Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

The Starwarden's answer came on the twenty-fourth day and said noted, and Varn read it three times looking for the rest.

There was no rest. Referral from the fold-approach watch, Eden, received. Re-baseline finding noted. Refusal of countersign stands. Instruments to remain in place. The Corps does not inspect a Compact member's structure uncalled. No further action lies with the Corps. A signature, a reference number, and a date. It was the clearest document Varn had read since arriving on Eden, and it did nothing, and Varn stood at the hatch holding it and felt the ninth day come back round: a thing that was true and belonged to nobody, with an initial beside it.

"It is not n/a," Smith said, without looking up, because she had read the Deputy's face from the trace, which Varn was beginning to think she could.

"It says no further action."

"It says noted." She turned. "Read the two side by side. The office struck the crew's line out; the line is gone from their record and you had to go and fetch it from a second file. The Starwarden has written ours in. It is on the Corps' record now, under a reference number, with the number beside it, and anyone who opens that file, for as long as the Corps keeps one, finds a mount carrying a third again and a watch that would not sign. That is not nothing. That is the opposite of nothing, done by people who cannot do anything else." She went back to the trace. "The Corps does not come uncalled. Write that down too. You will need it."

Varn did not understand why, and then, that afternoon, did.

It was the raven.

Varn had gone round the ring on the watch's letterhead to lodge a copy of the Starwarden's answer with the Certification Office, which was the kind of errand a Deputy exists for, and had come out onto the dock ring's upper gallery where the residents walked, and had looked up because everyone was looking up. A raven was flying the ring. Banded, obvious, not hurrying: a long slow circuit under the gallery lights with the whole of the dock shift watching her and pretending not to, and a reference number, Varn knew without being told, filed downstairs meaning every word it said.

Varn had been told about this. A notification goes to the Commissioner in writing; the field observer flies; by the third circuit she is weather. What Varn had not been told, and worked out standing on the gallery with the Starwarden's noted in one hand, was what the raven meant before the letter arrived. She was not looking for anything. She was the notification, made visible. Somewhere a letter had gone out that said she would be here, and she was here, and so the letter existed, and so Five-O had moved.

The letter reached the watch before Varn did.

Smith had it open on the desk. It was from Larsen, on the Governor's authority, addressed to the Starwarden and copied to Commissioner Wayland, to Mayor Petrakis, and to the fold-approach watch, Eden, and it did the one thing no document on the ring had been able to do since the ninth day. It recognised. A Compact-certified structural member carrying the Star Rangers' fold-route monitoring is a matter the Compact cannot finish alone. On that recognition, under the Compact's own charter and not the Corps', Orbital Five-O invited the Star Rangers' Engineering Corps onto Eden's dock ring to inspect approach mount three jointly with the habitat's own engineers, before the scheduled quarter, on a date two days off. The annex said the task force's Field Observer would be flying the dock ring from the date of notification. Her name. Her band number.

Varn read it standing up, and then, for the first time on the posting, sat down without being told.

"Who asked them?" Varn said.

"Nobody. That is the point. Nobody can." Smith set the two letters side by side, noted and the invitation, the way she set everything. "The Starwarden cannot come. The Commissioner cannot ask the Starwarden to come; the habitat has no standing to invite the Corps onto its own ring and would not want one. The crew could not ask anybody. We could not. The one desk in the Compact that exists to recognise a case has stopped being the Compact's is the one that has just done so, in writing, with a bird." She almost smiled, which Varn had not seen. "You asked, on the ninth day, whose question it was. It was the Governor's. It was always going to be. It took fifteen days and a raven for anyone to be allowed to say so."