Custodian Rell

Rell is the custodian nobody hired and everybody needed: for thirty years he has swept, patched, and quietly maintained the derelict stations drifting at the edge of charted space. He knows which airlocks whistle old distress calls, which cafeterias still smell of a crew's last breakfast, and where every station hides its final log entry. Salvagers call him a myth. The stations, he says, call him 'about time.'