The Survey form provides four fields: lifted, remaining, deceased, unaccounted. The Ferren were shown the form before it was filled in, as the protocol requires. Odai read it twice and asked that a fifth column be added, and that it be called stayed, because remaining is what you say about cargo.
The column was added. The form is not the Survey’s any more; it is theirs.
The count
| Population at first contact | 1,900 |
| Lifted — early keel launches | 372 |
| Lifted — final four keels | 1,140 |
| Lifted — aboard the Dawnward | 51 |
| Deceased during the lift | 44 |
| Stayed | 293 |
The columns close. That is the only clean thing about them.
Notes against the columns
On the 372. The early launches went in daylight and in order, which is why they read as the tidy number here. They were also the launches nobody was shooting at. Any reading of this ledger that treats the first column as representative of the rest is a reading made from a long way away.
On the 1,140. Four keels, cut out of a colony ship a hundred and twenty years ago and never intended to fly again, lifted in sequence under fire from a corridor held open at cost. The keels held. This desk records that as a fact about Ferren shipwrights and not as good fortune.
On the 51. Taken aboard because they could not be fitted into a keel and would not otherwise have gone. Berthed in the science spaces, the shuttle bay, and two of the crew’s own cabins, given up without being asked for.
On the 44. Named individually in the attached sheet. This desk declines to summarise them.
On the 293. Approximately a hundred and ten could not be lifted — frailty, injury, or a body a keel launch would have killed. The rest stayed. Some stayed to hold the water plant and the vault and the emitter mast, on the argument that a people who abandon their instruments have already agreed to be a memory. Some stayed with the hundred and ten because they would not leave them to it. And some stayed for the reason their speaker put on the record and asked to have entered exactly as spoken:
We will not be refugees under the power that killed our sun.
This desk was instructed, informally and more than once, that the sentence would read better paraphrased. It is entered as spoken. The ledger is a record, not an argument, and the Ferren were promised a record.
Provenance
Compiled aboard the NV Dawnward, cross-checked against the settlement’s own rolls, which are older and better kept than ours. Entered to the open ledger with full provenance so that it cannot later be improved.
The history does not change. Only the live state changes, and only when reality does.