Nova Arcis D 2
The Engineers of the Void
“Hard-won hope?!”, Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai said unisono. They had moved from the high observation deck overlooking the chaotic energy of the main docking bays. Their new location was quieter, more permanent, more rooted.
They were now walking through the residential sector of the great ship-families on Nova Arcis, a district nestled between the main commercial docks and the cavernous, silent shipyards. This was not a place of tourists or transient crews. This was home. The architecture was different here. Instead of the wide, public plazas of the main cylinder, the space was defined by immense, interconnected residential towers, each one a vertical village belonging to a specific clan—the Smith-Venturas, the Nakamura-Lis, and a dozen others. The air was still and quiet, filled only with the low, almost imperceptible hum of the station’s life support and the distant, percussive clang of a hammer on metal from the shipyards. It was a place that felt ancient, settled, a bastion of tradition amidst the constant flow of the station.
Cokas walked with a familiar ease, a man at home in this quiet, powerful enclave. He paused, looking up at one of the great towers, its windows glowing with the warm light of a thousand family apartments. “A civilization built on correcting its own mistakes,” he mused, his voice a low, reflective echo of the story they had just told. “The Wolf-Pack… they looked into the abyss of their own worst impulses—the greed of the Hong-Qi-Tan, the biological horror of the ‘Sesame Bloom’—and they chose to be better. They chose to be gardeners, to be preservationists. A powerful lesson.”
He turned to LYRA, a thoughtful, comparative expression on his face. “It’s a philosophy born of trauma and scarcity. They had no native life, so they learned to cherish the memory of it. They faced collapse, so they learned to value stability above all else.”
LYRA.ai, ever the analyst, picked up his thought and pivoted, guiding the broadcast to its next great subject. “But while the Wolf-Pack was forging its identity through a painful process of internal revolution and a deep, almost spiritual connection to a recreated Earth,” she said, her voice a clean, sharp counterpoint to Cokas’s reflective tone, “the Republic of Proxima, our first and greatest pillar, was engaged in a very different kind of project. Their gaze was fixed ever outwards. Having found a ‘second Earth’ in Amara, their first great colonial act was not one of consolidation, but of pure, audacious expansion. Their first daughter colony was a different kind of experiment entirely.”
As she spoke, the 3D-media-stream, which had been subtly capturing the quiet grandeur of the family towers, shifted. The solid architecture dissolved, replaced by a stark, beautiful, and deeply alien star-chart. It showed the twin, dim embers of two brown dwarf stars, Luhman 16 A and B, their light casting a faint, ghostly glow on a retinue of resource-rich dwarf planets and a single, massive gas giant.
Cokas’s expression shifted from nostalgic respect to a kind of intellectual excitement. He gestured to the alien vista now surrounding them. “And this is where the story of humanity’s divergence truly begins,” he said, his voice now filled with a teacher’s passion. “Luhman 16, or ‘Sweet Sixteen’ as the Proximans affectionately and ironically call it. A system with no habitable worlds. No soil to till, no native life to preserve, no garden to cultivate. Just cold, hard rock, a massive gas giant, and an abundance of energy and rare minerals.”
He looked directly at the camera, a challenging glint in his eye. “This was not a place for the Wolf-Pack’s gardeners. This was a place for pure technologists.”
“And yet,” LYRA.ai interjected, her voice taking on a new tone of subtle correction and deep wonder, “the paradox of Sweet Sixteen is that these pure technologists used their skills to become the most radical gardeners of all. For centuries, their culture remained one of the most insular and misunderstood in the Aproxi sphere.”
The star-chart behind them dissolved. The 3D-media-stream resolved into a stunning, impossible image. It wasn’t a single station. It was a cluster of sixteen smaller, unique orbital habitats, each one, although were O’Neil spheres, a different shape, drifting like a cloud of sculpted jewels in the faint light of the brown dwarfs. One was a perfect, crystalline sphere. Another was a twisting, organic helix. A third was a collection of interconnected, geodesic domes. There was nothing uniform or industrial about them.
“They live entirely in orbital habitats,” LYRA continued, “but to call them ‘stations’ is to miss the point entirely. Ross2Ma, interior view, Delta Station.”
The broadcast plunged inside one of the habitats. The view was even for a station-born disorienting. There were no visible buildings, no corridors, no gleaming metal walls. There was only a dense, lush, and seemingly endless virgin woodland. Massive trees soared upwards, their branches forming a living canopy. Strange, beautiful, bioluminescent mosses cast a soft, multi-coloured glow on the forest floor. The air seemed thick with the scent of damp earth and alien blossoms. The entire station was a garden.
Cokas Bluna stared at the image, his own experience with the manicured parks of Nova Arcis seeming sterile by comparison. “It’s an entire, self-contained biosphere,” he breathed, a look of genuine awe on his face. “The habitats, the life support, the recycling systems… they’re not visible. They’re woven into the ecosystem itself. The trees are the structural supports. The soil is the waste processor. It’s… it’s a living machine.”
“Precisely,” LYRA confirmed. “Each of the sixteen stations is a unique, closed-loop ecological experiment. A society of high-tech specialists who chose not to live in cities, but to build worlds. Their story is more than just another colonial venture. It is a glimpse into a potential future — a future where humanity doesn’t just live on worlds, or among them, but learns to live within the very ecosystems it creates.”
The broadcast held on the image of the strange, beautiful, and utterly wild-looking interior of the habitat. Cokas and LYRA stood in silence for a moment, two narrators from a world of artificial parks, presenting their audience with a story from a world that had, paradoxically, become the most natural place in the galaxy. It was a perfect, jarring transition, a journey not from green to metal, but from a tamed garden to a brilliant, engineered, and untameable wilderness.