Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

The referral came up the way the charter had imagined it would, which Larsen had learned to distrust slightly, on the grounds that a case arriving correctly is usually a case nobody has yet had to think about.

Halcyon's bureau had done its own work and done it well. A loading supervisor in the bonded freight hall had been opening sealed cradles, lifting the difference between what a manifest said and what a shipper would miss, and resealing with a bond stamp he had no business holding; the bureau had him, had the stamp, had thirty-one crossings' worth of audit behind him, and had charged him on Halcyon's own deck without once needing to ask anyone's permission. That was the whole of the bottom rung working as designed. A habitat bureau runs its own deck. It is good at it.

What came up to Larsen was the remainder. Of the thirty-one audited crossings, twenty-five fitted the supervisor's method exactly — same hall, same hours, same shortfall against the manifest, the arithmetic of a man taking what he thought he could take. Six did not. And one of the six had ended at Eden, which put a line between two habitats through the middle of the file, and a line between two habitats is the one part of a case a bureau cannot finish. Halcyon's Detective Superintendent had written four sentences and sent it up. Commissioner Duarte's office had countersigned without comment, which from Duarte was practically warmth.

Larsen notified both Commissioners in writing the same afternoon, because he always did, and because the habitats' bureaus were not suspects and were owed the truth about what was moving through their halls.

Five of the six went where remainders usually go. Two were transcription — a clerk entering a certified figure from the cradle above the one in front of her, twice, four months apart, which is not a crime and is not interesting and is exactly the kind of thing an audit finds when it finally looks. One was an honest error at the hall's end of the night, logged as an error at the time by the man who made it, which Larsen noted with a certain respect. Two were a second person running the supervisor's trick less competently, and went back down to Halcyon to be charged there, because they had never crossed anything.

The sixth was a cradle.

HC-2290, consigned Halcyon to Eden, bonded, sealed, and certified in the ordinary way. A bonded cradle's mass is not weighed — a habitat's gravity is a thing the habitat is doing, a product of its spin and its radius and the particular floor you happen to be standing on, and the Compact declines to certify cargo against a construction. So the cradle is clamped, oscillated against a calibrated spring, and timed, and what comes out is its inertial mass, which is a property of the thing itself and does not care where it is or how fast anything is turning.

Halcyon's instrument had read it at one thousand nine hundred and four kilograms, even, in the quarter's eighth week. Eden's had read it twenty-three hours later at one thousand nine hundred and seven kilograms, four hundred grams.

Each instrument is certified to one part in four thousand. Two honest readings of the same cradle may therefore differ by about a kilogram, and these differed by three point four, and the difference ran the wrong way for every explanation the file already contained. Larsen sat with that for a while. A thief takes. Nothing a thief does adds three kilograms to a sealed cradle in transit, and nothing in thirty-one crossings of a loading supervisor's small greed had prepared a single line of the file to hold a cradle that had arrived heavier than it left.