Page 52 of Kavan

Kavan has surgery twice and argues about the second one. Vesk keeps his arm. Petra Ansel, who I had written off on the platform, comes off the critical list on the fourth day, and her first coherent sentence is a question about whether the marshal is angry with her, and I leave the room.

And I give evidence.

Nine sessions in front of a League board convened on a resort island in the off-season, in a conference suite with a view of the water and a carafe of tepid coffee, describing an eleven-hundred-square-kilometer garrison city and a planetary defense installation that is currently plugging a caldera, to a dozen people who keep asking me to slow down.

On the sixth day they ask the question I have been dreading.

"Doctor Larkin, the Security Directorate's position is that a functioning Precursor weapons platform falls under military custody."

"It isn't a weapons platform. It's a memorial with a gun attached, and the gun is off."

"That is a semantic distinction."

"It's a stewardship distinction," I say, "and if you put a garrison in that city you will have a garrison sitting inside a system that spent eleven thousand years learning what garrisons look like, and I would very much like somebody in this room to think about that for eleven consecutive seconds."

They designate it a protected preserve on the ninth day. The vote is seven to four.

On the tenth day, Helena offers me the stars.

It's called the Anterior Worlds Initiative and it runs nine years across fourteen systems, with a survey fleet and the entire remaining budget of League Archaeology's exploration arm. It's the job I have been auditioning for since I was nineteen years old.

"You don't have to answer now," Helena says.

"No."

"Sophie." She sets down her cup. "You do have to answer eventually."

That evening I find out what Kavan has been doing.

He isn't preparing to leave. He's preparing to stay, which is different, and worse, and I only understand it because Vesk lets it slip in the corridor outside the ward.

Kavan has filed a permanent posting extension for Osiris. He has updated his service record with a next-of-kin designation. He has written, in his own hand, on paper, at a desk, with his arm in a sling, four letters: to the families of Tolan Rask, Kesh Aldani and Dain Yusuf, and to a woman named Ines on Corvane who is going to receive a page and a half about her brother from a man who read her name in a file so he wouldn't get it wrong.

And he has said nothing to me about the Initiative. Not once. Not a syllable.

"He's waiting," Vesk says.

"For what?"

"For you to decide without him standing on the scale, Doctor." He shrugs his good shoulder. "He worked out somewhere under that city that the worst thing he could do to you is make it easy."

I go to the window at the ward's far end and stay there a long while.

Because here is the thing nobody tells you about getting exactly what you wanted: I can picture it. Nine years. Fourteen systems. My signature on the survey that redefines a civilization. And when I try to picture the ninth year, actually picture it, a specific evening in a specific room, what I get is a berth on a survey ship and a report to file and nobody in the room to show it to.

And when I picture the alternative I get a window facing water.

I'm at that window still at 2100 when Zuri finds me, running, with her boots unlaced and a slate held away from her like something on fire.

"Sophie. Sophie, the seat is writing."

"That isn't possible. It stood down."

"Standing down isn't stopping." She shoves the slate at me. "The relay's been up eleven days and we've been logging ambient telemetry and nobody looked at the archive channel until an hour ago, and Sophie, it has been producing text continuously since the moment you relieved it."

"How much text?"

"Four hundred eleven thousand entries."