Field Officer Zoe Smith (Human)

Smith had seen a wall come down once, years ago, on a posting she did not talk about, and had learned from it that a wall coming down was the wrong thing to want.

This one had not come down. That was what she wanted the Deputy to understand, and what she did not say, because the Deputy would get there alone and it would hold better. The Rangers had held no authority on Eden's dock ring on the ninth day and held none now. The invitation named one mount, one inspection, one date, and the Engineering Corps would walk onto the ring on that date with the habitat's own engineers beside them and walk off it when the inspection was done, and the next time a mount rang under load on Eden the Corps would once again be a courtesy on the Compact side, as it should be. Nothing had been lowered. Something had been passed over, in writing, by the one party with the standing to pass it, and the wall had done what a wall is for: it had made the passing visible.

She wrote it up the way she wrote everything.

Invitation received, Orbital Five-O on the Governor's authority: joint inspection, approach mount three, Engineering Corps with habitat engineers, two days hence. Watch to stand the shift. Countersign remains refused pending the record stating what the structure carries. Not a finding. She had written not a finding on every entry since the ninth day and would go on writing it until the day there was one, because the watch's whole discipline was to know the difference and to say so, and a Deputy who learned nothing else from her would have learned the thing that mattered.

Varn asked, from the hatch, whether the crew would be told.

She thought about that longer than the question deserved, because it was the right question and had no answer she liked. "No. They have no standing to be told, and they are gone, and their log is in the Compact's file with a line under the line." She had read Larsen's annex twice. The crew's own closing entry was quoted in it, in the crew's hand: read; by whom, not known to this crew; mount still rings. Five-O had found it where the clerk had filed it, and had put it in the invitation, because the invitation was built on it. "Their line is in the Governor's letter. That is as told as anyone on this ring gets."

The trace ran. Six instruments agreed with each other every ninety seconds, and a seventh, on mount five, disagreed with all six by a third, and the disagreement was now on three records and a letter, which was three records and a letter more than it had been on the eighth day, when it had been a thing a young Chthonari felt through the feet and could tell nobody.

"Two days," Varn said.

"Two days. Then an inspection, and a number from people whose job is numbers, and the countersign or the refusal, and either way the watch stands its shift." She did not look up. "You came to a posting that does not watch anything, Deputy. You have now seen what it watches. Go and get some sleep. The raven has it."