Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

He read the question before he passed it to her, because it had come to his office and his office reads what comes to it, and he read her answer after, because she gave it to him to send. He did not amend either. He had not expected to.

What he had not expected was to sit with them for the better part of an hour afterwards, and he did not pretend to himself that it was the Warden's prose.

He had built the method against quiet. An observer nobody knew about was the thing he would not run. So: the notification, in writing, in advance, to the office with standing to object; her name on it, her band number, the dates. Everyone who could say no was told. He had thought of that as open, and had been right, as far as it went, and had just been shown by a habitat exactly how far it went.

It went to an office. An office does not forget. An office files the notification and the notification goes on meaning every word of it, downstairs, for as long as the Compact keeps paper. The people on the ring had been told too, by rumour with a reference number, and had looked up once each — a hundred and ninety-three of them, the Warden had counted, which was a number he could have had from her tallies and had never thought to want — and after that the only thing on Eden still seeing her had been the one reader he had never notified, because it was not on the list of offices owed a letter. It was on the list of offices sent a copy. It had been told. It had not forgotten. It had been standing over Berth 60-Low the whole quarter with the same angle as his observer, and nobody had asked it anything, and it would have had nothing to say — the Warden reads a berth as a clamp and a current, and a hull holding still is Eden being well. The vantage was never the view. What the Warden had, and what no one in the chain had thought to count as a thing an office could have, was attention that did not run out at ninety seconds.

He had written, at the foot of the close, that every part of the fraud had been visible the whole time from a vantage point that belonged to nobody. He had meant the gap between what is certified and what is bolted to it. He looked at that sentence now with the Warden's question beside it and found that the vantage point had an occupant, and had had one for the whole of the quarter, and that it had been doing with his notification exactly what he had expected the dock crews to do with it, which was read it and keep reading it.

The method stood. He checked that, honestly, and it did; he would send the next notification the same way and she would fly the next ring the same way, and none of it was his to alter and none of it was wrong. What had moved was smaller. He had announced her to everyone with the standing to object. He had not, until a habitat put it to him in four lines, announced her to anyone with the standing to answer — and the difference between those two had turned out to be the whole distance between an office and a person, which was the distance he had resigned a commission over, measured from the other end.

He appended both to the case. The Warden's question, in the Warden's form; her answer, in hers; open, on Five-O's record, under the close they had been written about, with a line of his own that said only that they were there. He put nothing in the recommendation section, because the only recommendation he could think of had just been given to him by the party it concerned, and it was not his to make.