The Meridian Reckoning

Nobody out there is hostile. That is the problem.

At 0412 on the hundred and sixty-eighth day, a region erased from every chart four hundred years ago sends Commander Mara Ellison the way in. Twelve approach bearings. Twenty-six shear points. A corrections table that somebody, somewhere, is still keeping up to date.

The references are valid for eleven days. Thirty-five hulls are assembled at Kestrel, and the references are issued for one.

On the eleventh day the disposition protocol reaches its nine-year review and selects the Orison approaches. Freeport Orison. Hollis Deep. Two regulators. The nine hundred and six at Carriden, who are a line in a table and do not know it.

Ellison takes two hundred and nine people into the Quiet Sector on a chart that expires on the day the thing they came to stop is scheduled to happen.

What waits there is not a weapon and not an enemy. It is an office. Four hundred years old, correctly staffed, refusing in four lines, administering a network that is shedding load exactly as its own procedure requires. Custodian Tal will show them the arithmetic, and nobody will be able to fault a line of it.

Elias Ward has no commission and a warrant with his name in it. Doctor Cole has a correction that needs four hundred and six structures to move in the same minute, and no authority to present it to any of them. Signals Officer Sera is the fastest route to a nine-symbol authorization that exists, and the people who want it have paperwork the crew cannot argue with.

Stopping this will cost six structures their transit function, permanently, with people on the far side.