Field Officer Zoe Smith (Human)

Smith read the notice standing, the way she read everything.

Four lines, filled. The fifth empty. The time to the second, which was the instruments' and not the Deputy's, and copied right; the class in the table's words and not in English; the clearance column checked against the list and not against memory, because the list's reference was on the line, which a Deputy who had checked memory would not have thought to write. There was nothing to strike. She had initialled notices of this class before, and sent two back, both for the fifth line. The Corps' rawest Deputies wrote on the fifth line. They wrote on it because they had seen something, and the watch had not yet taught them the difference between seeing a thing and the watch having seen it.

This one had seen something. Smith could tell from where the Deputy was standing, which was a step back from the desk and very still, with the particular stillness of a person who has decided not to say a thing and is waiting to find out whether she will be made to. Smith did not know what it was. She did not ask. Nothing in the doctrine let an officer ask a Deputy for an opinion she could not then log, and the doctrine was right about that, as it was about most things it was clear on.

She initialled the notice and sent it up to the Passage oversight, where it would be read by an officer who would pass it, under the oversight's seal and with none of the watch's names, to the Compact's dock master — as the oversight passed every transient of the artificial class, not as a complaint, since the Corps did not complain, but as a fact about the fold route's safety that the people who owned the vessels were owed. What the dock master did with it was the dock master's. The watch investigated nothing.

What she noted, because it was small, was that the Deputy had never taken the step. Twelve days, and this one had not once stood where the others stood; she stood where the log was, as if the compartment had been arranged around the log rather than around the officer, which it had. Smith wrote none of that down. An assessment records. There would be time.