The link came back fully at the seventh hour, and the first thing it carried was Caldris’s surrender.
She made it to the Board, over the directors’ heads.
Mara had not known she would do it. Nobody had. Caldris had come up the cold stair behind Mara at the fifth hour and stood in the corridor through the rescue and the families and Odren’s declaration without a word about what she meant to do next. Then, when the clerk got the video back, Caldris had walked into the doorway where the camera could see her and begun.
The Board clerk had restored it: the public feed’s video as well as its audio, through the service line and the third console the guard had handed back. The engineering hall’s screens came alive one by one. On them, and on every relay on the bridge, Caldris stood in the hall’s doorway. In her plain coat. With her slate.
She read her surrender aloud. In full sentences.
“I surrender my office,” she said. “As auditor of the Compact for Meridian and the lamps assigned to me. To the Sunward Board. Under independent observation.” Her voice was even. “I ask for a fair hearing. Before the Board and before observers from worlds other than Meridian.” A pause. “I do not ask for immunity. I ask for a hearing.”
