Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The evacuation took forty-one minutes and she was pleased with it afterward, in the small flat way she permitted herself, because forty-one minutes was very good.

The aperture had begun to widen when the Sufficient Cause came inside twenty kilometres — not toward the ship, which she noted, but along the boundary, the way a tear goes along the grain. The Combine's platform stopped rendering at some point in the first ten minutes. Nobody aboard it answered a channel again, and nobody aboard it was recovered.

She gave the order in the flat voice. Shuttles first, full loads, no personal effects: eleven people in four lifts, the science section going out with the instrument logs because the logs were the only part of this anyone would be able to argue about later. The lifts went to the couriers: three Farline hulls, Ninth Draft, Reasonable Notice and Held Open, that had been running data on the Threshold circuit and had, to their considerable credit, come when a Ranger asked and negotiated the rate afterward. Her Archwarden went out on the last shuttle, which took a direct order and then a second one.

"Ma'am—"

"You answer for the ship under its captain," Shepherd said. "I'm the captain today. Go and answer for it somewhere I can reach you."

Then she was alone on a ship in a boundary that was coming apart along the grain, and she did the arithmetic once more to see whether it had changed, and it had not. The Sufficient Cause could hold the aperture's edge stable long enough for the hulls to clear, or the hulls could clear on their own and hope. One of those was an order she could defend. It happened, as it usually did, to be the harder one, and she had long ago stopped finding that suspicious.

She was not brave about it. She noted, with the part of her that never fully turned off, that she was not frightened either, and wondered whether that was steadiness or whether she simply had not yet arrived at the part where a person is frightened.

Tobble, she said, inward, which was not a thing she did on duty. You should go with the ship's second.

The ship's second is on a shuttle, Tobble said. We are not on a shuttle. Do the arithmetic again.

She did the arithmetic again. It was the same.