Nai Syra, Boundary Analyst (Krenyi)

Syra did not experience deep fear, and so the boundary desk at Threshold got, for once, an assessment that arrived at the same speed as the data.

"Say only what the instruments carry," she told the desk, which was herself and Toval, a Krenyi Cadet she was training out of the habit of rounding up. "The Sufficient Cause reports an aperture at forty kilometres, held open past transit. That is what she reports. Here is what I have."

What she had: a fold signature that was not decaying. That was the whole of it and it was enough. Folding was a bounded event with a beginning and an end, and the end was not optional; the signature of a completed transit fell off a cliff and stayed fallen. This one had a floor. It had had a floor, she established, going back through the archive with the junior watching, for four months, in a band nobody swept because nothing was supposed to be able to sit in it.

"And the — " the Cadet started.

"Class III aggregate, in transit toward the aperture, in numbers." Syra kept her voice exactly level, because the Cadet was going to have to write this down and would write it better if nobody had performed anything at him. "Non-sapient. No Cascade standing. Not protected by any constraint I can cite, and I have looked, because I assumed you would ask and I would rather have looked than guessed."

"So there's no — " He stopped. "There's nothing wrong with it."

"There is nothing wrong with taking them," Syra said. "That is correct and you should not soften it. What is wrong is the aperture. An aperture held open is a breach of boundary integrity whatever it is held open for, and it would be a breach if the holds on the far side were empty. Do not build the finding on the animals. Build it on the aperture. The aperture is the part that will survive review."

She flagged it, and then, because precision was doctrine before it was temperament, she flagged what she could not support: that she did not know what four months of a held aperture did to a boundary zone, because nobody had ever had four months of one to measure.