The Last Watch

This story takes place long before the events of The Sentinel Trilogy. It is the story of one man, one station, and forty-one years of keeping the lights on.

The station had a smell. Ren had never thought about it before — the way you stop noticing the air when it has always been the same air — but on the morning of the leaving he noticed it for the first time. Something mineral and warm, recycled atmosphere that had passed through Ketheri lungs for generations. The soft gold light of the corridor lines tracing their familiar paths along the floor. The sound the hull made in the deep hours, ticking and settling in the cold of space, a sound so woven into his sleep that he could not imagine silence without it.

He was thirty-four years old. He had been born on this station. He had never spent more than a few weeks anywhere else. He stood in the corridor outside the stasis bay and tried to memorize all of it at once.