At least the posting came with surface access.
The LEPfield station entrance was a solid wall of bodies when Briar arrived, the morning crowd thickened by a fresh outbreak of the goblin-dwarf territorial conflict that had been cycling through escalation and temporary ceasefire for the better part of three decades. Angry parents packed the steps in dense formation, demanding the release of offspring they were prepared to describe, in the face of all available evidence, as innocent.
Briar had been in Deepfield Recon long enough to have formed a settled opinion on goblin innocence. The opinion was not favorable.
She shouldered into the crowd with the practiced economy of someone who had been navigating this particular obstruction most mornings for years. "Coming through. Field business."
They closed around her like water around a stone.
"My Grotto didn't start it!"
"Excessive force! I want a supervisor!"
"Officer, could you take this in to my boy? He won't settle without his comfort-stone, and the cell conditions are absolutely—"
Briar switched her visor to reflective mode and moved through them without acknowledgment. There had been an era, or so the senior officers claimed, when the uniform commanded something. Automatic deference, a reasonable expectation of cleared paths and respectful distance. That era had concluded, and what had replaced it was this: a daily gauntlet of requests, accusations, and the specific variety of obliviousness that came from citizens who had decided that a field officer's time was a shared civic resource available for any purpose.
"Excuse me, Captain, but my mana-lamp has been flickering for three days and the maintenance guild won't return my inquiry."
"Officer, I don't suppose you know the transit route to the Stillwater Baths?"
"Young lady, my neighbor has been cultivating in the shared corridor again and the resonance bleed is absolutely—"
Briar pressed through the station doors.
In the booking lobby, a kleptomaniac dwarf was working the pockets of everyone in the processing queue with the systematic efficiency of a lifelong professional, including the arresting officer he was currently handcuffed to. Briar identified him before she reached him.
She gave him a precise application of her resonance baton to the back of his knee as she passed. The discharge crackled through his leather work-trousers and he startled hard enough to scatter contraband across a three-meter radius.
"Good morning, Gatch."
Gatch collected his expression of wounded innocence from wherever he kept it and deployed it rapidly. "Officer Flint," he said, in the tone of a man observing a great injustice. "I can't help what I am. It's constitutive. The cultivation scholars say so."
"The cultivation scholars also say the cells on sub-level four have excellent mana-null shielding, which I imagine will be constitutively limiting for someone of your particular aptitudes." She glanced at the arresting officer, a young elf who was currently retrieving his own badge from the floor with the expression of someone reassessing his career choices. "Sharp work."
The elf's face went several shades of deep red.
Briar moved through the lobby toward her assignment cubicle with the focused momentum of someone who had identified their destination and fully intended to reach it before anything else intervened.
"FLINT."
She stopped.
The voice came from Commander Reeve's office, and it had the particular quality of a sound that had been waiting behind a door with considerable pressure behind it. Briar tucked her helmet under her arm, straightened her uniform across the shoulders, and went in.
Reeve's face occupied a register that his colleagues had documented, catalogued, and established a station pool around. The pool concerned the projected timeline until his primary cardiovascular cultivation matrix gave out under sustained strain. Current consensus placed the over-under at sixty years, with the more pessimistic analysis noting that the color he achieved during disciplinary meetings suggested the timeline was optimistic.
He was tapping the moon-cycle gauge on his wrist with the energy of a man communicating several things simultaneously.
"What time do you call this?"
Briar felt her own face respond with warmth she did not invite. She was forty seconds late. There were six officers on her shift who had not reported in at all. This fact was not going to be useful.
"The main thoroughfare had three lanes obstructed," she said. "Sprite congestion above the fourth district and a gnome aggregation blocking the ground-level approaches."
"Don't." Reeve's volume increased in a way that caused the documentation on his desk to shift slightly. "Do not stand in my office and explain the main thoroughfare to me. You live in this city. You have lived in this city your entire career. Get up earlier."
He was not wrong, which made it worse. Haven Deep was a city that had been absorbing displaced Deepwalker populations for forty years as surface-world mineral extraction pushed the shallow settlements progressively lower. The infrastructure had not kept pace with the population, and the transit situation in particular had been in a state of ongoing managed crisis since before Briar had taken her first field posting. Everyone who lived here understood the commute. The correct response was to account for it in advance.
Briar had not accounted for it in advance because she had been lying on her sleeping mat in a state of sustained irritation and had left twelve minutes later than she should have. This was accurate. She kept it to herself.
"I know what you're thinking," Reeve said, with the air of someone who had prepared this portion of the conversation in advance. "You're thinking I single you out. You're thinking every other officer in this station walks through the door at whatever time suits them and I say nothing, and the moment you're forty seconds behind the clock I'm calling you in here."
Briar maintained her expression at a careful neutral.
"You want me to tell you why."
She risked a small nod.
"Because you're a woman." He held up a hand before she could respond to this. "Not for the reason you've decided I mean. Listen to what I'm actually saying." He sat back in his chair, and some of the pressure behind his face shifted into something that was not exactly tiredness but occupied adjacent territory. "You are the first female field officer Deepfield Recon has had in its operational history. Do you understand what that means in practice? Not in principle, not in the official record, but in practice?"
Briar said nothing.
"It means every officer in this station is watching how this works out. It means every commanding officer in the LEPfield is watching. It means every parent who has a daughter who wants to go into field work is watching, and every senior officer who has spent thirty years telling those parents that Recon isn't appropriate for their girls is watching and hoping, very much, that they're going to be proven right." Reeve turned a stylus over in his hands. "There are a thousand Deepwalkers with an opinion on whether you should be here. And right now, Officer Flint, with forty seconds of lateness and the Hamburg Retrieval on your record, I would say the weight of that opinion is not currently sitting in your favor."
Briar blinked. This was not the version of this conversation she had been having with Reeve for eleven months. The previous versions had been shorter and less structurally coherent.
The Hamburg Retrieval. She had known this was coming, had been bracing for it since she walked through the door. It had been, by any honest assessment, a significant operational failure. A surface fugitive she had been tracking had made contact with surface-worlders and attempted to negotiate asylum in exchange for information about the Deep People's existence, and the resulting containment operation had required a full tactical response team, a localized time-suspension working, and four separate memory-wipe procedures administered to surface-world civilians. Resources, time, and political capital, all of it spent on cleaning up what had begun as a straightforward retrieval.
Her retrieval. Her mistake.
Reeve opened the top drawer of his desk and produced a reassignment form. Briar could read the destination field from where she stood. Transit Division. Vehicle violation processing.
"I've made my decision. I'm transferring you to Transit and bringing Corporal Venn into your Recon slot."
"Venn." The name came out before Briar had fully processed the decision to say it. "Reeve, Venn couldn't track a mana-signature in an isolation chamber. You can't make her the standard-bearer for female field officers, she'll last six months and then every senior officer in the building will spend the next century citing her as evidence."
Reeve's face returned to its operational color. "And your alternative proposal is what, exactly? That I keep an officer who has already cost this division four memory-wipe procedures and a formal inquiry?"
"It's that I earned this position." Briar kept her voice level with the effort of someone holding something heavy at arm's length. "I passed every qualification this division required, I completed eleven months of field work with one significant incident on my record, and I am asking for one more operational opportunity to demonstrate that the incident was an exception rather than a pattern."
The office was quiet for a moment except for the distant noise of the lobby processing its morning chaos.
Reeve had returned to his paperwork with the deliberate quality of a man who had decided the meeting was over.
"Give me a reason," he said, without looking up. "One reason I should look past the Hamburg Retrieval."
Briar stood in the too-large uniform she had been seam-cutting to fit for eleven years, one centimeter below the field average, forty seconds late and running a cultivation deficit she could not afford to have discovered, and thought about what she actually had to offer.
She thought about it for precisely four seconds.
"Because I have never once asked you to make this easier," she said. "I have never filed a grievance, never requested accommodation, never cited the conditions of my assignment as justification for anything. Every other officer in this station has. I have not. And that is not because the conditions don't apply to me. It is because I decided, on my first day in this division, that I was going to clear this path properly or not at all." She paused. "Transfer me to Transit and you'll have a tidy record and a problem you've handed to someone else. Give me one more operational window and you'll know definitively whether I belong here."
Reeve did not look up from his desk.
The stylus continued its rotation between his fingers.
"There's an unauthorized surface-walker reported in the northern transit corridor," he said, after a long moment. "Non-shielded, possible civilian contact risk. Recon response required." He turned a page of his paperwork. "It's yours, Flint. Don't make me regret it."
Briar put her helmet on, sealed it to her collar, and walked out of his office before he could observe that she was going to allow herself exactly three seconds of private relief about this before she converted it entirely into operational focus.
She gave herself two seconds instead.