Weekly Drabble #366: Nor Iron Bars (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from Lincoln Neal with 'the reservation protects us as much as them' and brings us back to the fledgling Beyond the Wall series, and what do you know, the tags work again!

Enjoy!

~

Nor Iron Bars:

Sentinel Station 942 was larger than almost anything that the Shamed had built before they had ventured into space. Even its intended complement of a dozen personnel would find the station overwhelmingly large; a spire nearly a kilometer tall and three hundred meters wide, which didn’t count the many sensor arrays, telescopes, comm units and more that were used to monitor the Great Barrier. For a single crew member, it was at once both overwhelmingly large and, paradoxically, suffocatingly small.

Most of the station’s internal space wasn’t for habitation: it was a warren of maintenance tunnels and service chambers to provide access to the various sensor arrays’ internal components for repairs and maintenance. The fleet of service robots handled nearly off the routine tasks, but there were some that Peliska, as caretaker, was expected to handle herself or visually confirm as completed. That could be difficult, as these stations had not been built with the needs of a four-legged Shamed in mind.

Some of these areas were large enough to drive one of the fleet of small travel carts through. Others were so small that Peliska had to flatten herself as much as she could, her knees pressing painfully up into her lower torso, her hooves useless in pushing her through the claustrophobic passages. She had grippy slip-ons to put over them, but they were only a little better than having no traction at all. To navigate those tunnels, she had to pull herself along with her hands and push with her long, muscular tail.

One time she’d gotten stuck in a tunnel. It had taken two hours before one of the station’s servicers could get down to her and pull her out. The entire time she’d been terrified, not even knowing if her signals had been received through the press of wiring, power cables and decking and increasingly convinced that she was going to die down there. It was quite possibly the worst experience of her life.

The second worst experience happened with distressing regularity. The Great Barrier wasn’t static. It shifted, swelled and receded like the tides of an actual ocean, only instead of reclaiming and surrendering a few meters of land, it swelled and receded by stellar diameters, and those ran the gamut of ‘white dwarf’ to ‘red supergiant’.

Some called it ‘bright matter’, the true opposite to dark matter, while others claimed the Great Barrier was a fifth state of matter, something that crossed the boundary between matter and energy. Both, yet neither. The answer, like so many other things, was something that Peliska knew she’d never learn. In lieu of any better terminology, the scientific minds of the galactic community classified the Great Barrier as ‘hypermatter’. It was as good a name as any. Whatever the truth of its nature, its surface – neither wholly discrete, nor quite a gradient – bulged and rippled like an ocean, with masses of hypermatter congealing into tempests larger than planets before eventually ripping apart as the Barrier settled down once more.

When the Great Barrier raged, those masses formed and broke apart with special violence, growing beneath the Barrier skin like boils, their gravity wells growing stronger as they accumulated more mass, their violence breaching outermost atmosphere of the Barrier, vomiting out swathes of radiation, pseudo-coronal ejections and plasmatic loops, that were far more destructive than the ejecta of any star.

Peliska was curled in the hollow of her bed, wrapped around Buddy, her arms clutching the stuffed animal tightly to her chest like a young girl in the midst of night terrors. Around her, the station’s massive form groaned and trembled. She’d already moved 942 to the maximum allowed safe distance, but the Great Barrier had been raging for the last three days. Two stellar masses of hypermatter had formed in close proximity to the station and their gravity wells were both tugging on the sentinel outpost, the strength of their pulls varying as the masses absorbed more matter from the Barrier or gobbets were spat out, the barrier masses moved farther away from her position or drifted back. There was never a moment when the stresses balanced out and for three days, sentinel station 942 had been pounded by the shifting, intense gravity fields like a lighthouse by hurricane-driven waves as they attempted to yank it from its orbit and pull it down into the Great Barrier.

Radiation surges pulsed from the Great Barrier at random. They were the most intense during storms and these were the highest Peliska had ever seen. She’d repeatedly asked the nearest guardian station for permission to break position and retreat to a safer distance – the sentinel stations had engines to allow them to move. They’d never accelerate like a starship, but they weren’t completely at the mercy of their environment. Each time her request had been denied. The scientific data 942 and the other stations were collecting from this anomalous event was invaluable, she was told. The guardian stations, she was also told, had run comprehensive threat assessments. Any hazard was well within normal standard deviations. She was to hold position and ensure ‘optimal functionality’ of 942’s systems.

She knew what that meant. The data the sentinels could acquire from this proximity was worth more than the lives of the Shamed aboard them. The last time she’d requested – all but begged – for permission to retreat was when she’d seen a polyp of hypermatter the size of a red giant swell out from the Great Barrier and envelop Sentinel Station 949. When it retreated, collapsing back into itself like water spat up from the surface of a pond, it took the station with it.

Station 949’s caretaker was Jashmeel, a junior officer from the same crop of graduates as Peliska. They’d talked several times, as much as their allotment of non-official communication time allowed. She’d liked him. That was why she hoped he was already dead. No one would be staging a rescue into the Great Barrier, least of all for a single Shamed. If he was still alive, then he’d been condemned to a long, slow death as his food reserves ran out and his station slowly broke down around him.

The response to Peliska’s plea was exactly what she’d expected. Five words. “Maintain position. Follow your orders.”

They didn’t care if she died here, just as they hadn’t cared that Jashmeel had died. A new sentinel station would be installed and a new Shamed officer would be put aboard it, punishment for a sin their ancestors had committed. A thousand years ago, her people had made the wrong choice and the galaxy would never forgive them for it. She couldn’t blame them. The devastation the Demons had wreaked was still visible to this day. Dying stars. Wrecked planets. Ruin and loss on a galactic scale. Her people had had a hand in that. They hadn’t been mind-shackled slaves, unwilling conscripts or helot warriors. They’d joined the Demons willingly, and this was their penance.

How many years is a life worth? She’d once been remonstrated by an IPGC instructor. How many lives did the Shamed take as they followed at the Demons’ beckoning? You speak of children like yourself as if you are blameless, but how many children were never, and will never be born because you destroyed their lines? How many cities have not been built, how many populations will never exist? The Shamed live, child. Because of you, how many do not? How many years are those lives, those futures and possibilities that never will be, worth?

In one moment, your kind showed all other civilized races your true faces. He’d emphasized that by pointing to her features. It is there for all to see. Your penance will end when every year every life your cursed kind took has been atoned for, when every life that was robbed from your victims can be outweighed by your redemption. Not before. Until that day, you will remain as you are. Shamed. Cursed, and bearing a demon’s visage.

So the station trembled, ancient anti-grav systems, station-keeping thrustings, hull plating and inertial compensators struggling against the unrelenting pull of the Great Barrier’s tides, a radiation counter ticked away and Peliska held tightly to her sole comfort amidst her isolation and eternal servitude. Buddy was warm and soft against her skin and her breathing was quick and frightened as she tried very hard to fall asleep, praying to a God that she wasn’t sure even heard her that if her end came, it would be quick.

And that maybe someday, though she knew she’d never live to see it, that her people would be forgiven.

Into those fears and uncertainties came something the shriek of an alarm and Peliska knew that whatever else was happening, the Great Barrier was not yet done with her.