Chapter Text
"The ideal Dove is an obedient Dove. The ideal Dove knows her place. Even if the Dove's cage is open, she knows not to leave her cage, because her cage is her place. She is content in her cage, she is content with obedience, and she is rewarded for her contentment with that which she craves most." - Excerpt from Canticles of the Aviary, Section 4:72, by Mother Malachi, FY -133.
Four years.
That's how long Natalie Ayers would be alone on the Lighthouse.
Well, not entirely alone, at least not for the entire span. A supply shuttle would come every four months, a maintenance technician every six, and she'd be able to communicate via the single-burst transmitter with her handler back at Vannier-Kole Aerospace Corporation once per week. She'd have to take scans of the Marrow, the vast and hyper-dense asteroid field she'd been assigned to, and send the radar solutions off to corporate HQ. That meant she'd have to file reports as well.
But besides those periods, the one day every four months a supply shuttle crew would be present and the three days every six months a technician would be present, Nat would be alone for the duration of her four-year tenure as Keeper of Lighthouse 6 "Brahe".
She couldn't have been happier.
There had been significant push-back of course. When the Aviary found out that one of its priceless Doves had applied for a transfer to a no-name Lighthouse station with an open slot, ten-point-something light years away from Earth in violent Epsilon Eridani, they had put forth all possible political power to prevent such a transfer.
They had gone so far as to place Natalie in a tribunal, questioning her patriotism and her duty to Humanity, and making her submit to hours upon hours of spoken testimony as to what, precisely, Humanity had to gain from a perfectly good Dove going off to a Lighthouse, when any old convict-class Man could perform such a task. All of Nat's testimonies had mostly fallen on deaf ears, and despite studying and practicing her public speaking skills for weeks leading up to the tribunal, she had almost been found guilty.
It was only her father's position, a Colonel in the Orsk Group's Marines, that got her both what she wanted -- the role of Keeper aboard Brahe -- and away from the punishment for Doves found to be lacking in patriotism: Chemical lobotomy.
Of course, Mother Henrietta, who had always disliked her, made sure to make it very clear that when Nat returned, she would be expected to submit to her duties as a Dove, and that this little 'rebel vacation' would be but a blip in a long life spent pumping out babies for the boys in beige. That, Nat figured, was a problem for future her, and one she'd endeavor to find a solution to during her four years of self-imposed exile.
The reason for Nat's pricelessness within the Aviary was of course that she was, by the standards of the Orsk Group, perfect. While waiting on the automated shuttle to reach Brahe, she caught her reflection in the dark curve of the shuttle's window as it rolled to align with the docking arm. She naturally looked away from it quickly, as she always tried to do.
Her red hair marked her in the same way that one might brand marked cattle, though the mark was meant to flatter rather than claim. Proof that somewhere up her line, a woman had bred well enough, or been fortunate enough, to be sorted into the small caste who got fed better and pushed harder and married off higher.
Physically she was, by the narrow and traditional views of Orsk's nobility, more akin to a Goddess than a true Human. She had large, rounded breasts, just the right amount of curves, the right amount of body fat. To 'have something to hold onto', to have chub but not too much fat, to have muscle to handle zero-g, but not enough to resist. Her cheeks were soft, down to a sharper chin, high cheekbones. Wide hips to handle bearing many children and flexible limbs to comfortably survive hours in the breeding stables. There was a reason men often compared women to cattle, and while it was broadly accurate societally, there could be something said about her print-and-play body as well.
One of many, despite her perfection. So similar to every other woman she'd ever known, except of course the scrawnier vent-rat girls, the brawnier trench-wives, and the poor accursed mechwarriors. Her fair skin was that of all other Doves though, kept genetically distinct from the 'Baser Women' of Orsk, who all bore the same homogenized brown brought forth by generations of intermixing. The only real thing that separated Nat from her actual peers though, by her accounting at any rate, was her hair. Even many Doves lacked that red hair of hers, and it bred resentment.
Though the window, Nat could see Lighthouse 6, and could see the state of repair it was in. Sixty-three years was a long time for anything to survive the volatile asteroid fields of Ran, the proper name of Epsilon Eridani, let alone a station held together seemingly entirely by spite, and it showed.
It looked like a dying animal.
Or a strange, lopsided insect. It was three pressure rings, two rotating one way and the middle rotating the opposite way, stacked around a stabilized rock. A spindly metal spire stuck out of one side, and a wide radar array was bolted to the other side. There would be no gravity in the middle spire, but the spinning rings should have almost half a G. The owner's manual she’d been reading for the past week had said 0.29G, but also noted that higher rotations meant more gravity, and Brahe looked like it was spinning a bit fast compared to factory standard. The hull was pocked gray-brown with micrometeor scarring. One of the three docking arms on the bottom side of the spire hung a few degrees lower than the other two, like a dislocated metal shoulder.
The small automated shuttle that Nat had awoken within after a year of cryosleep from Sol took the better part of an hour to dock with Brahe. It rolled, tilted, realigned and adjusted, as its primitive shipmind did its best to find the exact right angle to clamp on, secure and pressurize, fighting against the lopsidedness brought about by one of the docking arms being broken. It gave Natalie time to wake up, shake off the hazy-mindedness that always followed cryosleep, change out of the skin-tight jumpsuit and into a more loose-fitting crew uniform that clung rather snugly to her curves, and drink a cup of coffee.
Drinking in zero gravity was a little difficult, but Nat had grown up in the Lunar Aviary, and only been to Earth proper for her coming-of-age ceremony and accompanied first pregnancy. She was used to low-g, and indeed enjoyed zero-g. Conspiratorially, she hoped that she could build enough muscle pulling herself around Lighthouse 6 and exercising in its centrifuge ring that she could make herself unfavorable by the time she returned. Get assigned to some place more befitting of someone with her higher-than-average intelligence, or at least spare herself a life of childrearing for the Marines.
Really, she wasn't that much smarter than most Doves, but the average was on the floor, purposefully so. A Dove was meant to be pretty and pass on good genetic traits to as many children as possible, for the pride of a deserving Man and the glory of all Humankind. Nat's rebelliousness should've been a trait not worth passing on, and she knew that if her father were any other Man, then her intelligence would've been stolen from her and she'd have long-ago been slotted into a breeding chamber from which she'd have never returned.
When the shuttle finally docked, there was a loud hissing noise, and Nat felt her ears pop as the pressure equalized. "Disembark." The robotic voice of the shipmind intoned dully over a speaker on the ceiling, "Undocking in... T-29 minutes..."
Despite having plenty of time, Nat was eager to get off the boat. She grabbed her duffel bag and pulled herself forward through the open airlock and into Brahe proper. Once she'd cleared the airlock she called back to the shipmind, "Go home!" Her voice naturally melodic, devoid of any speech impediments or vocal tics.
The shipmind's voice intoned again, "Stand clear... Undocking..." And Brahe's airlock steadily sealed shut.
It left Nat finally, fully alone. Though the shipmind was not Human, it formed a sort of Human-like presence. It was the last connection she had to Sol. The last connection to the Aviary, to her old life, to everything she'd left behind.
She let herself float in the entry corridor, within reach of a handhold but keeping her arms tucked in so as to bask in the solitude of it all. A faint shudder behind her through the deck as the shuttle disengaged and pushed off. Then nothing. No voices but the one in her own skull, which had never, in her twenty years of life, had that much room to think.
The station around her creaked distantly, let out a dull whine as it equalized its pressure again now that the shuttle was gone. The corridor in front of her was narrow enough that, if her shoulders were just a touch broader, they could've brushed both walls. She sighed softly, pushing the duffel back ahead of her, which floated off gently down the corridor until it thumped against the far wall. This was the central spire that shot up Lighthouse 6's inner core, and served as both a structural beam and the means of accessing the three rotating pressure rings that formed the station's gravity areas. Nat pulled herself to follow the bag, grabbing bars and ledges here and there to guide herself through the zero-g environment.
She pulled herself up through the spire, and through one of the corridors into the lowest pressure ring. Gradually she could feel the gravity shifting, pulling outward and away from the spire, until she came to be able to stand in the lowest of the three rings. It felt like the 'wall' of the ring when she came to enter it, though quickly her mind adjusted to see it as the floor. She knew from studying the manual that the ring above her was operations, where she would likely spend most of her workdays taking scans of the Marrow asteroid field and sending them to AEgir Station and Kepler, the only settlements in the system. Above that was the cargo ring, which also contained the station's two power generators, and a number of other utilities.
It was cramped. The habitation ring, which she found herself in then, was only a few feet across in any given direction. Big enough for her to fully stand and walk in, though she'd have to use the low gravity to pull herself up and over some obstacles. The obstacles included a table in the small dining area, various cargo crates and storage containers, and bits-and-bobs of machinery she'd need to study and learn. The maintenance technician would come only sparingly after all, and she'd been told the Lighthouses broke down often and easily.
The bunk that she found was nothing to really write home about. Two of them, a smaller one and a bigger one. The bigger one was for the Keeper, while the other was a guest bed for visitors and emergencies. A harness was attached to the mattress, in case the rings couldn't maintain enough gravity on their own to lie down. If she could, she'd try to keep it at the 0.49G a meter on the wall listed it as. It felt nice to weight half as much as she would on Earth.
As Nat explored the curve of the habitation ring, she rounded the slow bend, and stopped in front of a large window that consumed a good six feet in length, and bridged from the floor to the ceiling. It wasn't a real window of course, it was a flickery camera screen transmitting a live view of the station's exterior. But it was breathtaking.
Perfect, peaceful desolation. The slow wheel of the Marrow and its dense fields of rock and ice. Asteroids tumbling forever with a patience that made the station's own rotation feel frantic by comparison, lit thinly by a far-away orange star. Tall bookshelves flanked the screen, packed with actual paperbacks and a spare few hardbacks. Not just technical manuals, but fiction, astronomy and astrology.
Nat stood there, watching as the ring rotated and revealed the helium-3 torch of the shuttle that had brought her here peeling away, where it would make its way to the system's edge for a slipspace jump. She watched as that last little connection to her old life grew more and more distance.
Four years. Four years away from Man. Four years to herself.
She couldn't have been happier.
Once Nat had finished admiring the view and exploring the remainder of the habitation ring, she unpacked her few belongings from her duffel bag, and stuffed the empty bag away into a box she would ideally not need to open again for the next four years.
She had almost nothing with her. Four changes of clothes, two of which were copies of the jumpsuit she'd worn onto the station, basic toiletries and hair-care products, a trio of floppy discs packed with as many digital books as she could cram onto them, and a framed photo of herself, her father and brothers.
As she set the photo beside her bed, she sighed softly. Its base magnetized to the bedside table, and on the glossy sheen of the photograph she could see and remember a happier time. Nat's mother had also been a Dove, the only Dove that Colonel Ayers had ever loved and taken as his own. It was a rather taboo thing to bed a single woman, and certainly in quiet rooms subordinate officers would've gossiped that the Colonel's heart was not all for Humanity, but nobody could deny he did not have the woman work for her monogamy.
Yvette Ayers, who claimed a surname through not only marriage, but contract marriage, birthed four strong sons, then Nat, then one final son. Back-to-back, six years in a row. Then she died. Nat wasn't really sure how, it was a sore spot for her father, by all accounts did not take the services of another Dove and did not even engage in sex recreationally. He took the secret with him to the Starfront, along with Nat's brothers, and sent Nat to the Aviary for a life of being pampered and groomed.
She was, in that way, a sort of prodigous anomaly among Doves. Most Doves were genetically engineered through means similar to the Children of Jove, the mechwarriors, who had to be specifically bred for their specific task. That task was breeding strong men who would go on to join the Marines, and beautiful women who would go on to become noble concubines and push the Aviary's political agendas behind silken veils. Were Nat born on Earth or one of the other principle colonies of Mankind, she'd likely have been a noblewoman herself, but hers was the fate of a Dove due to her military parentage, and her mother's demise.
A natural-born Dove was not unheard of, but it was rare enough that Nat made no friends on Luna as a result of being seen as privileged. None held higher distaste from her in all the Aviary than Mother Henrietta, who had delighted in making Nat's life a living hell, and had yet still been surprised when the perfectly trained crimson Dove had enacted her small rebellion. Fleeing the cage and off into the stars.
It was not lost on Nat in the slightest that in four years, when she was due back, her eldest brother would also be back from the Starfront, if he yet lived. And it was rather likely, given their strong genetic traits, that Henrietta would gift Nat to her brother as a mate. The thought evoked a sort of curdled milk sensation in Nat's mind, a sickening thought that made her stomach drop. Every Dove beside her would've been thrilled to birth children for the heroic boys in beige, but Nat had grown up with that Man, and had experienced the rare sensation of familial love, which in her mind had damaged the idea of romantic.
But the Starfront was in Epsilon Eridani, on Golem and over AEgir. Far from Nat, but closer than Sol by a country lightyear. If just one of her brothers passed by her little Lighthouse on a troopship, she could get a message through. They could take her with them, get a marriage contract to a Man they knew would treat her well, and she'd never again have to see the oppressive golden halls of the Aviary again.
But that was all hopes, and all dreams. The limits of Ran's light were far, and the chances of encountering her father or brothers way out at Lighthouse 6 were slim. Still, she could hope.
Nat walked back to one of the corridors that led to the central spire, and pushed herself off the pressure ring's floor, propelling herself a short distance into lesser-and-lesser gravity down the corridor. She slowed slightly midway down it, but pulled and pushed herself fully back into the zero-g of the spire. From there she ascended one level, and pulled herself into the operations ring.
Unlike the habitation ring, which had seen some manner of refurbishment before her arrival, everything in the operations ring was covered in a fine layer of dust. "Shipmind?" Nat called out, but received no response. The owner's manual hadn't mentioned one, but she thought to check anyway. Remembering the manual, she flicked three switches in the corridor leading into the ring, which fully powered on the communications systems. Due to the high power draw, she was supposed to disable the ring while sleeping.
The lights of the ring slowly flickered to life, illuminating the cramped interior in a dull white light. Nat had no doubt that even without the lights she could probably see just fine, and made a mental note of that. She had never liked bright lights after just waking up after all.
The ring was stuffed with rather outdated technology. Compared to the fast slimtech CD's of Sol, everything here was still using floppy discs, cassettes and microfiche readers.
Nat slid into the main operations console's chair, and harnessed herself in so as to remain stable. The station had enough power to maintain the centrifuges or run the phased array, but not both, and while the pressure rings would continue to spin on their own, the manual had noted a chance of 'disruptions' when the array kicked on.
"Okay, Nat." She cracked her knuckles, "Day 1 of... 1,460." She had memorized the total, as she'd be counting them down.
She flipped a switch, and the whole station groaned and whined. There was a sort of metal-on-metal scraping sound, a distant 'thud', and she felt a little bit of turbulence press against her back through the chair. Then it equalized again, and the computer in front of her powered on automatically. 'ORSK' appeared in glowing amber line-drawn graphics on the oscilloscope display, glittering in the dim light of an otherwise gray screen.
Nat had memorized the procedure, but still regretted not bringing the manual up with her. Already she felt nervous about taking on the task. She had been told that she'd be given a bit of leeway while learning, and didn't need to meet quota every single day for her first few weeks, but she still felt a compulsion to do well. The last thing she wanted was to be removed early for failing to do her actual job.
The computer monitor scrolled through what began as a few, and then spiraled into many hundreds of thousands, of individual signal packages. Nat watched with fascination as a single bright line otated around the display like a clock hand, matching the physical dish's rotation outside, and catching live data. A motor somewhere above her made a grinding noise as the array outside rotated. The computer automatically sorted raw signal data into categories, like 'Metallic asteroid', 'Ice asteroid', 'Debris - Small', 'Microdebris cloud' and so on and so forth.
SECTOR 6 -- FY73 W22
OBJ 0447 METL HDC ...... TRAJ STABLE
OBJ 0448 METL HDC ...... TRAJ STABLE
OBJ 0449 ICE MDC ...... TRAJ STABLE
OBJ 0450 METL MDC ...... TRAJ STABLE
The system printed the object, its tagged number, its content, and then the degree of confidence behind the scan. Low degree, medium and high... and if it's trajectory was holding from yesterday's chart or had changed, usually due to impacts or other stellar forces. Ran was a violent star, and frequent solar flares 'mixed up' the fields rather often.
OBJ 0451 UNCL --- ...... FLAG: RECHECK
At the end of the report, only one object remained unaccounted for. Nat furrowed her brow... And snagged a clipboard from beside the monitor, which had all the codes on it. 'UNCL'... Unclassified, but not a ship, debris or asteroid. "Hm." She'd log it anyway, unless Vannier-Kole sent her information that said otherwise.
A dull 'thud' sounded above her as the array stopped moving, and Nat unharnessed herself from the seat. Already machines were whirring, buzzing and whining as the next processes of the array took place. Developing the chart on a drum plotter, which steadily unfurled a vast piece of paper. This, Nat knew, was where her actual work began. Taking all the categories and manually cross-referencing today's scan with yesterday's... Today would be easier, since there was no scan yesterday, but she'd still need to check it against neighboring sectors'.
Nat had one of the machines print off the neighboring charts, and lined them up on one of her tables, using conveniently placed magnetized paperweights to hold them down to the table. With it, she could identify any objects that clearly came from other sectors based on trajectory, and any objects that were going to enter other sectors based on the same data. Making manual annotations in the pre-approved Company code, marking hazardous objects in red and objects of note in black. She made sure to circle that 'unclassified' result in black as well, so whoever read the report would know to look out for her. Whatever it was, its trajectory placed it at a near-pass to her. Maybe she'd get to see it in a few weeks, when it passed by?
This process took hours. Nat had to take a break in the middle to go make coffee, and something to eat. When she had finally finished refining the chart, she then fed it through a flatbed photo scanner, which converted the ink-and-paper chart back into a single modulated signal. That was exorted onto a tape spool, which she hopped on over to the directional transmitter, and placed the spool within. A large lever labelled 'TRANSMIT' was pulled, and a progress bar depicted the real-time transmission of the full signal from Lighthouse 6 to AEgir. She couldn't upload another spool while the first was still going.
And that was her first real signal solution. It was well into the evening by then.
She had to do 27 per week.
She'd need to get faster...