Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

Egede recalibrated, and for six shifts there was nothing, and Egede was pleased, and then there was.

Same place. Twenty seconds this time. Then four shifts of nothing and then two minutes. Egede changed the lens. It came back. Egede took the imager up to the station and ran it against the test card for a whole evening and found nothing wrong with it and said so, with the particular irritation of a person whose instrument will not be broken when told to, and took the spare imager down instead, the one that had sat in its case since the first year.

The spare saw it too. Same place. Same edge.

"Then it's the mount," said Egede. "Or the fungus. Or there's a cold spot on that wall doing something to the optics. I don't know what it is. I'm investigating."

Seven times, in seven weeks. Nakagawa kept the count, in the file, beside the entries, the way Nakagawa had kept the count of shifts on which nothing happened, and for the same reason: so that on the day it mattered, the file would say how long it had already been true. Each entry was in Egede's hand. Imager artefact, third passage mouth, cause under investigation. Seven of them. Honest, every one, and each one a reading entered as a fact, and Nakagawa had let them stand, and knew it.

The manifest came round in the middle of it, because the manifest came round at the turn of every year on the ground and did not care what else was happening. Every instrument on the station listed, checked, signed for. Egede did the rack. Nakagawa did the signing.

Third shelf. A unit the party had not installed: squat, sealed, humming very slightly, with a boundary-side seal on its case and a boundary-side marking on the manifest line. It had come with the station, under the protocols that applied to this planet because of the feature under study somewhere near it, which the survey had never been told the nature of and did not need to know. A gravimeter. Dormant, meaning powered and logging and not the survey's to touch. It had been logging since the first year. Its log was not the survey's to read.

"Gravimeter, boundary-side, nominal," said Egede, and ticked it.

Nakagawa signed. It was not theirs. It was logging. That was all the manifest asked, and all the manifest had asked the year before, and Nakagawa signed it and went to the next line and did not think about it again that evening, and would, later, remember exactly the tick, and the pen, and the hum.