The Threshold, the Tally, and the Second Hand

The Threshold

The Threshold does two jobs, and they are the same job.

The first step through a new anchor. When a door opens, somebody has to walk through it before anybody else is allowed to. Nobody knows what is on the other side — not the pressure, not the chemistry, not whether the far housing is sitting in rock or in water or in a wind that will take you off your feet. A first-through goes, finds out, and comes back and says so.

The call when an old one goes wrong. Which is most of the work now, and all of the worry.

What a first-through is. Trained two years in 61 Cygni, and the Yards, qualified at fifteen or sixteen if they are quick, and sent out alone or in twos. Not soldiers. Not police. Closer to a lifeboat crew who happen to be engineers, and who are expected to talk their way out of most of what they walk into.

The Threshold’s whole doctrine comes out of one physical fact, and the fact is in Why Nobody Can Reach You: once you step through, you are the whole response. Everything else follows. You are trained broad because there is nobody to hand the problem to. You are trained to talk because you cannot call for backup. You are trained to leave rather than win, because a first-through who dies on the far side of a door takes the information with them, and the information was the job.

Where it sits. Home is Sirius, and the Nine, ready room off the second gallery. The Threshold is old, underfunded, widely liked and politically powerless — it holds no doors, charges no tolls, and owns nothing anybody wants. That is either its weakness or the only reason it has survived this long, depending on which part of the service you ask.

The Tally

Here is the thing nobody planned.

A door cannot be moved, copied or replaced. It sits where the First Reach put it, inside a building, and the building has a corridor, and the corridor has an end. Whoever stands at that end decides who goes through.

So the Causeway is not governed by a fleet, or a parliament, or an empire. It is governed by a counting house. The Tally began as a clearing office that nobody minded: somebody had to record what crossed which door, settle who owed what, and keep the ledgers straight between systems that could not talk to each other. Nine hundred years later it records everything, charges for everything, and has quietly become the only institution that exists at every door at once.

It calls itself a service, and mostly it is one. The tolls pay for the halls, the dressing rooms, the hall doctors and the rota that keeps a watch on a dark housing at Kapteyn’s three hundred and seventy-three years after anybody expected anything from it. The Standing is a public good and the Tally keeps it honestly.

Its people are tallymen — grey pressure armour, a ledger mark on the shoulder, and by and large decent professionals doing an unglamorous job in twenty-eight systems that cannot agree on anything else.

They are not the villains of this campaign. They are the traffic authority, and most of them would be insulted to be told otherwise.

And the manifest is not paperwork. Since one carried passenger is the only way force reaches between stars (see Carrying), a tallyman asking who you are bringing through is the single thing standing between that hall and somebody’s knife. They are slow about it on purpose. They have earned the right to be.

What a tallyman carries, and why it matters. A shock baton, restraint loops, and a reader. Not a rifle. Not a blade. The Tally does not arm its people to kill, and the reason is not kindness — it is bookkeeping.

A body is not a line on a manifest. A dead traveller is an investigation, a dispute between systems, an unreconciled entry and a courier sent nine light years to explain it. A living one under restraint is a detention, a fine, an impound and a tidy signature. The Tally wants you alive, in a cell, with your kit in a locker and your name written down. That is what losing to the Tally looks like, and it is worse than it sounds.

What they want now. Every anchor on the Causeway under toll before LHS 1140 opens. They are most of the way there.

The Second Hand

Everything in the Causeway that is rotten, somebody is doing on purpose, and mostly it is these.

The Second Hand is not a government, a guild or a faction with a legitimate case. It is an outfit. It has no charter and no seat anywhere, it operates in the gaps between twenty-eight systems that cannot compare notes faster than a child can walk, and it does four things.

It sells being early. Somebody at a Tally desk passes word that a door is about to stray, and the Second Hand sells that to whoever needs to move a cargo or clear a berth before the news is public. People have died of this and it is the most profitable thing anybody does.

It books fetches as freight. On a manifest, as cargo, for the toll saving. Everybody in human space knows this is a crime. They do it anyway, in the systems where the inspection is thin, and a fetch booked as cargo has no berth, no air allowance and no name on the list if something goes wrong.

It keeps stock. Unbonded people of the five peoples, in back rooms, written to by strangers and handed on. There is no argument about this one anywhere. It is the single thing that will get a Second Hand crew torn apart by a dockside crowd, and it has.

And it strands people. Deliberately, when being on the wrong side of a door is convenient for somebody. Usually couriers. Usually children.

Why nobody has finished them

Because nothing crosses faster than a walking child. A warrant issued at the Nine arrives at Barnard’s in somebody’s coat pocket a fortnight later, by which time the crew it names has moved three doors on under different paperwork.

They are not clever. They are just faster than the law can be in a galaxy where the law walks.

What this means for you

You are allowed to hate them, and you are allowed to do something about it.

The Tally wants them caught and cannot catch them. The Council does not want them in the hall. Calloway has a particular face she makes about them, and anybody who has seen it once will go a long way out of their way to see it again.

If you bring back a name, with evidence, somebody will act on it. That is not always true in this setting. It is true about these.