Field Officer Zoe Smith (Human)

Smith read the log the way she read an approach trace: for what it matched, and for what it did not.

It matched the certification in every particular the certification named. That was the first entry in her own log, and she made it before anything else, because a Deputy who has just found something needs to watch the officer write down first that most of it is nothing. Then she wrote the line that did not match, in the crew's words and not hers, and beside it the office's n/a, and beside that the only thing the watch could truthfully add: not within the watch's competence to assess; not within the certification's remit to record; observed by the contractor and struck by the habitat.

Varn was standing where Deputies stand, which is one step further from the desk than they need to be. She did not say to sit. She asked what rings under load meant, and Varn said I don't know, and she said that was the correct answer and the only one she would have accepted, and watched the Deputy not know what to do with being right by having nothing.

There were three things she could do with the line, and she declined two of them.

She could countersign. The certification was complete on its own terms, the monitoring read normal, and the watch signs to say the record is in order, not to say the ring is. The signature would be honest. It would also make the line disappear under it, and a thing that disappears under an honest signature is the one kind the Corps has never learned to find again.

She could refer. A referral from the watch went to the Starwarden, and from the Starwarden, if it went anywhere, to a habitat that had already written n/a and would write it again with more people in the room. The evidence supported none of it: a monitoring record that had read normal for as long as she had stood here, and one contractor's note that the habitat had considered and set aside. She had seen officers refer on less, and seen what it cost the next officer who needed to be believed.

So she did the third thing, which was the watch's actual job and the reason the posting existed. She logged it, flat, timestamped, in a form that could be checked: Countersign withheld pending clarification of contractor's note. Not a finding. No further action by this watch. Then she sent the Deputy back to ask the Certification Office, on the Corps' letterhead and politely, what n/a had meant — not whether the note was true, which was not the watch's question, but who had decided it was not a question.

Varn asked, from the hatch, whether the crew could be asked directly.

"Not by us," Smith said. "They are the Compact's contractors on the Compact's ring. We are a courtesy there." She turned back to the trace. "Find out whose question it is. It is somebody's. It always is."