She knew to the quarter-hour when the dock master's office was between its night staff and its day staff, because for a year the band had timed its break by it. Nobody was at the dock master's desk at a quarter past three. Nobody had been for as long as she had been on Eden.

So she knew what the eleven seconds meant, or thought she did, and she knew it from a room on the Compact side that no part of her posting had ever been in.

She wrote the notice. The form was the watch's and had four lines: the time, to the second; the duration; the class, in the table's words; and whether a transit had been cleared, with the list's reference beside it. She filled all four. The fifth line was remarks, and she had learned at the Garda college on Tír na nÓg — two weeks short of the oath, which was a thing she had stopped explaining — that the remarks line was where a report stopped being evidence. She left it empty. What she could support was that six instruments had agreed about eleven seconds inside the approach and that the clearance list had nothing in it for that hour. What she knew about a quarter past three she knew from a band, and it would have gone into a Ranger notice as a Ranger's opinion about where the Compact's dock master kept his staff, and the Rangers held no opinion about that, because they had no standing to hold one.

It cost her something to leave the line empty. She had expected it to, and it did. Then she put the notice on the desk for the Field Officer's initial, and stood a step back from it, and waited.