The Long Quiet at Tern Station
Three technicians keep a relay station running on a dead moon. Then, after nine years of silence, the relay picks up a voice.
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Tern Station is a relay on the far side of a moon nobody visits, crewed by three people whose job is to keep the antenna pointed at a home they have not seen in years. Mae Kurtz fixes things. Bartholomew cooks. Joss keeps the logs and pretends not to care. When the relay picks up a human voice from the wrong direction, from somewhere there should be nothing at all, the three of them have to decide whether to answer it. A quiet, warm science fiction novel about work, distance and choosing who you stay with.
Every morning at station time 0600, Mae Kurtz put on her boots, walked the eighty metres of corridor to the relay room and checked that the big antenna was still pointed at the sun that warmed a planet she had not stood on in nine years. It always was. She checked anyway. That was the job. Tern Station sat on the far side of a moon so small and so dead that the survey had given it a number instead of a name. Three people lived on it. Mae fixed things. Bartholomew cooked, and ran the hydroponics,
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Arlo Quinn
I fix bikes at a little shop in West End, a block back from the river, and I write before work, from about five until the humidity wins. Most of my stories start with something broken and a person stubborn enough to fix it: a relay station on a dead moon, a glass furnace in a flooded city, a bush town where the iron has started to walk. I grew up in Ipswich, read every paperback in the Redbank Plains library by the time I was fourteen, and still think the best crews are the ones that argue about lunch. I share a Queenslander with two housemates, a lot of tools and a possum who lives in the roof and does not pay rent.
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