The asset. One single-charge emergency beacon, drawn from the Endurance’s own stores and logged out by the quartermaster before the ship left the green world. Carried down the ramp with the med-cache, the hand-tools and the sealed teaching-slates, and kept — so the report read into the record says — by the door of a Drowned house. One charge. One ping. The one rescue call its keeper would ever own.
The keeper. The ship’s contact officer, mustered out in place by the commanding authority and logged contact officer left in place — not desertion. His ISCA holdall went back up the ramp. The manifest has run one short from the green world onward: a clean count with a hole in it, shaped exactly like a man who did the thing the whole ship was homesick for.
The watch. The signals boards log every whisper that crosses them, and have since the running-silent days. In all the dark road since the green world fell astern, no ping has ever come up with his name on it.
The watch standard notes, for the record, what a nil return is and is not. A fired charge would mean distress. An unfired charge means either that he has never needed it — or that whatever came needed more than one charge could summon. The boards cannot distinguish these cases, and no receiver ever built can. The watch is therefore maintained without conclusion, leg after leg, and the nil return is entered without comment.
The mess keeps its own version of this record, nightly, in one sentence and its variations: wonder what he’s eating tonight. That entry is not logged. It does not need to be.