The Abbey at Station Nine
A world by Ari Weaver
The Abbey at Station Nine
Six hundred years after the old world ended, the monks of Station Nine sing their holy Rule every day, and their Rule happens to be the manual for the water pumps their abbey is built around. Now pump three is groaning and the Rule calls for a part nobody alive has seen. A scavenger has one that might fit. The bishop's inquisitor arrives in four days to call the whole question heresy.
Playing as Traveler·
The bell for vespers has stopped, and twenty-eight brothers and sisters stand in two rows on the iron gallery above the pump hall, singing down at the machines. Brother Cosmas leads. He sings the Rule as it was written, in its old flat words, and the rows answer him.
“Isolation valves. Rotate one quarter turn. To prevent seizure.”
“To prevent seizure,” the rows sing back.
Below, Brother Piet climbs onto the plinth of Saint Wendelin, the third pump, a green iron drum the size of a hay cart with the saint painted on its side holding out a cup of water. Piet sets both hands on the valve wheel and leans. The wheel goes a quarter turn. Cosmas lifts his hand for the next line.
Then the pump groans. It's a long low grinding from somewhere inside the drum, and it goes on long enough that the singing falls apart. Piet takes his hands off the wheel. Sister Agathe, at the end of your row, says “Well” to nobody. On the wall above Saint Wendelin, the gauge the monks call her Face has its needle a finger's width lower than it was at dawn.
Cosmas grips the rail and looks along the gallery until he finds you.
“You heard that,” he says. “Tell me you heard it the same as I did, because I have to write it down, and the Rule says I have to report it, and I honestly don't know who I'm supposed to report it to anymore.”
Vespers1 of 3