What the Station Keeps

Twenty-four years after its founding, the Cairn is a hundred and ten thousand people — including an entire adult generation born aboard, who have never stood on a planet and never lived a year without the emergency authority that has governed the station since the attack. The power was meant to be temporary. It has been renewed annually without argument, and it is finally about to sunset. Then a transport comes in overloaded and off charter, carrying a returning expedition and proof that nobody forged and nobody ordered: a preservation measure that could keep the Cairn's own region of sky viable does it by moving the cost onto an inhabited sky downstream.

The founding principle was written when holding to it cost nothing: no one keeps their own sky lit by putting out somebody else's. Now the people who wrote it have to decide whether they meant it. Competing factions move to preserve, capture or destroy the emergency power before the decision can be imposed; the Cairn-born — adults now, and split every way their parents were — inherit the station and the argument together. The close of the saga settles what the Cairn's government actually possesses against the powers that founded it, and what it will refuse to do to survive.