Ranger Liaison Officer Galen (Human)

Galen had worked the Union gate long enough to stop expecting the handoff to look the same way twice, and the morning Line Captain Shepherd came through it still surprised him a little.

The Highland Guard detail brought her down from the uplands in good order and better silence — four of them, ceremonial rifles at rest, the kind of correctness that read less like hostility than like a people who had decided, generations back, that correctness was the safest shape for a feeling they didn't have a better container for. They said their farewells at the gate the way the charter specified: precisely, briefly, with no more warmth than the occasion strictly required and no less. Shepherd returned it in kind, which Galen had come to recognise as her own way of paying a courtesy back exactly as given, not a beat more or less.

She looked tired in the specific way leave sometimes left a Ranger tired — not the operational exhaustion Galen saw off every boundary-proximate rotation, but something quieter, like she'd spent four days doing arithmetic she hadn't been able to put down.

"Welcome back," Galen said, once the guard detail had turned and started back up the track.

Something in her shoulders came down half an inch. It was a small thing. Galen had learned to watch for small things; the gate rarely gave him anything larger to work with, and a small thing, read correctly, usually told him everything the paperwork wouldn't.

"It is good to home," she said, and caught it half a beat late, the correction arriving before he could have needed it. "I mean back home. With the Star Rangers."

Galen logged the manifest, confirmed the seal, and did not ask her what four days on her mother's hillside had cost her to be worth correcting that sentence for. Rangers who wanted to say something said it unprompted, in the gap between the guard leaving and the boarding call. He had learned, a long time ago, to leave that gap open and let her decide what went in it.

She didn't fill it further. He walked her to the aetoshuttle instead, logged the handover, and watched Union jurisdiction end the way it always did at this gate: quietly, on schedule, with nothing about the moment marked as significant except to the two people standing in it.