Garrison Held Lime, Not Line

Gwilym Eriksdottir, quartermaster of Picket Station Doldrum, closed the south gallery on Friday after a galley archive showed the garrison's founding order read "hold the lime", not "hold the line". The order was a catering note. It was sent to the station's first cook in 2617 and filed with the defence orders by a clerk on a double shift.

The garrison has since kept a perimeter for six hundred years. Wardens have walked 211,000 night patrols, and the guns have fired on four drifting ice-lumps and one very slow tug. No lime has ever been aboard.

Siosaia Lomax, who has walked the outer ring for thirty-one years, learned the news in the mess queue. "I asked if we still had to stand the line, and they said it was now a garnish matter," she said. "I said I would need that in writing, and they gave me a lemon. I have held worse things for less."

The station council voted to rename the perimeter "a long-standing garnish policy". Florin Barzani, the council clerk, said the wardens' pensions would not change. "Every warden held the thing they were told to hold," he said. "The cook is the only one who failed, and she has been dead for six hundred years, so we are letting it go."

The galley has requested a crate of limes. The cook's old recipe, found in the same archive, calls for the line to be walked twice daily and served chilled.