February 15, 2019. Washington D.C., The White House. 15:30 Local Time.
The media circus outside was deafening, but behind the thick bulletproof glass of the Oval Office, it was dead silent. I sat on one of the cream-colored sofas. Across from me sat the President of the United States. Standing next to her was General Vance, who looked like he had just swallowed a lemon whole. Judy sat next to me, efficiently sorting through a stack of papers the Chief of Staff had handed us.
"These are the amnesty declarations," Judy said, adjusting her glasses and handing me a pen. "For the three of us. And a provisional operating permit for the Nomad as a civilian research vessel."
"Research vessel," Vance scoffed. "That thing is a battleship."
"It's a tool, General," I said without looking up as I signed the documents. "A hammer can be a tool or a weapon. It depends on who is holding it."
The President leaned forward. "We kept our end of the bargain, Mr. Surgrim. Commander Higgins and his crew are safe. The press is hailing you as the heroes of the hour. But now comes the hard part. You cannot stay here."
"We don't want to," I said, capping the pen. "Earth is too... crowded for us."
"Where do you intend to go?" she asked.
"L5," I said simply.
Vance frowned, looking back and forth between me and the President. "L5? What the hell is that? Some secret base?"
I sighed internally. "Lagrange Point 5, General. The most stable point in the Earth-Moon system."
Mereel chimed in, nervously tugging at his NASA hoodie. "It's a gravitational parking lot. Objects there just stay put. We don't want to disturb anyone. We just want to build."
"Build what?" the President asked, her eyes narrowing slightly.
"A port," I said. "An anchor point. We need a place where we can maintain the ship without atmospheric interference. A place for trade. And research."
The President thought for a moment. She knew she couldn't stop us. If she said "no," we would do it anyway, but as enemies. If she said "yes," she at least maintained the appearance of control.
"As long as you adhere to international law and do not point weapons at Earth," she said finally, "we will tolerate your presence at L5."
I stood up and extended my hand. "We won't point weapons at you, Madam President. We only point telescopes at the stars."
16:00 Local Time. The South Lawn.
We stood on the ramp again. The crowd beyond the gates was still cheering. I stepped up to the improvised podium that had been set up for us. Dozens of microphones were pointed at my face. CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera—the whole world was watching.
"Citizens of Earth," I began. It sounded cheesy, but I couldn't think of anything better. "We are Nomad. We are not invaders. We are neighbors."
I looked into the cameras. "Today we saw how fragile our presence in space is. A bit of debris, and the ISS was almost history. That has to change."
I pointed up at the cloudy sky. "We are leaving Earth today. But we are not disappearing. We are going to Lagrange Point 5. We will establish an outpost there. An anchor. Not for war, but for logistics. For resources. For the future. Anyone who wants to trade with us is welcome. Anyone who threatens us... should remember today."
I nodded to Mereel and Judy. "See you up there."
We turned and walked up the ramp. The hiss of the hydraulics was the last sound the world heard from us before the Nomad engaged its thrusters. We ascended slowly, majestically, a black monolith dissolving into the clouds.
February 16, 2019. Lagrange Point 5. Distance to Earth: approx. 385,000 km.
It was quiet out here. The Nomad drifted in the void. Earth was a beautiful blue marble in the distance, the Moon a silent, gray sentinel on the other side. There was nothing here. No asteroids, no dust. Just stable gravity keeping us in place.
We sat in the Lounge, staring out the large panoramic window into the emptiness.
"So," Mereel said, breaking the silence. "This is it. Our new home. Pretty... empty."
"It's a blank canvas," I said, taking a sip of coffee. "Exactly what we need."
Judy had her tablet on her lap, her brow furrowed. "I'm reading the news from Earth. Some random tech startup in Silicon Valley just renamed itself 'Nomad Galactic' and their stock went up five hundred percent in the last hour. People are throwing billions at them, and they have absolutely nothing to do with us."
I groaned, rubbing my temples. "This is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Judy, set up an automated public broadcast on a loop: The Nomad has no corporate partners, subsidiaries, or investors on Earth. And then block financial news from our feed."
"You don't want to leverage the hype?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Absolutely not," I said firmly. "I refuse to be the guy who crashes or pumps the global economy every time he sneezes or sends a transmission. One wrong word from us, and thousands of people down there lose their pensions. Let them play their Wall Street games down there. We stay completely out of it. What else is happening?"
Judy swiped on her screen. "Well, General Vance just announced he's tripling the budget for his new 'Space Force'."
"Let him," I said tiredly. "As long as he stays down there, I don't care." I set my mug down. "Archi, show us the draft for the station. Let's look at the hangar."
The lights in the Lounge dimmed. A large hologram appeared in the center of the room. I stood up and pointed at the projection. "Alright, so my idea is simple. We need a garage. A dry dock. Just a massive, airtight box, maybe half a kilometer long, where we can park the Nomad and do maintenance in a pressurized environment."
A wireframe cube slowly spun in the air. It looked exactly like what it was: a giant, boring shoebox floating in space.
"With all due respect, Captain," Archi's voice suddenly echoed through the room, dripping with artificial condescension. "That design is absolutely atrocious. Did you draw your inspiration from a cardboard shipping container?"
I rolled my eyes. "It's functional, Archi. We don't need a palace, we need a workspace."
"Functionality does not mandate visual depression," Archi countered smoothly. "Furthermore, enclosing a space of that volume in solid armor plating requires an absurd amount of raw material and creates unnecessary internal pressure differentials. Allow me to upgrade your... 'box'."
The hologram shattered. The boring cube dissolved into digital dust. In its place, a completely new structure materialized. Mereel let out a low whistle.
It didn't look like a box. It looked like the skeletal ribcage of a leviathan. A massive central spine ran along the top, from which giant, sweeping metallic spokes curved downwards, forming a massive cylindrical tunnel open to the stars at both ends.
"An open-space dock?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "Archi, it looks amazing, but I specifically said I want to work in a pressurized environment. I'm not doing zero-G maintenance in a space suit for the rest of my life."
"And you won't have to," Archi replied smugly. "The 'ribs' act as both structural support and emitter arrays. We will generate atmospheric forcefields between the spokes. The hangar remains visually completely open to the void, but the atmosphere, temperature, and pressure stay trapped inside."
Judy leaned forward, scrutinizing the blue shimmering fields in the hologram. "Forcefields? What if someone slips? We are working in zero-G in there, right?"
"Obviously zero-G," Archi said, as if explaining something to a toddler. "Artificial gravity in a dry dock is a logistical nightmare when moving thousand-ton reactor parts. And regarding safety, Ms. Judy: The fields are biometrically and technologically keyed. They hold air, but if anything with a human heartbeat or a Nomad comm-badge hits the field, it actively repels them back inside. You literally couldn't float out into space if you tried."
"Okay, I admit it," Mereel grinned, walking around the hologram. "That looks incredibly badass. Like a real spacedock."
"Fine," I sighed, though I couldn't hide my own smirk. "It's a great design, Archi. But even with the open ribs instead of solid walls, building that spine and those emitters... we still don't have enough material in the cargo holds."
"My calculations concur," Archi said. "We require significantly more mass."
Mereel tapped his chin, looking at the massive holographic ribcage. "Well, if we want to mine asteroids, we can't use the Nomad. She's too big, too sluggish. Taking her into a dense asteroid field to cut rocks is like using an aircraft carrier to go buy groceries."
"What are you getting at?" Judy asked.
Mereel's eyes lit up with that familiar engineering craze. "We already solved this problem once. Remember the little metal tub we built back in the warehouse just to get up here in the first place?"
I smiled, remembering our very first, cramped flight out of Brandenburg. "The shuttle."
"Exactly. We don't need to start from scratch. We take that blueprint and build a V2," Mereel explained, his hands gesturing excitedly in the air. "We bulk it up. Strip out the passenger seats, give it heavy thrusters, industrial laser cutters, and grappler arms. Small, ugly workhorses. Tugs."
I looked at the hologram, imagining a swarm of those upgraded shuttles flying out from the ribcage to harvest the solar system. "Mules," I said. "We'll build a fleet of Mules."
I leaned back and looked out the real window, out into the vast, empty canvas of Lagrange Point 5. "Archi, start the nanites. We are building a Station."