Marlow Calloway

Marlow Calloway played strings in Slipwave, the three-person spacer-folk band from Eden Space Habitat's civilian arts circuit, named for the pitch drift that habitat musicians learn to compensate for when a station's rotational hum leaks into an unshielded sound system. The band played dock-adjacent common rooms for a little under two years and never recorded a studio album. Its vocalist, Tissadelle Shepherd, sang and wrote for it before the Music Corps confirmed her Cadet standing; her Cadet posting began in the summer of 2826 UCSD. To the circuit it was a band; to the Corps' Xenomusicology branch it was her placement, the Slipwave project. Calloway and Perrin Ashgrove were the band's other two members, and the band was never a Ranger band.

He and Ashgrove enlisted not long after Shepherd did, on their own account. Neither chased her career. Both hold the rank of Officer with the Music Corps' musician specialization, and play muster halls and dock common rooms wherever they are posted. Her path went to command; theirs went sideways instead of up. No one involved describes the band's end as a tragedy, and the band never formally disbanded.

Known History

• Slipwave's two clean recordings from its own era, the Star Rangers Anthem and Ballad of the Stars, are credited to the band with Shepherd on vocals. The two videocasts, Odonata: Raise Your Banners and Borrow the Angle, state no lineup.
• Decades after the anthem sessions, he and Ashgrove recorded Protectors of the Fold without Shepherd: declarative where the original was reluctant, mixing-booth-polished, cut by a training officer under a Survey Corps orientation reel. It has no charter status. The Archive files it next to the first anthem, not above it.
• When postings overlap, the three still play a set, unpolished and off the record. Shepherd has not played with them in years, and Calloway and Ashgrove no longer ask.

Character Notes

The record quotes Calloway nowhere; the one spoken line on the Protectors sheet is Ashgrove's. What it does say of the pair is that their diction has drifted toward doctrine over years of playing memorials and musters, that the drift came from the rooms and not from a brief, and that they have become recognisable without meaning to. The anthem spread because the band was small and carried, and the two of them kept carrying it.

The record gives no birth, no age, no home world, no posting by name and no rank date, and does not say which Corps he enlisted through. He shares a surname with Chief Commissioner Dorian Calloway of the Orbital Habitats Compact; the record does not say whether they are related, and nothing on either page connects them.

See also

• Slipwave
• Perrin Ashgrove
• Tissadelle Shepherd
• Protectors of the Fold, The Star Rangers Anthem
• The Star Rangers Music Corps