From Apollo to Venice

Report filed by: Editorial Team “Conglomerated Network News” for CBS, ARTE, BBC, DD, HBO, PBS
Location: Venice Station Orbital Complex (480km Orbit), Habitat Ring 1, Section 6, Private Suite 101
Date: October 14, 2063

Chapter 1: The First Rumbling

We arrived at Venice Station expecting a laboratory; we stepped into a sovereign state.

It was exactly like entering a foreign country - perhaps the one old European principality that vanished under the sea. There were passport controls, biometric scans, and rigorous credit balance checks. The immigration lines stretched down the zero-G transfer tube, a mix of medical tourists, contractors, and nervous families. Gladly, we had done our paperwork. Our invite codes were flagged “StellarLink / Diplomatic,” which granted us the “Blue Lane” - direct access to the comforts and social benefits provided by the corporation. Free food, expedited transit, and access to standard accommodations without the three-week waiting list.

The history books tell you Venice Station was built as a hospital in the 2040s. That is technically true, but walking through it today, 20 years later, the “hospital” feels like a cathedral hidden in the centre of a sprawling metropolis. The station is ten times larger than the history vids show. A third ring - five thousand metres in diameter, seventeen thousand feet of steel, aluminium, exotic ceramics and composite - is currently under construction, visible through the viewports as a skeleton of sparks and robotic arms.

The grand communal hallways were a sensory overload. It was a boomtown wrapped around a core of medicine. We passed 24/7 malls selling things we barely understood, bakeries smelling of yeast and clean, fresh air, bustling offices, and shops selling real space-wear alongside everyday clothes. It was loud, vibrant, and aggressively alive.

We were transported to Section 6: Harbour Oversight.

In hindsight, the name should have been a warning. We weren’t going to a penthouse; we were going to a former engine room of the administration.

He was waiting for us at the front door of his apartment. He was more compact than the looming figure in the historical archives, a man distilled down to pure, kinetic energy rather than mass. At seventy-two, he possessed the wiry, sportif build of a long-distance runner, his skin holding the deep, healthy bronze of someone who spent his mornings in the station’s high-UV arboretums rather than its boardrooms.

He wore a light, sky-blue technical jacket - the colour of an atmosphere he had spent a lifetime trying to reach - but he wore it with a deliberate lack of ceremony. The zip was pulled only halfway up, revealing a simple white shirt underneath, and the sleeves were pushed up his forearms. With his utilitarian grey buzz-cut and bright, crinkling green eyes, he looked less like a retired CTO, not like one would imagine a StellarLink shareholder, and more like a dependable shift-pilot enjoying a weekend off. He leaned against the doorframe with a relaxed, open posture that immediately dismantled the tension in the corridor.

When we addressed him as “Mister Brian” or “Sir,” he waved it away with a polite but firm hand.

“Erin,” he insisted. “Just plain, old good Erin S. Green Brian. Titles take up too much oxygen.”

He ushered us inside. The apartment was not what we expected. It was a vast, open space, eclectic and lived-in. To one side, a functional kitchenette; to the other, a small personal cabinet for sleeping and a modest bath. But the rest was a chaotic library of a life. Bookshelves piled high with physical paper books, small kinetic sculptures - some clearly originals by Amara Varna - and models. Endless models. Rockets from the 1960s, orbiters from the 2000s, and strange, spike-shaped ships that looked like they belonged in a future we hadn’t reached yet.

But everything in the room pointed to the far wall.

There was a massive panorama window, and in front of it, a heavy wooden desk. Four easy chairs were arranged in a semi-circle, but it was clear that the chair behind the desk - the one facing the window - was the throne.

We sat. Or rather, we tried to sit.

The view through that window was a whirlwind. Because the station rotates to provide gravity, the window didn’t offer a static view of the stars. It circulated. Every minute, the view swept from the blinding white of the cloud deck below to the infinite black of space, then back again. Earth. Space. Earth. Space.

It was dizzying. A relentless reminder that we were falling around the planet at twenty-eight thousand kilometres an hour. We gripped the armrests of our chairs, trying to find a horizon that didn’t exist.

Erin sat behind the desk, perfectly still against the spinning backdrop. He watched us struggle with the vertigo for a moment, a faint, dry smile touching his lips.

“Breathe,” he said. His voice was lighter than expected, but it carried the weight of the room. “The vertigo passes. Your inner ear is just arguing with your eyes. Let them argue.”

My colleague fumbled with the recording device, trying to look anywhere but the window. “Erin… thank you for agreeing. We wanted to start with the technical specifications of the Hal Busse class. The advancements in modern rocketry that allowed - “

Erin raised a hand. He didn’t look at us. He looked past us, at the Earth rising in the window.

“Rocketry,” he said. He tasted the word like it was spoiled milk. “Please. Do not use that word in this room.”

“I… excuse me?”

“Rocketry,” he repeated. His accent shifted, dropping the casual American tone for something harder, more precise - the cadence of someone who had spent forty years speaking Euro-English in Icelandic bunkers. “It implies fire. Explosion. Brute force. It implies the arrogance of the Twentieth Century. We did not build this place with rocketry, young man. We built it by admitting that rocketry was a dead end.”

He leaned forward, placing his hands on the wood of the desk.

“You want to know about the Hal Busse? You want to talk about the Louise? Then you have to forget everything the history books told you about the ‘New Space’ era of the 2020s. That wasn’t a revolution. It was a Verschlimmbesserung. You know this word?”

We shook our heads.

“German,” he said. “It means making something worse by trying to improve it. That was the US aerospace industry when I was your age. A loud, expensive, kerosene-soaked Verschlimmbesserung.”

He tapped the desk. A hollow thud against the wood.

“Listen. Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The silence,” Erin said. “We are moving twentyeight thousand kilometres an hour, spinning to generate zero-point-eight gravity, and lifting a four-hundred-ton medical module in the dock adjacent to us. And you hear nothing. No rumble. No shaking.”

He looked at us, his eyes hard.

“Do you know what the Apollo F-1 engines sounded like? I don’t mean on a recording. I mean in your bones. It was a tearing sound. It was the sound of the sky being ripped open because we didn’t have the manners to knock on the door. We worshipped that noise. We thought noise was power. We thought fire was progress. We spent sixty years building taller, fatter firecrackers, congratulating ourselves on how efficiently we could burn dinosaurs to lift tin cans.”

The Earth rotated out of view, replaced by the starfield. The light in the room shifted from the reflected blue of the ocean to the harsh, sterile white of the void. Erin’s face was half in shadow.

“We were shouting at gravity,” he whispered. “Screaming at it. Fighting it with fire and noise and ego. And gravity, being gravity, just waited for us to run out of breath.”

He picked up a small object from the desk - a ceramic coaster, pitted and scorched.

“We lost fifty years,” he said. “Fifty years chasing the ghosts of Von Braun and Reveers. We built cathedrals of explosive power - those Steel monsters, the SLS, the endless iterations of the same bad idea. We ignored the Aerospike. We ignored the DC-X. We ignored the geometry because we were too in love with the fire.”

He looked at us, and we realized he wasn’t really seeing us anymore. He was seeing the past.

Erin stood up. We heard the faint, metallic click of magnetic soles engaging with the deck plating - a reminder that the gravity we were feeling was merely centrifugal, a trick of momentum. He walked over to the shelf of models lining the wall, his silhouette sharp against the circulating backdrop of the Earth.

We watched him scan the collection. He bypassed the shiny, silver rockets of the Mego Reveers era - the famous “Eagles” that had dominated the news feeds of our childhood. He didn’t even glance at them. Instead, he reached past those icons of the 2020s, back to a dustier corner of the shelf, and pulled down a heavy, blocky shape.

It didn’t look like a spaceship. It looked like a radiator grill welded to a fuel tank.

“People look at the Saturn V and they see a triumph,” Erin said, turning back to us. He traced the lines of the massive F-1 nozzle on a different model with a calloused thumb. “And it was. It was a triumph of brute force. But the program… the program was an execution.”

He turned the blocky model in his hands, presenting it to us like a piece of evidence in a trial.

“I do not mean they killed people. I mean they executed the future. Slowly. Softly. By the 1970s, NASA was already bleeding out. But in that twilight, before the money dried up completely, the engineers - the real artists at Rocketdyne - they tried to save us. They consolidated the F-1 and the J-2 knowledge into what they called the ‘Saturn Omnibus’ contract.”

He placed the model on the heavy oak desk. It landed with a dull thud.

“Look at it,” he commanded. “July 1970. While the public was watching golf on the Moon, the engineers were building this. A breadboard engine. A ten-chamber linear array.”

He pointed a long finger at the truncated spike running down the centre of the engine.

“The Bell nozzle is stupid. It is a fixed shape. It screams at the air at sea level, and it chokes in the vacuum. But this? The Aerospike? It creates a free jet boundary. It uses the atmosphere itself to shape the flame. At sea level, the air compresses the exhaust, keeps it tight against the wall. As you climb, as the air gets thin, the boundary expands. The engine breathes. It adapts. It maintains an expansion area ratio of one hundred and nineteen, from the ground to the black.”

Erin looked at us, his eyes narrowing, checking if we grasped the physics.

“It means efficiency, strákur. It means you don’t need stages. You don’t need to throw away half your ship just to get the other half to orbit.”

He tapped the side of the model rhythmically.

“They built it. They cast it in Nar-Loy - a copper alloy, poured in a vacuum at 1950 degrees Fahrenheit. They used electron beam welding. They used a filler material called ‘Rigidax’ to protect the cooling channels during electroforming. It was jewelry. It was a Gesamtkunstwerk of thermal engineering. By May 1972, they had run forty-four tests. Three thousand seconds of main stage operation. It worked. It was done.”

He shoved the model toward us across the wood.

“And then? They put it on a shelf. The Shuttle happened. The solid boosters happened. Politics happened. We traded elegance for a flying brick.”

Erin walked back to the window. The Earth was overhead now, a ceiling of blue and white cloud that seemed dangerously close. He stared up at it, his back to us.

“Then came the Nineties. The last gasp of sanity before the stagnation set in.” He gestured vaguely at the stars rotating into view beneath the floor. “You know the DC-X? The Delta Clipper?”

“I… I think I saw a video,” I ventured, trying to engage. “It hovered?”

“It flew,” Erin corrected, sharp and immediate. “It stood on a pillar of fire, hovered, moved sideways, and landed on its tail. It was ugly. It was built from spare parts and determination. But it was the safe bet. It was the proof that you could build a ship that operated like an aircraft. Refuel, relaunch. Simple.”

He shook his head, a slow, disappointed motion.

“But the US government… they didn’t want simple. They wanted a miracle. They wanted the VentureStar. The X-33.”

He let out a short, harsh laugh.

“They took that beautiful linear aerospike engine - the technology we had perfected in 1973 - and they tried to marry it to a composite fuel tank that nobody knew how to build yet. They wanted too much, too soon. They tried to leap over the Kinderkrankheiten - the teething troubles - instead of solving them.”

He leaned in close, invading our personal space, his intense gaze pinning us to the Italian leather chairs.

“Engineering is the art of the possible. You push the envelope, yes. But you do not tear it. The VentureStar failed because they tried to brute force the materials science just like they brute forced the gravity with the Saturn V. When the composite tanks cracked, they cancelled the whole future. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Erin sat back down behind the heavy oak desk. The silence of the room pressed in on us, heavy with the weight of lost decades.

“So we got thirty years of capsules and kerosene tubes. We got Mego Reveers and his ‘New Space’ billionaires playing with 1960s technology. They made it cheaper, they made the Eagles land, yes - but they never made it better. They refined the horse carriage while we should have been building the automobile.”

He picked up the ceramic coaster again, turning it over in his hands like a worry stone.

“It wasn’t until Varna that we remembered the Aerospike. We remembered that you don’t fight the atmosphere. You use it. But by then… we had lost half a century. And the climate didn’t wait for us to catch up.”

He glanced at a timer embedded in his desk, dismissing the past with a wave of his hand.

“But that is ancient history. You came to ask about the Hal Busse. About the heavy lifters. To understand them, you have to understand that we didn’t just build a bigger rocket. We stopped building rockets entirely.”

Chapter 2: The Enlightenment of a Young Engineer

The silence in the room following Erin’s dismissal of the rocket age was heavy, almost physical. It hung in the air like the static charge before a storm. Outside the panoramic window, the Atlantic Ocean was sliding away to the left, a vast, chaotic abstraction of deep blues and storm-grey swirls, slowly surrendering the frame to the encroaching darkness of the terminator line.

Erin S. Green Brian did not immediately continue. He seemed to be calibrating, assessing whether we were worth the next packet of information. He stood up from the heavy oak desk, the movement surprisingly fluid for a man of his apparent age, and walked toward the kitchenette niche.

“You look parched,” he said, not turning around. “The air scrubbers here are efficient, perhaps too efficient. They strip the humidity to preserve the electronics, and they take your throat with it. I can offer you hydration. Water? Recycled, naturally, but molecularly perfect. Coffee? The beans are synthetic blend, grown in the agro-farms, but the molecular structure is identical to a Coffea arabica from 1990. Or tea? We have variations. Black, Green, or a herbal blend Surgenia insisted on cultivating. Or Cacao? Real Cacao.”

“Cacao would be fine,” my colleague managed to say, her voice slightly tight. “Thank you.”

“A good choice. It is… comforting.”

He busied himself with a sleek, chrome machine that hummed with a quiet, confident vibration. The domesticity of the moment - the clinking of ceramic cups, the hiss of steam - felt jarringly normal against the backdrop of the orbital void. It gave us a moment to regroup. We had come here to talk about engines and lift capacities, about the Hal Busse and the mechanics of the Swan-Neck manoeuvre. But Erin had thrown our technical dossier out the metaphorical airlock in the first five minutes.

I glanced at my notes. Propulsion systems. Fuel ratios. Material stress tests. They seemed irrelevant now. I needed to understand the man before I could understand the machine.

“Mr. Brian,” I started, trying to inject a degree of firmness into my tone. “Erin. You speak about the US aerospace industry of the twenties with… considerable disdain. But you were a product of that system. You were a scholarship student at MIT. You interned at the Cape. You were, by all accounts, the prodigy of the 2027 graduating class. You were positioned to lead the next generation of American rocketry.”

Erin placed a tray on the low table between our chairs. The cacao smelled rich, dark, and impossibly earthy. He sat down, not behind the desk this time, but in one of the easy chairs facing the window, his profile illuminated by the earthlight.

“And yet,” I pressed, sensing an opening, “in 2029, you vanished. You dropped off the grid. The American media called it a betrayal. The ‘Brain Drain’ was the headline, but for you, it felt personal. They said you ran away. Why? What happened in 2029 that made you leave the most well-funded aerospace infrastructure in human history to work in a freezing bunker in Iceland?”

Erin took a sip of his tea - he had chosen a dark, herbal brew - and watched the steam rise. He didn’t look angry at the question. He looked resigned.

“Betrayal,” he mused, rolling the word around his mouth like a stone. “A heavy word. Very American. It implies a loyalty to geography rather than to physics.”

He gestured toward the window. The North American continent was just beginning to crest the horizon, a sprawling tapestry of lights emerging from the twilight. The Great Lakes were visible, glowing clusters of civilization connected by the spiderwebs of the old interstate system.

“You ask why I left,” Erin said, his voice dropping an octave, becoming intimate and sharp. “You think I left because I was afraid? No. I left because I was bored. I was suffocating. I was dying of Ennui.”

He used the French word with a specific weight, drawing it out. On-nwee.

“Do you understand what the late 2020s felt like, truly? You read the archives, yes. You see the glossy PR videos of the Eagle launches. You see Mego Reveers standing on a stage, promising Mars in two years. Always two years. It was a perpetual motion machine of hype.”

He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto mine.

“But inside? Inside the engineering bays at Corpus Christi? Inside the design bureaus in Florida and California? It was a graveyard of ambition. We were not engineers anymore. We were iterating on a dead loop. We were refining the horse carriage, adding gold rims and leather seats, while the internal combustion engine sat ignored in the corner.”

“Mego Reveers achieved vertical landing,” I countered. “He lowered the cost to orbit.”

Erin waved his hand dismissively, a sharp, cutting motion.

“He did,” Erin conceded. “He was a competent industrialist. I will grant him that. He solved the economic equation of the 1960s. But he was a ‘Cowboy.’ And I do not use that word as a compliment. In America, you love the Cowboy. The rugged individual. The man who shoots from the hip. Move fast and break things. That was the Silicon Valley religion, yes?”

“It worked for software,” I said.

“Precisely!” Erin snapped. “It works for code. If you break code, you patch it. If you crash a server, you reboot it. But we were building hardware, vinur minn. We were building vessels to carry human beings into a vacuum. When you ‘move fast and break things’ in aerospace, you do not get a bug report. You get a funeral.”

He took another sip of tea, his gaze drifting back to the continent below, watching the East Coast glow.

“There was this… atmosphere,” he continued, struggling to find the right word in his adopted lexicon. “A cultural stagnation. We had thousands of brilliant minds - my generation - trapped in a system that valued the spectacle over the science. We were told to build bigger rockets, not smarter ones. More thrust. More methane. More fire. It was brute force engineering. It was vulgar.”

“Vulgar?”

“Yes. Vulgar. It lacked elegance. It lacked… Fingerspitzengefühl.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “The fingertip-feeling. The intuition for the material. We were welding stainless steel towers in muddy fields and calling it the future. I would look at the telemetry data, and I would see the inefficiencies. The wasted mass. The thermal stress. And every time I proposed a solution - a new alloy, a different nozzle geometry, a spike concept - I was told: ‘No. Too complex. Too slow. We need to launch next week. The stock price needs a boost.’”

Erin stood up again, restless. He paced to the window, his silhouette blocking out the city of New York, which was just passing into the night.

“I remember the moment,” he said softly. “It was late 2028. We had just launched an Eagle Heavy. A ‘success,’ they called it. The payload was delivered. The boosters landed. The internet cheered. Fireworks. Champagne.”

“But?”

“But I was looking at the engine readouts from the second stage,” Erin said. “The vacuum nozzle had suffered harmonic vibration that nearly tore the bell apart. We were within two percent of a catastrophic failure. I showed the data to my section chief. Do you know what he said?”

I shook my head.

“He said, ‘But it didn’t tear, Erin. It held. Good enough for government work. Ship the next one.’”

Erin turned to us, his face illuminated by the harsh white light of the stars as the Earth fell away beneath the frame.

“Good enough,” he whispered with intense loathing. “That was the motto of the era. Good enough. That was the moment I knew I had to leave. I realized that if I stayed, I would spend the rest of my life building things that were ‘good enough.’ I would become a mechanic for a billionaire’s toy train set. I did not study the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to build toys. I wanted to build a cathedral.”

“So you went to Europe,” I said. “To the ‘Old World’.”

“I went to sanity,” he corrected. “The US was suffering from a delusion of grandeur. Europe… Europe was suffering from a crisis of confidence, but at least they were honest about it. They knew they were behind. They knew they could not out-spend Mego Reveers. They could not out-shout the Americans.”

He smiled, a thin, wintry expression.

“And that is exactly why they were ready for something new. When you cannot win with brute force, you must win with intellect. You must be smarter. You must be more precise.”

“Was it Iceland immediately?”

“No. First Toulouse. Then Hamburg. I walked the halls of the old Aerospace giants. Airbus. Ariane. They were bureaucratic, yes. Sclerotic, even. But they had something the Americans had lost. They had a respect for the process. They understood that engineering is a discipline, not a reality TV show. But even there… I felt the limits. They were too cautious. They were managing the decline.”

Erin paused, looking at the models on his shelf. He touched a small, abstract sculpture made of twisted wire and glass.

“I was in Berlin for a conference. Winter, 2029. The mood was bleak. The climate reports were getting worse every month. The Atlantic currents were slowing. The politicians were arguing about carbon taxes while the water rose. I sat in a bar in Kreuzberg, drinking bad beer, wondering if I should just quit engineering and become a farmer before the soil died.”

He chuckled.

“And then I met the recruiter. Not a head-hunter. A courier. He didn’t offer me a salary. He didn’t offer me stock options. He handed me a file folder. Paper. Hard copy. No digital trace.”

“What was inside?”

“Mathematics,” Erin said. “Just mathematics. No introduction. No sales pitch. Just ten pages of equations derived from a paper I hadn’t seen published anywhere. It was… esoteric. It dealt with the geometry of spacetime, but not in the way Einstein described it. It treated time as a spatial dimension that could be structured. It was beautiful. It was the first time in five years I had seen something that didn’t look like a product.”

“Varna’s work,” I said.

“Varna’s soul,” Erin corrected. “Though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a note on the last page. Coordinates. A geodetic marker in the Icelandic highlands. And a time. Three days from then.”

“And you went?”

“I didn’t just go. I fled. I left my apartment in Berlin with the dishes in the sink. I deleted my cloud backups. I threw my phone into the Spree river. It wasn’t a career move. It was a defection. I defected from the stagnation. I defected from the ‘Good Enough’.”

The view outside had shifted completely now. The Earth was a dark, looming mass at the top of the frame, the city lights of North America sliding away into the upper bezel of the window, disappearing into the station’s shadow. We were looking out into the deep field. The stars were hard, unblinking points of ice.

“People talk about the ‘Brain Drain’ of that era,” Erin said, his voice quiet. “They say Europe stole the best minds. That is propaganda. Europe didn’t steal us. America threw us away. They starved us of meaning. They fed us marketing instead of mission. When you starve a mind, it will go to wherever the food is. Even if that food is in a volcanic bunker under a glacier.”

He finished his tea and set the cup down with a precise click.

“I arrived in Iceland in a snowstorm. The wind was howling like a banshee. There was no welcome committee. Just a heavy steel door in the side of a basalt cliff. I knocked. The door opened.”

He looked at me, and for a second, the years seemed to fall away. I didn’t see the frail patient or the legendary engineer. I saw the young man, shivering in a parka, standing on the threshold of a new world.

“I didn’t leave because I hated my home, gents,” Erin said, pointing a finger at the darkness where North America had vanished. “I left because my home had stopped looking up. They were looking at their phones. They were looking at their quarterly returns. They were looking at each other. But they had stopped looking up.”

He leaned back, the “Euro-English” cadence returning, crisp and final.

“And I knew, with the certainty of a mathematical proof, that if we didn’t start looking up again - and looking up correctly, with new eyes - we were all going to die down there. The Ennui wasn’t just boring. It was terminal.”

Erin reached out and touched the small kinetic sculpture on his desk - the wire and glass construct that moved in impossible, non-linear ways. He gave it a gentle spin. We watched it dance, casting fractured shadows across the oak surface.

“I thought I was bringing them the fire,” he murmured, watching the metal spin. “I was an American engineer. I had the arrogance of the Empire. I thought I was walking into that bunker to teach them how to build rockets.”

He laughed - a low, self-deprecating sound that rattled in his chest.

“I was an idiot. I walked in there thinking I was the solution. Ten minutes later, I realized I didn’t even understand the problem. I didn’t meet a scientist that day. I met a… Force Majeure.”

He looked up from the sculpture, his eyes sharp.

“And the first person to explain it to me wasn’t Varna. It wasn’t Voss. It was the woman holding the mop.”

Chapter 3: The Paradigm Shift

Erin set the sculpture down with a sharp clack.

“We were at a stalemate. And to understand why, you have to understand the genesis of the technology. The ITT-Drive wasn’t just engineering; it was Darius Voss’s brainchild. Not in the sense that he welded the circuits, but he was the conductor. He managed the chaos, he built the environment, he found the right minds for the impossible problems. He had the dream, asked the first, dangerous questions, but he never took the credit. ‘It is a team effort,’ he always said. Even when the team was failing.”

Erin sighed, rubbing his temples as if the headache of 2029 was still throbbing.

“So there we were. We had Voss’s baby, the ITT-Drive - the ‘Gravity Climber.’ And we had the AM-Engine concepts - the rotating detonation spikes. In theory, they were both brilliant solutions for a single problem. They should have solved it standalone. But in reality? They were useless. One more, one less.”

He ticked the points off on his fingers.

“The AME increased the standard performance of rocket engines minimally. It was better, yes, but not a revolution. The ITT-drive? It could lift and accelerate a vehicle to orbital velocity… in nine point four days. If, and only if, we had enough energy on board. But any lifter, any orbiter, has a window of maybe twenty minutes before gravity wins. The ITT was too slow to lift a ship out of the well - it ran out of fuel before it hit the Karman line. The atmosphere was too ‘thick’ for the time-space manipulation. The AME was powerful, but it still didn’t have enough ISP. To carry enough fuel to get the ITT to orbit as an SSTO, the ship became too massive to launch. It was the Rocket Equation again. The Tyrant.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair.

“I was still thinking like an American. I was thinking in terms of thrust. More fire. Bigger explosions. I was trying to force the ITT to act like a booster rocket. I was trying to make the AME carry the dead weight of the ITT system until orbit. We were shouting at each other. Whiteboards covered in red ink. The air was thick with frustration and stale coffee.”

Erin paused. He looked at the empty cacao cups on our table.

“And then, the silent witness raised her voice.”

“Bjork,” he said, naming her with the same reverence he used for the ships. “She was the charwoman. She had been there since the beginning. She moved through the chaos like a ghost, taking care of empty cups, picking up the papers we dropped in our rage, cleaning the plates someone had forgotten on a desk three hours prior. She was the one who would tap you on the shoulder at 3:00 AM and remind you that you had a wife, or a husband, or a dog waiting at home. She reminded us we were biological entities, not just calculating machines.”

Erin leaned forward.

“We were standing around the main 3D display table. I was arguing about mass fractions. I was grumbling in frustration that the ITT drive was ‘dead weight’ on the pad. I said, ‘It lifts nothing! It is a zero-percent contribution until we hit one hundred kilometres! It is like trying to fly with a lead anchor!’”

“Bjork was emptying a bin near the table. She stopped. She looked at the 3d projection of the ship - this heavy, fat ugly thing we were trying to build. And she spoke. Very quietly. Icelandic accent, thick as the glaciers.”

Erin mimicked a soft, practical tone.

“‘If the anchor is too heavy to carry, Mr. Erin… why do you not fill it with helium?’”

“I turned to her, ready to snap. ‘It’s not a balloon, Bjork. It’s a hyper-dimensional displacement drive. It doesn’t float.’”

“‘But you said it pushes,’ she said. She made a lifting motion with her hands. ‘Just a little bit. Even on the ground. Like a child trying to lift a sofa. He cannot lift it, but he makes it lighter for the father to carry, já?’”

Erin stared at us, his eyes wide, reliving the moment.

“The room went silent. I looked at the math. I looked at the ITT specs. At zero efficiency - at the very bottom of the gravity well - the drive didn’t generate speed. But it generated uplift. Tiny. Minimal. Millimetres per hour.”

“I had been discarding that data as noise. Because it wasn’t thrust. It wasn’t motion. But Bjork didn’t care about motion. She cared about the weight.”

“If the ITT drive runs at zero percent efficiency…” Erin whispered, tapping the desk, “…it effectively neutralizes a percentage of the ship’s gravitational weight. It doesn’t move the ship. It makes the ship weigh less.

We all were buffed and gasped. A sixteen-ton stone had been dropped in the room, no… it had been lifted.

‘It turns the rocket into an airship,’ someone realized aloud.”

“Like a balloon?” I asked.

“Precisely,” Erin beamed. “Accountable Weight Reduction. We didn’t need the ITT to be an engine at launch. We needed it to be a buoyancy tank. We didn’t need to fight 100 tons of gravity. If the ITT neutralized 20 percent of the weight, the AME only had to lift 80 tons. Suddenly, the Thrust-to-Weight ratio flipped. We didn’t need a bigger engine. We just needed to let the ‘child’ help lift the sofa. An idea and a name was born.”

Erin sat back, shaking his head.

“But we still couldn’t make the equations balance. We had the concept, but the physics of the transition - where the child lets go and the father runs - was messy. We struggled. We argued. Until finally, we did the only thing left to do. We went to the studio.”

His demeanor shifted instantly. The warmth he showed for Bjork vanished, replaced by a cold, distant awe.

“We visited Amara Varna. She rarely came to the main floor. She did not manage us. She did not attend status meetings. She existed… elsewhere. On a different plane. She was not a boss; she was a Force Majeure.”

“We stood in her doorway like schoolkids. The silence in that room was absolute. And then, the door to the inner sanctum opened.”

“She walked straight to the whiteboard we had wheeled in. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at the team. She looked at the equations I had crossed out in red. She picked up a marker - black - and she drew a single vector. She inverted the relationship between Time-Space drag and local gravity.”

“She said, ‘Bjork is right. You are trying to punch the wall. Stop punching. The wall is fluid. If you cannot move fast, move light.’”

Erin looked out the window, where the stars were rotating back into view.

“She knew the cleaning woman. Of course she did. Varna saw everything. She dropped the marker and went back to her office. She followed her own ways. But she had done it. In thirty seconds, she took our equations, our trials and errors, and turned them into a Varna-esque Buoyancy Principle.”

He looked at his hands.

“That was the shift. That was the moment we stopped being rocket scientists and became… something else. We stopped looking for fire. We started looking for balance. We realized that the machine didn’t have to conquer nature. It had to cooperate with it. The ITT wasn’t the payload. It was the wings.”

Erin smiled, a sad, nostalgic expression.

“Of course, it wasn’t a magic bullet. The first combined engines… they still needed a kick stage for orbital insertion. We still had to fight for every metre per second to come home safely. But we knew it was possible.”

“As usual Bjork brought us fresh coffee, tea, or whatever someone need. She did know. We were all working furiously, rewriting the simulation kernels. I tried to thank her. She just patted my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t forget to eat, elskan.’ And she went back to cleaning the floor.”

“I found out later why Darius hired her. Why he kept her close. It wasn’t for the cleaning. It was for the grounding. He knew that engineers suffer from a specific blindness. We see the trees, the bark, the leaves, the cellular structure of the wood… but we can’t see the forest for the trees.. Bjork saw the forest.”

“That was the Institute,” Erin said quietly. “A Force Majeure in one room, and a woman with a mop in the other, and between them… we found the stars.”

Chapter 4: The Mission

The atmosphere in the room had shifted. The warmth of the anecdote about Bjork and the “Buoyancy Principle” still lingered, a ghostly afterimage of humanity amidst the cold hard science, but Erin S. Green Brian was already moving on. He was a man who did not dwell on victories; he dwelled on the problems those victories created.

Outside the rotating window, the Pacific Ocean was a vast, obsidian void, swallowing the light. Then, creeping over the curved horizon, the jagged, illuminated spine of the Andes Mountains clawed its way into view. The tectonic violence of the planet was visible even from 480 kilometres up - a crumpled rug of stone and snow where the Nazca plate was slowly, inexorably diving beneath the South American continent.

Erin watched the mountains rise. He wasn’t looking at them with the appreciation of a tourist. He was looking at them with the suspicious glare of an engineer eyeing a faulty strut.

“You have questions,” Erin said, not turning from the window. “I can hear your pens scratching. You want to ask about the destination. You want to ask about the Moon bases, or the Mars initiatives, or the grand vision of expanding the human footprint.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, yes. The narrative of the 2030s was dominated by the idea of the multi-planetary species. Mego Reveers spoke of it constantly. We assumed that the rapid development of the Eva and Louise class ships was driven by that hunger. The desire to go out.”

Erin turned. His face was hard, the earlier softness gone.

“Then you assume wrong,” he said flatly. “That is the romance. That is the story we let the marketing departments tell because it sold t-shirts and video games. But it was not the truth. We did not go to space to go to Mars. We did not build the most sophisticated orbital logistics network in human history to plant flags in red dust.”

He walked back to the desk, leaning over it, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge.

“We went to space,” he said, spacing the words like hammer blows, “because we needed to build a map. A map that changed every single second.”

He tapped the surface of the desk.

“You understand ITT, yes? The basics? You press a button in Mumbai, you appear in New York. Instantaneous Translocation. It sounds like magic. It sounds like freedom.”

“It changed the world,” my colleague offered.

“It almost destroyed it,” Erin corrected. “Do you know what happens if you try to jump-port an object - let us say, a human being - from Point A to Point B, but Point B has moved three millimetres to the left since you last checked?”

We stared at him. It was a question we had never considered.

“You do not arrive at Point B,” Erin answered for us. “You arrive inside the wall of Point B. Or you arrive three millimetres above the floor, which is fine. Or you arrive three millimetres below the floor.”

He let that image hang in the air. The horror of it was clinical, precise.

“Fusion,” he whispered. “Your atoms and the atoms of the concrete floor attempt to occupy the same spacetime coordinates. It is not a clean process. It is… messy. Energetic. And fatal.”

Erin turned back to the window, staring down at the Andes.

“The Earth is not a solid rock, Signori miei. It is a liquid ball with a thin, cracking crust floating on top. It breathes. It shakes. The moon pulls the tides, not just of the water, but of the land itself. The continents drift. The atmosphere expands and contracts, altering the refractive index of the air. A skyscraper in Tokyo sways in the wind. A bridge in San Francisco expands in the heat.”

He tapped the thick, reinforced glass of the viewport aggressively as the landmass passed below.

“Millimetres, ma foi. Millimetres dictate survival. In the 2020s, our GPS systems were accurate to within a metre, maybe thirty centimetres if you had military clearance. For a car, that is fine. If your car thinks it is a metre to the left, you are still in the lane. If an ITT traveler is a metre to the left, they are dead.”

He paced the room, the Euro-English cadence clipping his words into precise, engineering packets.

“This was the Mission. This was the terror that woke Darius Voss up at night. We had the technology to move people instantly, but we did not have the infrastructure to tell us where they were going. We needed a geodetic reference frame that was absolute, real-time, and dynamic. We needed to map every square metre of the Earth’s surface, constantly, updated every millisecond, accounting for thermal expansion, tidal forces, and tectonic drift.”

“The OCN,” I said, the pieces falling into place.

“OCN, Orbital-Connection-Networks,” Erin nodded. “The public thought it was just internet. ‘We connect people!’ That was the slogan on the billboards. A smiling family in rural Africa video-calling a doctor in Berlin. And yes, it did that. It killed the latency of the old fiber networks. But that was the side effect. That was the exhaust.”

He gestured to the sky above the Earth.

“The real payload was the sensors. We didn’t just launch routers. We launched a nervous system. Every satellite in the OCN constellation - the thousands launched by Eva and Louise - carried synthetic aperture radar, LiDAR, and gravimetric sensors that Amara Varna herself helped calibrate. They were watching the ground. They were measuring the breathing of the planet.”

Erin stopped pacing and looked at us with a wry smile.

“You know why it is called a ‘Jump’?”

“The instant nature of the travel?” I guessed.

“No,” Erin laughed. It was a bark of a sound. “It is called a Jump because in the early days… you literally had to jump. Or rather, you fell.”

He sat on the edge of the desk, crossing his arms.

“Go back to 2027. The early experiments. We were using the terrestrial prototypes. The ‘Bison Stunt.’ You remember this?”

“The Hamburg to Montana transfer,” I nodded. “The first biological transport.”

“It was a joke,” Erin said, his eyes twinkling with a memory of chaos. “A PR stunt to calm the investors. Darius wanted to show it was safe for living things. So, we bought an American Bison from a zoo in Germany. We built a destination frame in a ranch in Montana. We calibrated the coordinates. We accounted for the rotation of the Earth, the Coriolis effect, the relative velocity. We felt like gods.”

He leaned in conspiratorially.

“We initiated the transfer. The Bison vanished from Hamburg. Instant success. Champagne corks popped.”

“And?”

“And three milliseconds later, the phone rang from Montana. The Bison had arrived. Alive. Unharmed. But it had arrived four-hundred metres in the air.”

My colleague gasped. “Four hundred metres?”

“Four hundred metres,” Erin confirmed. “A one-ton animal, dropping from that height of a skyscraper - with a parachute. It… bounced. It was not happy. It broke the enclosing box, charged the camera crew, and ran off into the wilderness. It lived for years, I think. But the engineers? They were white as sheets.”

He held up four fingers.

“Four hundred metres. The error margin of the best geodetic models we had in 2027 was roughly 1 to 3 metres. If that had been a person arriving in a room with a low ceiling… well.”

He dropped his hand.

“We realized then. The Earth had moved. The gravitational anomalies over the Atlantic had warped the spacetime calculation just enough. We were flying blind. We were trying to thread a needle while riding a rollercoaster.”

“That was when the ‘Jump’ became literal. For the next two years, until 2029, the protocols required a ‘Drop Zone.’ You didn’t arrive on the floor. You arrived in the air, usually over a net or a foam pit, because we couldn’t guarantee the vertical coordinate. You ‘Jumped’ because if we tried to put you on the ground, we might bury you.”

“The Airpocalypse,” I murmured. “The collapse of aviation. You couldn’t replace planes with foam pits.”

“Exactly,” Erin said. “You cannot build a global economy on foam pits. You need doors, the hubs, the time tunnels. That design was stolen from an old science-fiction. You need to walk from a terminal in London to a terminal in Sydney without spilling your coffee. To do that, you need precision. And to get precision, you need the high ground.”

Erin’s expression shifted. He looked at the model of the Eva Hesse on his shelf.

“That is where Darius Voss became something more than a CEO. In the history books, he is the businessman. The founder. But to us? He was the mothering Übervater.”

He used the German word with a profound, heavy resonance. Over-father. Not a tyrant, but a protector. A nursing mind who watches the perimetre so the children can sleep.

“He saw the math. He saw the Bison fall. And he understood, terrified, what would happen if he commercialized this technology without the map. He saw the horrific accidents waiting to happen. The fused bodies. The severed limbs. The lawsuits were the least of it. He saw the moral stain.”

Erin stood up and walked to the window again, placing his hand against the glass as the Pacific drifted into darkness.

“He called us into the Atelier. He said, ‘We are not opening the network. Not yet.’ The board screamed. The investors screamed. They wanted their ROI. But Voss refused. He said, ‘We are going to space first. We are going to wrap this planet in eyes.’”

“That was the Mission. We had to build a constellation of thirty thousand satellites. We had to do it fast, and we had to do it cheap, because every day we waited was a day the world burned a little more from the climate crisis. We needed the AME engines not to go to Mars, but to lift the sensors that would make Earth safe.”

“And Varna?” I asked. “Where was she in this? This sounds like engineering, not theoretical physics.”

Erin laughed softly. “Do not mistake Amara Varna for a chalkboard theorist. She touched every part of this. She understood that ITT wasn’t just about moving mass; it was about perceiving location.”

“She directed the satellite builders. I remember her in the clean rooms in Toulouse, wearing a bunny suit, yelling at the sensor integration teams. She didn’t care about the solar panels or the thrusters. She cared about the com-relays and the interferometry. She explained that the OC Network wasn’t just a collection of cameras. It was a singular instrument.”

He turned to face us, framing the air with his hands.

“It was the Observation Interplay. Varna designed the algorithms. Satellite A talks to Satellite B, which talks to the ground station, which talks to the ITT Hub. They triangulate. They measure the atmospheric density, the gravitational flux, the crustal shift. They create a four-dimensional model of the target zone in real-time. It was more than GPS. GPS tells you where you are. Varna’s network told the universe where you should be.”

“It was her domain. Voss built the ships to carry them. I built the engines to lift them. But Varna gave them sight. Without her, the OCN would have just been a very expensive internet provider. With her, it became the anchor.”

The station rotated further. The view outside was now dominated by the curve of the Earth, a fragile blue line against the dark.

“It took us years,” Erin said, his voice quiet. “From the first launches in 2030 to the full activation. We burned through money like oxygen. We worked until our eyes bled. But we did it. We locked the geodetic grid. We reduced the error margin from metres to a single micrometre above ground.”

He walked over to a decorative glass panel set into the wall, etched with the company’s history. He traced the original 2025 logo - a simple stylized arc connecting two points, with the slogan underneath: We connect people.

“Marketing,” Erin scoffed gently. “They paste that on billboards. We connect people. It sounds so banal, doesn’t it? Like a social media app.”

He tapped the logo.

“But when you have seen a Bison fall from the sky… when you have seen the simulations of what happens when a transfer goes wrong… that slogan is not banal. It is a prayer. It is a promise.”

I noticed the contrast immediately. On the shoulder of his sky-blue jacket, the fabric worn soft from use, sat the modern StellarLink emblem. It was a different design entirely. Where the glass showed a simple arc, the patch featured a stylized Ring Station - a circle bisected by a docking spoke - hovering between a family and the Earth. And the slogan had shifted tense. It no longer read We connect people, a promise of service. It read CONNECTING THE PEOPLE, a statement of permanent, structural reality.

Erin saw me looking at the patch. He tapped the old glass again, then tapped his own shoulder.

“Darius never wore this one,” he said, his voice softening. “He didn’t live to see the slogan change. But if he were here… if he saw that we finally put the Station right in the middle of the loop… he would have laughed. He would have said, ‘Finally, they put the bridge on the map.’”

He turned back to the window, watching the world turn below him, a world wrapped in an invisible, protective web of data that he helped spin.

“We didn’t go to space to conquer it, gents. We didn’t go to plant flags or mine helium-3. That came later. The rush, the greed, the expansion… that was inevitable. But the start? The Mission?”

Erin looked at us, his eyes tired but fierce with the memory of the work.

“We went to space to make sure the people on Earth could walk through doors safely. We went to space so that when a mother in Berlin stepped through a frame, she could hug her son in Tokyo, and not… miss.”

He let out a long breath.

“It was never about the stars. It was always about the ground.”

Chapter 5: The First Family

The station had rotated again. The jagged spine of the Andes was gone, swallowed by the eastern horizon, replaced by the vast, glittering expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. From an altitude of four hundred and eighty kilometres, the water looked like hammered lead, calm and solid.

It is strange to think that from down there, looking up, we are visible. Venice Station is one of the few man-made objects - along with the massive solar farms of the Lagrange points - that can be seen from the surface in broad daylight. A silver needle threading the blue sky, a second, artificial moon that orbits too fast. A reminder.

Erin S. Green Brian seemed to be thinking the same thing. He wasn’t looking at the Earth anymore; he was looking at the reflection of the room in the dark glass. He looked tired. The fire that had animated him while discussing the “Mission” had burned down to glowing embers. The anger at the “lost decades” was gone, replaced by a softer, more melancholy light.

“We talk about the physics,” Erin said, his voice quiet, almost a murmur against the hum of the air recyclers. “We talk about Varna and the geometry. We talk about Voss and the money. But you cannot build a new world with just math and credit.”

He turned away from the window and walked to the chaotic bookshelves. He didn’t pick up a model this time. He tapped a command into a small console on the shelf, and the air above the oak desk shimmered. A projection coalesced - not a 3D schematic of an engine, but a flat, 2D photograph, grainy and over-saturated, hovering in the air.

It showed a group of people standing on a slab of cracked concrete, wrapped in heavy, high-visibility parkas, snow whipping around their legs. They looked exhausted. Their eyes were sunken, their skin grey with fatigue, but they were grinning like wolves who had just taken down a elk. Behind them, obscured by steam and ice fog, was the vague, upright shape of a ship.

“Engineering is not just metal,” Erin said, looking at the ghosts in the projection. “It is flesh. It is blood. It is the ability to endure the impossible for three hundred dollars an hour and a promise.”

I leaned forward, studying the image. “Is that… Iceland?”

“The Northern Range,” Erin nodded. “Winter, 2030. That is Shift Team Alpha. The ‘Icebreakers.’ I am the one in the back, the one who looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. Because I hadn’t.”

He sat down, not in the throne-like chair behind the desk, but in the one next to it, closer to us.

“You asked how we did it. How we put thirty thousand eyes in the sky before the crust shifted too much. You think we just snapped our fingers and the AME appeared?”

“We assumed…” I started, but stopped.

“You assumed a linear progression,” Erin finished. “History books love straight lines. They say: ‘Varna wrote the paper, Voss wrote the check, and the ships flew.’ Non. That is a fairy tale.”

He leaned in, his hands clasped.

“Darius Voss was a dreamer, yes. But he was also a gambler. And a good gambler never bets on one horse. He bets on the race.”

Erin held up three fingers.

“StellarLink had a Triple Strategy. We were running three horses simultaneously, because we didn’t know which one would break its leg.”

He folded one finger.

“Horse Number One: The Conventionals. The ‘Dumb Rockets.’ From 2027 to early 2030, while we were still arguing with the charwoman about buoyancy, we were already launching. We bought capacity on everything that could fly. Old surplus ICBMs, cheap solid-fuel boosters from India, the new ‘eco-kerosene’ launchers from Spain. We even bought flights from the dying remnants of the American private sector.”

“These were the pathfinders,” I said, recalling the old manifests.

“They were mules,” Erin corrected gently. “They were expensive, inefficient, and dirty. But they worked. In those three years, we put one hundred and twenty ‘Node-Zero’ satellites into orbit. They were the skeleton. They allowed us to test the signal triangulation. They proved the concept. But one hundred and twenty satellites is not a global skin. It is a dotted line. We needed thousands.”

He folded the second finger.

“Horse Number Two: The Hybrids. This is the part of history people forget. StellarLink didn’t just invent; we acquired. Voss bought a small, struggling company in Toulouse - Aéro-Combustion - and another in Stuttgart. They were working on something the Americans had ignored: hybrid propulsion. Not quite AME, not quite chemical. They had a working metallic-gel propellant system. Efficient, dense, stable. We didn’t use it for the big ships, but we learned from it. We stripped their patents, we hired their engineers - brilliant minds who had been starved of funding - and we integrated them. They taught us how to cool a chamber without melting it.”

He folded the last finger, leaving a fist resting on his knee.

“And Horse Number Three: The Future. The Advanced Machine Engines, Ame. ITT. The engines that would eventually power the fleet. But an engine is useless without a hull.”

Erin swiped his hand through the air, and the 3d projection changed. The grainy photo of the crew dissolved, replaced by a rotating wireframe of a ship. It wasn’t the massive, blocky Hal Busse heavy lifters we had discussed earlier. This was sleeker, smaller. It had a triangular cross-section, flaring at the base into the distinct geometry of the bladed aerospike. It looked like a arrowhead carved from obsidian.

“Meet the First Family,” Erin said softly. “The sisters.”

He listed the names like a litany, a prayer to saints of a religion he had helped found.

“Eva. Louise. Françoise. Carmen. Camille.”

“Named for artists,” my colleague noted. “Eva Hesse. Louise Bourgeois…”

“Voss’s choice,” Erin said. “He said that if we were going to pollute the sky, we should at least do it with names that represented creation, not conquest. No ‘Conquerors,’ no ‘Destroyers,’ no ‘Eagles.’ Artists. Women who took raw, difficult materials - latex, bronze, steel - and forced them to speak.”

He pointed to the wireframe.

“They were small. By modern standards, they were toys. Four tons of payload capacity to Low Earth Orbit. A fraction of what a Eagles could lift. But the Eagles had to land, be refurbished, inspected, re-stacked. It took weeks. Sometimes months.”

Erin’s eyes lit up with the memory of the logistics.

“The Eva class? They were not rockets. They were aircraft that happened to go to space. They landed, we checked the spike blades, we refuelled the propellant tanks, we loaded four satellites into the cassette, and we launched again.”

He looked at me, intense.

“We called it The Takt. The Beat. The Pulse.”

“The cadence,” I translated.

“More than cadence,” Erin insisted. “Takt is musical. It is industrial. It is the rhythm of a machine that is working perfectly. In 2030, when Eva and Louise came online, we were launching weekly. By 2031, with all five sisters operational, we were launching daily.”

He stood up and walked to the window again, looking down at the clouds.

“You have to understand the sheer physical reality of that. Imagine the launch site in Iceland. The ‘Black Sands’ facility. It is cold. The wind never stops. The geothermal plants are pumping gigawatts of power to liquefy the propellant. The air smells of heated technique, not nature.”

“The ground crews… Guð minn, the organization. You have to understand, the American industry in the twenties ran on burnout. They ground their engineers into dust with eighty-hour weeks. Voss looked at that and said, ‘A tired watchmaker breaks the spring.’” Erin leaned forward, tapping the table to a steady, comfortable beat.

“We instituted the Voss Rotation. Six-hour shifts. Four shifts a day. You worked three days, you took three days off. It didn’t matter if it was Tuesday or Sunday. The calendar was irrelevant; only the Takt mattered.”

He smiled, a look of vindication in his eyes.

“The shareholders screamed, of course. They saw the payroll. Fully funded pension plans from day one. Thirty days of mandatory vacation. Full medical compensation even if you broke your leg skiing on your time off. They called it ‘socialist charity.’ They said we were burning capital.”

Erin gestured to the 3D projection of the ship launching.

“But then they looked at the telemetry. We had no accidents. We had no rework. A crew that works six hours with total focus achieves more than a crew that works twelve hours with coffee jitters and resentment. We didn’t have burnouts. We had a waiting list of the best technicians in the world begging to work in the Icelandic cold.”

“It was expensive,” Erin admitted. “But when the Louise launched for the fiftieth time without a single technical delay, the shareholders stopped screaming and started counting their dividends. We proved that security is the ultimate efficiency.”

“And French Guiana?” I asked. “The equatorial site?”

“Different hell, same rhythm,” Erin said. “Instead of ice, it was heat. Humidity that felt like breathing soup. The insects were the size of your hand. But the Takt was the same. Camille launched from Kourou at dawn, Eva from Iceland at dusk. We were stitching the sky together, one orbit at a time.”

“One thousand satellites in the first year,” I recited from my notes.

“One thousand and forty-two,” Erin corrected. “We counted every one. But it wasn’t enough. The Earth… the Earth was moving faster than we predicted. The Orbital Connection Network needed density. We needed a mesh, not a net.”

He swiped the 3d projection again. The image shifted. The sleek arrowhead shape of the Eva class bulked up. It grew wider shoulders, a slightly longer fuselage.

“2033,” Erin said. “The Airpocalypse was in full swing. Planes were grounded. The global economy was screaming for the Jump Hubs to open, but we couldn’t open them until the safety shell was complete. We needed more mass. We needed more eyes.”

“Enter the Second Batch.”

He smiled.

“Niki. Artemisia. Frida. Gego. Elsa.”

“Five new ships,” I said.

“While Eva was turned into a monument in Iceland at the launchpads and Louise went to the Airbus Aerospace Museum in Toulouse, the other three of elder sisters - Françoise, Carmen, Camille - went into docks for two months. We gutted them. We upgraded the AME cores with the new ceramic composites we learned from the Germans. We optimized the ITT buoyancy coils. We turned them into the Mark IIs. Total fleet: eight ships.”

Erin turned back to the desk, leaning on it with both hands.

“Eight ships. It doesn’t sound like an armada, does it? But these eight ships… they were machines of pure logistics. We pushed the Takt to the breaking point. We were launching every single ship every second day. Four launches a day, split between the poles and the equator.”

He did the mental math, his eyes darting as he calculated.

“One hundred and eighty launches per ship, per year. Eight ships. That is nearly one thousand five hundred flights a year. Four satellites per flight.”

“Six thousand satellites a year,” I whispered.

“For five years,” Erin said. “From 2033 to 2038. We put twenty-seven thousand two hundred satellites into the Multi-Shell. We didn’t just build a constellation. We built a Dyson Sphere of data.”

He looked at the 3d projection of the Eva, hovering silently in the room.

“It’s a wonder that it didn’t broke people,” he admitted softly. “The pace. We should have had burnouts, divorces. We had engineers who walked out into the snow in Iceland and just… screamed. For short moments, it was too much, but we couldn’t stop. Because every time we looked at the geodetic data, we saw the crust slipping. We saw the ‘Jump’ error margins spiking. If we stopped, the network failed. If the network failed, the ITT failed. And if the ITT failed… the world stayed broken.”

He walked over to the 3d projection and reached out, his hand passing through the ghostly wireframe of the engine nozzle.

“People talk about the Hal Busse class - the 500-ton monsters that built this station - as the triumph of our engineering. And they are right. They are magnificent beasts. They are the cathedrals.”

He turned to look at us, and his expression was fiercely protective.

“But the Eva class? The First Family? They were the corner-stones. They were the ones who did the dirty, repetitive, unglamorous work. They flew until their heat shields were worn out grey. They flew until their airframes groaned. They flew until they were obsolete.”

He gestured to the view outside, where the stars were thick and bright.

“They didn’t build Venice Station. They didn’t save the city from the sea. They just carried boxes of sensors to Low Earth Orbit, over and over and over again.”

Erin sat back down, the energy fading from him again, leaving him looking older, smaller. He picked up his cold tea.

“They were small,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Only four tons. A pickup truck compared to a freight train. But they were ours. And without them… without that ‘First Family’ and the Takt that nearly killed us… none of this,” he gestured to the station, to the view, to the future, “would be here.”

He took a sip, grimaced at the cold liquid, and set it down.

“But then,” he said, his eyes darkening, “the water started to rise faster than the satellites could track. And we realized that connecting the world wasn’t enough. We had to save it.”

He looked at me, signalling the end of the nostalgia.

“Ask me about the Adriatic. Ask me about the Panic of ‘43.”

Chapter 6: The Exclamation Mark

The rotational cycle of the station brought Europe into view. It was night down there, a sprawl of amber cobwebs stretching from the darkness of the Atlantic to the Urals. From this altitude, the borders were invisible, the heat of fading conflicts was silent, and the scars of the last century were hidden under the glow of LEDs and sodium vapor.

Erin S. Green Brian was staring specifically at the boot of Italy. It was a cluster of light, but there was a darkness at the top of the Adriatic Sea, a black void where the lights simply stopped.

The mood in the room had curdled. The nostalgia for the “First Family” - the frantic, triumphant days of the 2030s - had evaporated. Erin sat heavily in the chair, the ceramic coaster still in his hand, but he wasn’t playing with it anymore. He was gripping it like a weapon.

“You know,” he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly low, “we spent the thirties patting ourselves on the back. We had the OC network up. The Airpocalypse was ending because the geodetic map was stable. The Jump Hubs were opening in London, in Tokyo, in New York. We thought we had won the game.”

He gestured vaguely at the ceiling, towards the unseen luxury of the upper rings.

“We thought the future was going to be clean. Efficient. A straight line up.”

He turned his gaze to us. His eyes were cold.

“But gravity is not the only force that wants to kill you. Entropy is patient. And the climate… the climate does not care about your stock prices.”

“You are referring to the resignation,” I said. “Darius Voss stepping down.”

“It was not a resignation,” Erin corrected sharply. “It was a tactical withdrawal. In 2040, Darius walked away from the boardrooms. He left the CEO chair of StellarLink. The markets panicked. They thought he was dying, or that he had lost his mind. Der Alte - the Old Man - leaving the empire he built?”

Erin shook his head.

“He wasn’t leaving. He was digging in. He realized that StellarLink had become a utility company. A bureaucracy. It was necessary, yes, but it was no longer the spearhead. He retreated into privacy to focus on the things the board members found ‘unprofitable.’ He looked at the climate models. He looked at the medical data. And he saw the storm coming before the first raindrop fell.”

Erin stood up and walked to the wall, tapping a panel. The 3D display flared to life again. The sleek, arrow-head shapes of the Eva class vanished.

In their place, a new shape resolved.

It was brutal. That was the only word for it. It didn’t look like a rocket. It looked like a brutalist cathedral block made of matte-grey composite. It was squat, broad-shouldered, and dense. It lacked the soaring elegance of the Mego Reveers “Eagles” or the aerodynamic sleekness of the Eva. It looked like a heavy industrial tool. A hammer designed to hit the sky.

“2043,” Erin said. The date hung in the air like a curse. “The Adriatic Disaster.”

“The Aqua Alta,” my colleague whispered.

“It was not an Alta,” Erin snapped. “It was a deluge. The storm surge hit the lagoon with a force the MOSE barriers were never designed for. The sea level had already risen, yes, but that night… physics conspired against history. The pressure broke the locks. The water didn’t just flood the Piazza San Marco. It erased it.”

He looked out the window at the black void where Venice used to be.

“We watched it on the feeds. Two thousand years of history, drowning in mud and salt water. The panic was… absolute. It wasn’t just Italy. It was a signal flare for the species. If Venice could vanish in twenty-four hours, what about Manhattan? What about Mumbai? Shanghai? The illusion of stability shattered.”

Erin turned back to the 3d projection of the brutal ship.

“That was the morning I got the call. Not from the StellarLink board. From Voss’s private line. He didn’t say ‘Hello.’ He didn’t ask how I was. He said, ‘Erin, the toys are finished. It is time to build the trucks.’”

Erin’s chest swelled slightly.

“I was thirty-eight years old. Competent, yes. Experienced, yes. But that morning, I became the Lead Engineer for the Heavy Lift Initiative. It was a promotion in the middle of a funeral.”

He pointed to the squat, grey ship.

“This is the Hal Busse class. Forty tons of payload to Low Earth Orbit. Single Stage. No boosters. No throw-away cans. You land, you load, you lift.”

“Forty tons?” I asked, checking my figures. “The Hyper-Boosters with their 2nd stage SpaceLiners of that era were claiming one hundred and fifty.”

“Claiming,” Erin scoffed. “And to do it, they needed a booster the size of a skyscraper. They were massive, hollow tubes of stainless steel, filled with methane, trying to fight gravity with brute force. The Hal Busse? It was the size of an Eagle double the amount of payload and on a daily takt per rocket. Half the height. But it was dense.”

He tapped his temple.

“The Varna Principle. The ITT-Drive inside the Hal Busse wasn’t there to move it fast; it performed with 10% back than - it was there to make it light. We could load forty tons of lead into that cargo hold, engage the buoyancy coils, and the engines - the glorious, up-scaled AME arrays- v0.75 later the v0.70 - would lift it as if it were feathers. It was the first real SSTO. Not because it had magical engines, but because it cheated the weight.”

“And the name?” I asked. “Hal Busse?”

A dry, dark smile cracked Erin’s face.

“Darius’s humor. Dadaism. You know of Hal Busse? The German artist? 1926 to 2018. She was a master of Konkrete Kunst - Concrete Art. She painted structures. Textures. She understood that nature and geometry were not enemies, but layers of the same thing. She painted over photographs of landscapes, imposing order on chaos.”

Erin traced the blocky lines of the ship.

“This ship was our Concrete Art. A geometric imposition on the chaos of the atmosphere. But the joke… the joke was the name. ‘Hal.’ Like the computer in 2001. But also… ‘Busse.’ In German, a Bus. An Omnibus. A heavy transport for the masses.”

“So it’s a pun?” my colleague asked, blinking. “The Heavy Bus?”

“A pun worth billions,” Erin said. “It was Voss telling the world: ‘The era of the Ferrari is over. Here is the Bus. Get in.’”

He swiped the 3d projection, and the interior of the Hal Busse revealed itself. It wasn’t fuel tanks. It was a cavernous cargo hold, modular and massive.

“We didn’t build these to move satellites,” Erin said quietly. “We built them to move civilization.”

“Venice Station,” I said.

“Venice Station,” he echoed. “The world thought we were building a museum. That was the press release. ‘We will save the treasures of Italy! We will lift the stones of the Doge’s Palace into the sky!’ And we did. We lifted art. We lifted statues. But that was the cover story.”

Erin walked to the centre of the room, standing directly under the circulating view of the heavens.

“You have to understand Surgenia Miller. In the vids, she is just Voss’s wife. The quiet woman in the background. That is a lie. She was the architect of the soul of this place.”

“She was a doctor,” I recalled. “An oncologist.”

“She was a warrior,” Erin corrected. “She fought cancer. And in the 2040s, cancer was winning. The microplastics, the atmospheric toxins, the stress of a dying biosphere… the rates were skyrocketing. And on Earth? The hospitals were flooding. The supply chains for isotopes were breaking down.”

He gestured to the station around us - the malls, the walkways, the hidden depth of the structure.

“Surgenia looked at Darius and said, ‘I do not need a museum. I need a clean room. I need zero-gravity to crystalize proteins. I need hard vacuum to manufacture purity. I need a hospital that is not drowning.’”

Erin’s voice shook slightly.

“That is why we built the Hal Busse. To lift the modules. Not tin cans, but lead-lined, four-hundred-ton bio-labs. MRI machines that weighed fifty tons. Radiation shielding. We lifted a Level-4 Bio-Containment facility in one piece. We lifted the future of medicine on a pillar of pink magnetic fire.”

“For All Mankind,” my colleague quoted the old NASA plaque.

“No,” Erin stopped him. “Not Mankind. That word is too… imperial. Too gendered. Surgenia had a motto. She carved it into the bulkhead of the first module we fused to the core.”

He spoke the German words with a profound softness.

“Für alle Menschen.”

“For all humans. For all people. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, American or Chinese. If you were sick, and the Earth couldn’t save you… we built a place that could.”

He sat down again, the weight of the memory pressing him into the chair.

“And the irony,” he whispered. “The cruel, black irony of the universe.”

“Voss,” I said.

Erin nodded slowly.

“2048. Five years after the Venice Panic. Five years after we started lifting the station. Darius Voss - the man who bought the future, the man who built the ‘Heavy Bus’ to save the world - was diagnosed.”

“Pancreatic cancer,” I said. The records were public, but the details had always been sparse.

“Aggressive,” Erin said. “Terminal. The doctors on Earth gave him six months.”

Erin looked at his hands, calloused and spotted with age.

“He didn’t tell the public. He didn’t tell the board. He told us. The engineering team. He called me into his office in Iceland - the old office, empty now, dusty. He looked thinner. But his eyes were still burning.”

“He said, ‘Erin, the schedule is too slow. Surgenia needs the Delta-Ring operational by next year.’”

“I told him it was impossible. I told him the Hal Busse fleet was already flying twice a day. We were cracking the airframes. The crews were breaking.”

“He just looked at me and said, ‘Then build better frames. Or build more ships. But build them. Because I am not going to die on the ground, Erin. And neither are the people waiting for those beds.’”

Erin looked up at us.

“We worked. Mein Gott, we worked. We pushed the AME technology harder than physics should allow. We optimized the Swan-Neck landing until we could drop a ship, refuel it, and launch it again in four hours. We built the Delta-Ring.”

“And the 150-ton class?” I asked. “The Niki replacements?”

“The Personnel Lifters,” Erin nodded. “Yes. The Hal Busse was for cargo. But you cannot put sick people in a cargo container and pull 3Gs. We needed a taxi. A gentle ride. We built the 150-tonners - the Varna Class shuttles - specifically for biological transport. High ITT buoyancy, low thrust. A ride so smooth you could perform surgery during the ascent.”

He waved a hand at the bustling station outside his door.

“That is what you see today. The 150s bring the people. The doctors, the patients, the families. The 500s - the old Hal Busse workhorses - they still fly, bringing the food, the water, the steel. But the panic is gone. Now, it is just… traffic.”

Erin stood up one last time, signalling that this part of the story was done. He walked to the window and placed his hand against the glass, looking out at the sprawling, metallic rings of the station - a silver city floating above the blue.

“You look at this place,” he said, his voice rasping. “You see the malls. You see the tourists. You think this is a hotel? You think this is a resort for the wealthy?”

He turned to us, and for the first time, I saw the fear behind the engineer’s eyes.

“It is a lifeboat,” he said. “It is an Ark. We built it because the water was rising, and the cells were mutating, and we ran out of other options.”

He looked back at the Earth.

“We stopped building for profit in 2043, gents. We stopped caring about the stock price. When Venice went under… we started building for life.”

Chapter 7: The Art of Engineering

The view from the window had shifted again. We were passing over the night side of the planet, but the darkness was not absolute. The lights of the Indian mega-cities formed a glowing web below us, a testament to humanity’s refusal to sleep.

Inside the suite, the mood had shifted from the heavy gravity of the Venice crisis back to the precise, intellectual energy of the design studio. Erin S. Green Brian was no longer looking at the past with regret; he was looking at it with the critical eye of a craftsman.

He reached into a drawer of the oak desk and pulled out a simple sketchpad and a charcoal pencil. It was an anachronism in a room filled with 3D projectors, but watching his hands move, I understood. He needed to feel the friction.

“We talk about mass,” Erin said, sketching a rapid, sharp line across the paper. “We talk about thrust. But you are still thinking in the old paradigm. You are looking at the Hal Busse model and you are seeing a rocket. A tube full of gas fighting a planet.”

He looked up, his eyes sharp.

“If the Hal Busse had been a standard rocket, it would have needed to be the size of the Empire State Building to lift fifty tons of payload. It wasn’t. It was compact. Why?”

“The ITT,” I said, remembering the story of the Charwoman. “The buoyancy.”

“Precisely,” Erin snapped, tapping the paper. “The geometry of the Hal Busse - the prism shape, the triangular cross-section - wasn’t just for aerodynamics. It was for the Coils. To neutralize the weight of five hundred tons of gross mass, you need a geometry that supports the ITT field generation. A cylinder is inefficient for that. A triangle? A triangle allows you to focus the buoyancy vector.”

He sketched a cross-section. A central core wrapped in what looked like heavy cabling, surrounded by the fuel tanks.

“When a Hal Busse sat on the pad, fully fuelled, it weighed five hundred tons. But when we flipped the switch on the ITT-Drive… to the launch clamps, it acted like a feather, an accountable lift mass of four hundred tons. It was a five-hundred-ton airship made of metalo-ceramics.”

Erin slashed the charcoal across the bottom of the drawing.

“This changed the engines completely. We didn’t need massive F-1 bells screaming at the ground to lift dead weight. We didn’t need millions of pounds of thrust. We needed control. We needed efficiency.”

He turned the page and began drawing the base of the ship.

“We had abandoned the central spike. Moved forward to the Triangular Blade Array. The modular arrays of linear blades, arranged in a triangle. But look closely.”

He drew the detail along the edge of the blade. It wasn’t a single open throat. It was a honeycomb.

“We didn’t use one big combustion chamber. That is 20th-century thinking. Big chambers are unstable. They vibrate. We used hundreds of micro-RDEs - Rotating Detonation Engines. Small, simple, high-pressure chambers. No complex plumbing. Modular. If one fails, the others ignore it, compensate.”

He added lines flowing out from the honeycomb.

“These small chambers fed the blades. They created the primary flow. But the magic… the magic was the ‘Afterburner’.”

“The Magnetic Ring?” I asked.

“The Ionic Magnetic Accelerator,” Erin corrected. “We integrated pre-ionization directly into the micro-chambers. The exhaust gas was already charged plasma when it hit the expansion ramp. Then, we used the ship’s power - generated by the secondary cooling loop - to drive a magnetic field around the blade skirt.”

He drew a halo around the base of the triangle.

“It grabbed that exhaust and pulled it. It accelerated the gas velocity by forty percent. It turned a chemical flame into a magnetic torch. That is why the Hal Busse didn’t roar like a Falcon. It hissed. A pink-white electric hiss.”

“But the heat,” my colleague interjected. “The friction of re-entry. The plasma.”

“Ah,” Erin smiled. “The Metalo-Ceramics.”

“The Holy Grail,” he whispered. “We developed it in the labs in Stuttgart. A lattice of titanium-aluminide infused with a ceramic matrix. It was lighter than aluminium, harder than diamond, and it didn’t just resist heat; it drank it.”

He sketched the cooling flow - arrows rushing down the sides of the ship, into the blades, and back up.

“The skin of the Hal Busse was active. It was a heat exchanger. When the ship re-entered the atmosphere, the friction didn’t burn the hull. The hull absorbed the energy, transferred it into the propellant, and used it to pre-heat the fuel for the landing burn. The ship fed on the fire.”

Erin looked at the drawing, a mixture of pride and technical satisfaction on his face.

“So you see? It was a system. The ITT made it light. The Blade Arrays made it efficient. The Magnetic Afterburners gave it the ISP. And the Metalo-Ceramics kept it from melting.”

Erin paused, a mischievous, almost wolflike smile curling the corners of his mouth. He leaned back, tapping the charcoal pencil against his chin.

“Of course, you know the date. 2048.”

“The Patent Release,” I said. “When the exclusivity on the ITT-Drive expired.”

“Expired,” Erin chuckled. “That is the legal term. The history books say we lost the monopoly. They say the courts forced StellarLink’s hand. But look at me.”

He tapped the side of his nose.

“Do I look like a man who lost?”

He sketched a quick, crude cylinder next to his elegant triangle.

“In 2048, the ‘Gravity Climber’ became open source. Suddenly, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Canadians… OrbitLift in Australia… they all had the wings. They rushed to integrate. The Chinese were fast - they built heavy lifters within two years. The Europeans adapted the Ariane architecture brilliantly.”

He shook his head, his amusement deepening.

“But the Americans… the US sector… ach, it was painful to watch. They had spent twenty years worshipping Mego Reveers and his stainless steel silos. When the ITT became free, they didn’t redesign. They just bolted the buoyancy coils onto their old methane rockets. They created Frankenstein monsters. Brute force engines fighting against delicate physics. It worked, technically. But it was ugly. It was like putting a racehorse’s legs on a mule.”

Erin’s expression turned shrewd.

“But here is the secret. We gave them the ITT. We gave them the levitation. But we kept the AME. The other part remained proprietary. We held the patent on the blades, the magnetic afterburner, the metalo-ceramics. So, while the world could finally float… only we could truly fly.”

He looked at the model of the Hal Busse.

“Darius knew. He knew that if we kept the ITT locked up forever, the expansion would stall. We needed an ecosystem. We needed Ares Dynamics to start building on Mars - even if Mego was dead and his successors were greedy, they needed the lift capacity to build their little kingdom. We needed the Moon to open up. So, the Übervater let the patent go. He let the children play with the buoyancy.”

Erin’s smile faded into a look of quiet, strategic pride.

“It wasn’t a defeat, gents. It was a seeding operation. We let them have the Low Earth Orbit. We let them have the clumsy, heavy logistics. But the deep space? The high-efficiency routes? The speed? That stayed with us. That stayed with the Hal Busse.”

“We built a fleet of them. They were the workhorses. They lifted the modules for Venice Station. A single Hal Busse could lift fifty tons of payload - a full station module - to orbit. We launched ten times a day. That is five hundred tons of civilization to orbit, every single day.”

“And the 2000-ton class?” I asked. “The Super-Heavies?”

“The Gigants,” Erin nodded. “Scaled up. Four blades. Two hundred and twenty tons of payload. Enough to lift a reactor core. But the Hal Busse… the 500-tonner… that was the sweet spot.”

He picked up the sketchpad and handed it to me. It was a crude drawing, but it captured the energy of the thing. The sharp angles, the integration of form and function.

“You asked about the art,” Erin said. “Why we named them after Hal Busse. Why we cared about the shape.”

He gestured to the window, to the station that surrounded us.

“Because engineering without aesthetics is just bad plumbing. We were not just building a station. We were building a home. A sanctuary. When the refugees from the coastlines looked up, when the patients in the cancer wards looked out the window… they didn’t want to see a tin can. They wanted to see something that looked like it had a purpose. Something that looked like it was meant to be there.”

He looked me in the eye.

“It was not enough for them to fly, gents. They had to be beautiful. Because they were carrying our hope. And hope… hope should have a shape.”

He turned back to the window, watching the lights of India drift by, a continent of history protected by a ring of geometry.

“Hal Busse would have loved it,” he murmured. “It is the ultimate concrete art. A circle of light drawn around a dying world.”

---

Chapter 8: The Ballet

The sketchpad lay forgotten on the desk, the charcoal dust smudged like soot. The static diagrams of the Hal Busse - the triangles, the cooling channels, the honeycomb chambers - were no longer enough for Erin S. Green Brian.

He was standing in the centre of the room now, directly beneath the circulating view of the cosmos. The Earth had rolled away, leaving us staring into the deep stellar field, but Erin wasn’t looking at the stars. His eyes were closed. His head was tilted back, listening to a frequency only he could hear.

“You have the shape,” he said, his voice thrumming with a new, kinetic energy. “You have the materials. You have the engine geometry. But a ship is not a statue, gents. A ship is a verb. It moves.”

He raised his arms, hands flattened into planes, mimicking the delta shape of the heavy lifter.

“You grew up watching the history vids of the Cape. The fire and the fury. The ground shaking three miles away. You think launch is violence. You think gravity must be beaten into submission.”

Erin opened his eyes. They were electric, alive with the memory of flight.

“But the Hal Busse? The 500-ton class? We did not fight gravity. We negotiated with it.”

He began to move. It wasn’t a pace; it was a performance. He was enacting the physics of the launch.

“Picture the pad at French Guiana. Dawn. The humidity is one hundred percent. The ship is a grey monolith, five hundred tons of mass. In the old days, to lift that, you would need nine engines screaming at full throttle, burning tons of fuel per second just to inch off the ground. Gravity drag. The tax you pay to the planet.”

Erin lowered his hands, palms pushing down against an invisible cushion.

“But we engage the ITT-Drive. We feed the power from the secondary loop into the coils. We tune the field to the local geodetic grid - thanks to Varna, thanks to the OCN satellites. And suddenly… the math changes.”

He rose on the balls of his feet, his body tension evaporating.

“Zero percent efficiency for travel, but one hundred percent efficiency for buoyancy. The ship still has mass - five hundred tons of inertia - but it has no weight. To the launch clamps, it feels like a balloon. It is an airship made of metalo-ceramics.”

He made a rising gesture, slow and steady.

“Levitation. The AME blades ignite. Not a roar, but a hum. A high-pitched magnetic song. The purple-pink plasma bites the air. And the ship… it just slides up. No vibration. No G-force crushing the cargo. It ascends like a bubble in water. We clear the tower in silence. Unheimlich, the Germans called it. Uncanny. A mountain floating away on a breeze.”

Erin began to turn in the room, his hands banking like wings.

“We climb. The air gets thin. The ITT loses its grip on the local gravity well, but by then, the AME is breathing hard, the magnetic afterburners are singing, and we are accelerating. We punch through the Karman line not with a bang, but with a whisper.”

He stopped, freezing in place. The room was silent, save for the air recyclers.

“But launch… launch is easy,” Erin scoffed, dismissing the ascent with a wave. “Energy in, altitude out. Any fool with enough kerosene can go up. The Art… the true Art of Engineering… is coming back down.”

He looked at us, his expression sharpening.

“You remember the ‘Belly Flip’? The manoeuvre of the SpaceLiners?”

“The suicide burn,” I said.

“Precisely,” Erin spat the word. “The Suicide Burns. They barley hovered. It was bold. I will give them that. It was spectacle. To take a steel cylinder, let it fall like a brick, and then, at the very last second, light the engines and pray the turbopumps don’t choke on the slosh.”

He mimicked the SpaceLiner manoeuvre with his hand - a chaotic tumbling motion, followed by a violent, desperate flip.

“It was chaos. It relied on aerodynamic instability. It relied on brute force to arrest terminal velocity in seconds. It broke the airframes. It terrified the passengers. It was not engineering; it was Russian Roulette with physics.”

Erin took a deep breath, centring himself. His posture changed. He became elongated, elegant.

“The Hal Busse was different. Because of the ITT buoyancy, we didn’t have to fall. We didn’t have to be a brick. When we hit the atmosphere, we engaged the coils. We reduced our effective weight. We didn’t plummet; we skated.”

He swept his hand across the room in a long, descending glide path.

“We stayed high. We surfed the upper atmosphere, bleeding off that twenty-eight thousand kilometres an hour over thousands of miles. The hull drank the heat. The plasma flow was laminar, smooth. We were a glider the size of a cathedral.”

“And then,” Erin whispered, his voice trembling with the anticipation of the climax, “we approached the landing zone. We are subsonic now. Floating. Horizontal. Belly to the ground.”

He closed his eyes again. He wasn’t in the room anymore. He was in the cockpit of a Hal Busse, hands on the yoke, feeling the ship hum around him.

“The computer aligns the geodetics. The AME blades spool up. The magnetic rings glow. And we begin… the Swan-Neck.”

Erin’s body moved. He leaned forward, then swept his arms up and back in a fluid, curling motion. It was a perfect physical representation of a complex vector calculus.

“Pitch up,” he narrated, his voice a low chant. “Nose rises. Forty degrees. Sixty. The ITT shifts the centre of buoyancy aft. The engines vector down. We are not flipping; we are curling. Like a swan lifting its head from the water.”

He held the pose - arms raised, chest open, balanced perfectly.

“The forward momentum bleeds into lift. The horizontal velocity becomes vertical thrust. It is continuous. Fluid. Agilità. There is no moment of zero-g panic. There is no ‘suicide burn’ where you fall before you fly. You transition from flying forward to hovering upward in one heartbeat.”

He slowly lowered his arms, bringing his hands together as if cradling something fragile.

“The ship stands upright on a column of temporal space buoyancy. We are hovering at five hundred metres. Silent. Stable. The landing legs deploy - click-clack-click. And we lower.”

He pressed his hands down onto the imaginary pad.

“Contact. Engine cut-off. The steam vents. The magnetic ring fades.”

Erin opened his eyes. He was breathing hard, flushed with the exertion of the memory. He looked at us, challenging us to deny the beauty of it.

“That was the Ballet. Ten times a day. We took five hundred tons of delicate medical equipment, or unstable isotopes, or terrified refugees, and we brought them down from the heavens without spilling a drop of water.”

He walked back to the desk, leaning against it, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead.

“The old rockets… they were boxers. They took a beating and kept standing. The Hal Busse was a dancer. It knew exactly where its centre was. It knew exactly how the earth moved beneath it.”

“And the future?” my colleague asked, sensing that Erin was reaching the end of the technical lecture. “The 2000-ton class? The Gigants?”

Erin laughed, reaching for his cold tea.

“Ah. The Gigants. The 2000-ton lifters. And the monsters that came after - the 2500-tonners with their 300-ton payloads, and the 5000-ton leviathans moving 600 tons at a time.”

He shook his head, amused.

“They were too big for the Swan-Neck. Physics has limits, even for us. If you try to pitch a 5000-ton ship up ninety degrees in the lower atmosphere, the structural stress would snap the keel. The inertia is too great.”

“So how do they land?”

“They don’t land,” Erin said, a mischievous glint in his eye. “They arrive.”

He used his hand to mimic a flat, steady approach.

“We improved ITT beyond 20%, AMEs run on v0.70. A v0.50 might be coming. Vertical, maybe horizontal takeoff. Horizontal landing. Like the ancient airplanes. We built runways in the Sahara and the Australian Outback. Ten kilometres long, reinforced concrete. The Gigants use the ITT to lighten themselves to almost nothing, and they touch down on wheels. Massive, magnetic-levitation gear.”

Erin chuckled, a sound of genuine delight.

“It is funny, no? You have to explain this to the children on the station today. You tell them, ‘In the old days, machines flew horizontally and landed on wheels.’ And they look at you like you are insane. In their ears, it sounds absurd. To them, space travel is vertical. It is the Swan-Neck. Or docking. The idea of a runway… it feels primitive to them. Like a horse and cart.”

He looked out the window again. The Earth was returning, a sliver of blue dawn breaking over the rim of the world.

“But for the Hal Busse… for the ship that built this station… the vertical landing was the only way. We didn’t have runways in the ocean where Venice used to be. We had platforms. We had to be precise.”

Erin walked over to the model of the Hal Busse one last time. He touched the triangular blade array, running his finger along the sharp edge of the metalo-ceramic skirt.

“That is what I mean by the Art of Engineering,” he said softly. “It isn’t just the math. It isn’t just the efficiency. It is the feeling of the machine. The Ares Dynamics boosters fell with rage. They fought the ground.”

He looked at me, his face open, vulnerable, and profoundly proud.

“We didn’t crash them back to Earth, gents. We didn’t fight the planet. We set them down like a mother placing a child in a crib. Gentle. Quiet. Safe.”

He let his hand linger on the model for a moment longer, then pulled away. The technical lecture was over. The engineering lesson was done. All that was left now was the truth.

“But even a gentle landing,” Erin murmured, turning away from the model to face the door of his apartment, “leaves a mark.”

---

Chapter 9: The Legacy (The Testament)

The lecture was over. The energy that had sustained Erin S. Green Brian through the technical descriptions of the Hal Busse and the kinetic poetry of the Swan-Neck manoeuvre seemed to evaporate all at once. He sat back in the heavy chair, and for the first time, he looked small against the backdrop of the cosmos.

Outside, the station’s rotation had brought the sun into view again - a harsh, blinding flare that washed out the stars. The solar filters on the window instantly darkened, turning the room into a cool, shadowed sanctuary.

“Darius died in 2052,” Erin said into the silence. He wasn’t looking at us. He was looking at the darkened glass, perhaps seeing a reflection we couldn’t. “He saw the first phase of the station completed. He saw the Delta-Ring pressurized. But he never saw the cures.”

He picked up a stylus from the desk and turned it over in his fingers.

“The history books call it the ‘End of the Era of Giants.’ Reveers was gone. Voss was gone. The world moved on to smaller men with louder voices. Politics returned. Bureaucracy returned. But the Station… the Station remained.”

“It is the premier research facility in the system,” I noted. “The breakthroughs in oncology made here changed global expectancy statistics.”

“Oncology,” Erin repeated, testing the word. “Yes. That is the public face. Surgenia’s legacy. We cure the sick from the surface. But Darius? Darius was looking further.”

Erin leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Do you think we can go to Jupiter? To Saturn? To the stars? Not with rockets. We solved the rocket problem. We solved the gravity problem. But we have not solved the biological problem. Cosmic radiation. Microgravity cellular degradation. The mutation rate in deep space is a wall higher than the speed of light.”

He gestured to the walls of the room, to the station humming around us.

“Venice Station is not just a hospital. It is a laboratory for the evolution of the species. We are learning how to keep the human genome stable in the void. Without this place… without the work done in the Gamma-Sector labs… the deep space colonies are just graveyards waiting to be filled.”

He looked at me, his eyes sharp again.

“The Hal Busse lifted the weight. But Venice Station lifts the burden of our mortality. That was the dream. To make us strong enough to leave.”

Suddenly, a soft, melodic chime echoed through the apartment. It wasn’t a door chime. It was internal, systemic.

The lighting in the room shifted instantly. The harsh, clear work-lights faded, replaced by a soft, warm amber glow. It was a specific hue - soothing, bio-rhythmic, medical.

Erin stiffened. He glanced at the analogue watch on his wrist, then at the bio-monitor discreetly embedded in the oak desk surface.

“My apologies,” he said, his voice turning brittle. “I must cut this short.”

He began to stand up. It was a struggle. The fluid grace he had shown when miming the flight of the ships was gone. He pushed himself up with trembling arms, his knuckles white against the wood. In the amber light, his skin looked translucent, papery. The “Old Greybeard” engineer vanished, replaced by a frail, elderly man carrying a heavy invisible load.

“You have… a meeting?” my colleague asked, gathering her notes.

“I have an appointment,” Erin corrected. He walked slowly around the desk. He didn’t move toward the exit door where we had entered. He moved toward the small, private cabinet door in the rear of the apartment.

“Section 4. Oncology. Phase Three treatment.”

We froze. The realization hit us like a pressure drop. He wasn’t just the architect of the station. He wasn’t just the retired genius living in the penthouse.

“You are a patient,” I whispered.

Erin stopped. He put his hand on the doorframe to steady himself.

“For two years,” he said. “The same thing that took Darius. The pancreas. It is… stubborn.”

He looked back at the empty chair where he had envisioned Darius Voss sitting moments ago. His eyes welled up. It wasn’t a sob, just a silent, overflowing of grief that he had held back for decades. A single tear tracked through the deep lines of his face.

“It is hard,” he choked out, his Euro-English accent thickening with emotion. “It is hard when you are reminded every day that you owe your life to a friend who died for the same reasons. I lie in the machines I designed. I take the isotopes the Hal Busse carried. And I breathe.”

He wiped his face with a shaking hand, angry at his own weakness.

“He built this house to save himself, and he died at the door. For him, it came too late. I am living on his borrowed time.”

The chime sounded again, slightly more urgent.

Erin straightened his spine. He took a deep breath, forcing the engineer back into control of the biology. He buttoned his jacket. He looked at us one last time, his dignity reassembled, though the sadness remained etched in the amber light.

“The interview is over,” he said firmly. “I have to go. The machines work, gents. They do exactly what we told them to do.”

He opened the rear door, revealing a sterile white corridor and a medical drone waiting to escort him.

“The rest…” he paused, looking at the ceiling, past the metal, past the shielding, out to the silence of the universe. “…depends on your paperwork. And God.”

The door slid shut. The amber light remained. We were left alone in the silent room, with the view of the turning Earth and the heavy wooden desk of the man who had lifted the world.

---

Nova Arcis