The Star Rangers Anthem (Slipwave Recording)

RECOVERED RECORDING — TRANSCRIPTION Original title: Half-Light Causeway Performing credit: Slipwave Recorded: Eden Space Habitat, roughly one year before the performer's cadet intake Current standing: No formal charter status. Sung at cadet musters and informal commissionings across multiple intakes; never adopted by any Star Rangers directive, never disclaimed by one either.

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Transcriber's note: no studio master survives. This text is reconstructed from three independently carried copies — a dock recording, a cadet-cohort recording made years later at a muster, and Shepherd's own handwritten lyric sheet, recovered separately. The three agree closely enough that the differences are treated as performance variation, not competing versions.

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Verse 1

Threshold clock is running slow again, same eleven years it never learns to close. Every dock has a light it can't explain, every causeway has a story no one chose.

Chorus

The stars call us forward with hope — protect what is good, and learn what is true. Half-light causeway, edge of the known, I'll carry the lamp if you carry it too.

Verse 2

Nobody signed me up to hold the line, nobody handed me a rank to grow into. But the boundary doesn't ask for a title first, it only asks if the work will get done.

Chorus

The stars call us forward with hope — protect what is good, and learn what is true. Half-light causeway, edge of the known, I'll carry the lamp if you carry it too.

Bridge

Let the record argue whose witness was right. Let the archive keep fighting for one true line. I'm not here to settle the history books — I'm here because the light was still on, and I saw it.

Chorus (out)

The stars call us forward with hope — protect what is good, and learn what is true. Half-light causeway, edge of the known, I'll carry the lamp if you carry it too, I'll carry the lamp if you carry it too.

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Archivist's note (S., Survey Archive): We get the same question every few intakes — was this ever made official? No. It doesn't need to be. Half of what holds the frontier together was never signed by anyone with the authority to sign it. It just kept getting carried.

See also: Protectors of the Fold, a later Slipwave recording by Ashgrove and Calloway alone — same lack of charter status, considerably more polish.