Wrong measures

The arrival confirmation came through during Beta shift. I went to Bay C.

The quartermaster on duty — a tall woman with a tethered keycard and a terminal on a wheeled stand — pulled up the procurement reference before I reached the desk. Six crates on a staging pallet. The two largest were marked fragile.

She walked me through the receipt process. Exploration unit deliveries route through a separate intake log from the standard section flow. She worked through the manifest line by line, checked each crate seal, and handed me the confirmation pad.

I asked about the sensor modules.

She checked the secondary queue. Separate product category, separate routing — Central Procurement rather than section supply. No revised arrival window on record. She said exploration unit equipment gets priority flagging through the production support allocation, so the window should update once the tier clears. She said it as a reassurance. I noted it and signed the pad.

I loaded the crates onto two standard pallets and took the freight tram to Station Alpha.

The unpacking took most of the shift in Bay 7.

Echo confirmed each item as I worked through the crates, cross-referencing against the procurement specification. The first thirteen items cleared without notation. On the core sample container crates, the count confirmed — six crates, as listed. Echo flagged a discrepancy on the specification check.

I pulled one container from the crate and checked the physical label. The label read 6 centimetres. I checked the invoice. The invoice listed 8-centimetre units. The crate manifest listed 8-centimetre units.

The units in the crate were 6 centimetres.

I asked Echo to assess mission impact.

The assessment was not ambiguous. Samples collected at 6 centimetres carried significant rejection risk at classification. If the mission returned with invalidated samples, the contribution to Bravo's output would be void.

I marked the replacement query as mission critical and filed it. I closed the inspection.

The sensor modules remain pending.