Back to work.
I walk the central spine, boots clipping on the grated floor. The viewport is the size of a garage door. Below, the Earth hangs like a cracked blue marble, half in shadow. Above, nothing but the black felt of space and the slow crawl of the orbital elevators.
I glance at the duty roster. Two mechanics are on break, playing zero-G poker in the centrifuge. “I’ll wake them. Welcome to the Hub.” moon hub
“ Polaris ,” I say, “divert to bay twelve. It’s tight, but you’ll fit. Watch the antenna array on your port side.”
Earthrise again. Beautiful, cold, and irrelevant for the next six hours. Back to work
They think the moon is about science. Or glory. Or war.
The Hub isn't a city. Not yet. It’s a knuckle: a titanium-and-concrete junction where the Lunar South Pole supply lines meet the tourist ferries from Tranquility. By day, it’s chaos—miners bartering ice for carbon-fiber patches, scientists fighting for bandwidth on the deep-space array, and rich idiots paying $50 million to jump in low-gravity bounce houses. Below, the Earth hangs like a cracked blue
The first thing you notice is the quiet.