The Lagrange station was the largest construction ever built by Man. Nate knew of the technological prowess, as its construction had meant the true start of the colonization of the moon, events he had witnessed in his teenage years, but the size of the station fifty years ago was incomparable to the size of the current station. Every country in the world wanted a place to park their spaceships, and not only countries but also every mining company, every large business. The lunar lift, a project that was only in its infancy during Nate’s pre-jump time, had been finished, and it had made everyone’s desires accessible. The station had subsequently grown.

Nate was looking at it through the window in his bedroom. He was waiting anxiously for news from the Saviour’s crewmembers. No, he corrected himself, his crewmates. They had been orbiting the station for a few hours, waiting for the authorization to dock.

Tess had told him it could take a few hours: The Saviour did not have a specific docking hangar available, it needed to wait for a spot to open amongst the hangars reserved for the United Nations ships.

Anxiety in the command room had been too much for the young man’s own nerves, and he had confined himself in his room.

The station was peculiar. He did not know if he really liked the giant metal construction that looked like a conglomeration of grey cubes, mirroring one and another and stuck together. He recognized the work of the builder-robots AI on it. He preferred the old one, built by men, the Lagrange station of his memories. It was small, constructed around an old International space station. There had been something of an artistic expression in it, a soul, that the gargantuan geometric dehumanized blocks in front of him lacked.

But Nate understood the reason for the current form of the station. The space lift as well as the large improvements on fusion reactor efficiency had opened the path to the exploration of the entirety of the solar system. Shiina had explained to him that there was a colony on mars of at least two hundred individuals and that another Lagrange station between earth and the sun was currently being built. She had also told him that space tourism had greatly expanded, that there even existed absurdly costly trips to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Nate wasn’t surprised about that last part, as it was exactly why the God’s View had been built in the first place. What he hadn’t expected was the last part: the advancement of industries into space. Lack of rare minerals had pushed many industries to turn towards the stars, or in this case, asteroids. Fifty percent of the station was exclusively reserved for mining vessels. They were much larger than any other ship, but also much lighter. They refueled on the station after dropping their loads of minerals on the moon.

Nate was currently looking at one of those ships, entering a cubic hangar in the station.

He heard a knock on his door.

“Come in.” He said.

He was getting so used to seeing the young woman with mixed Caucasian and Asiatic traits appear from behind his door that he took a few seconds to recognize Honey.

“Honey?”

“Don’t look so disappointed kid, or I’ll have to conclude you don’t like me.”

“The authorization?”

“We are good to go. I told you, there was no reason to worry. If there had been a problem, they would not have made us wait, we would have known as soon as we made contact.”

“I’m going to the bridge.”

“Yeah, better you handle the engine. By the way, I’ll be staying with you in the ship while we transit it to the moon and mod it.”

“No, you don’t have to…”

“If I go back to the surface, I’ll just be eating burgers and drink. I’d rather not drink surrounded by strangers; I am loose-lipped when I’m drunk.”

Nate held his tongue. He doubted that was the real reason. He couldn’t leave the ship or show himself to the authorities until he received a new ID. He would have to stay in the ship for the entire length of their stop here and the God’s View remodeling on the moon. Nate would have asked to stay anyway, wanting to be present during the alterations done on his ship by Oliver’s contacts. He understood why they could not just leave him alone on the ship though. A man left on his own mere days after his desperate act in the airlock…

“Impressive insight about yourself.” Nate responded.

“Oh no. I just heard it four thousand times, and after that many times, I just started to accept it as my destiny. Clarke women are merciless. And don't be so tense when you talk to me, relax, or I’ll call you grandpa.”

The young man grimaced. “Understood.”

The human bear gave him a large slap on the back, and both left the room towards the main bridge.

Nate was following the whole approach operation. Still, after just turning the engine on and off, just enough to slow down the ship, he quickly saw he had nothing to worry about. Tess and Oliver had quickly taken hold of the ship’s commands, and the first mate seemed to have studied the instructions and recommendations of the young man about the retrorockets. In Nate’s time, an individual wanting to leave Earth had to follow rigorous training, with very few exceptions. It seemed this law was still in place, considering the professionalism and expertise of the captain and her co-pilot, even though this was a brand new ship they had no prior knowledge of.

“We’ll need some cameras around the airlock. I want to be able to check if the linkage is done well or not.” Tess said as the ship was entering the hangar vertically.

Oliver nodded, hitting some keywords on the tablet at his wrist, before going back to his screens.

“Our approach is optimal.” He announced.

A few minutes later, a deep sound echoed through the ship, and Nate heard for the first time the sound of the metallic grip of the airlock door clamp down.

“Good. This was the easy part.” Tess announced. She stood up and looked at her crew.

“I trust you. You know what is at stake. Shiina, will you be alright on your own?”

“Yeeeah. I have done it so many times with Honey. Go to the United Nations office. Ask for a refuel. I have the signed papers.”

“Good. Nate, will you be alright? I know how hard it must be, being stuck here while you certainly want to know how everything has changed. You will have to wait for our next leave.”

“I am aware. I will patiently wait and prevent anyone from entering the command centre and the greenhouse. In any case, you left me Honey. Everything will be fine.”

The captain sighed. “Sam?”

“Yes, modernizing the med bay will take most of my free time. I won’t be far away from the ship.”

“Perfect. For the most part, you are on holiday. But in case of emergency, I want you back at your posts as soon as possible. No gustatory trip to Europe this time.”

“Hey! I’m staying on the ship with Nate! And it was one time." Honey complained.

“And international police came to ask me where you were after it.”

“I had been drinking slightly too much, I’ll admit.”

“In any case, it was just an example. If one of Oliver’s friends becomes too inquisitive, I want you all to be ready to leave.”

“Yes captain!” Shouted the Saviour crew in unison, followed by Nate a few seconds late.

Tess nodded, before finishing with: “I’ll see you in a month.”

Nate turned off his computer. He had close to fifty years of history to catch up with, many things had changed, but unfortunately, news outlets had not. He could not bear to watch another apocalyptic announcement today. The great Asiatic seas war was the tenth ‘earth-shattering’ ‘world-destroying' event, or even better ‘The one that would force humanity to change’. He had watched video archives from two years after that, and the world had gone back to normal. Everyone had forgotten the dead; the cries of parents and children who had lost their relatives had been overwhelmed by misinformation and celebrities in scandalous affairs.

He went to the bar at the end of the corridor. Outside his sound-proof room, he could hear the sound of builder-robots working on the fake fusion engine. The young man had not left the ship once. It was too dangerous, and he didn’t really want to either. The hangar where the ship had been placed was in bad shape. There was a large hole that forced you to put on a helmet if you wanted to go outside, and the dust accumulating on his window was a testimony of the surrounding filth.

Honey though went and left. Nate had initially helped the mechanic in removing all the signs of Site inside the ship, and all mentions of the name God’s View. After that, Honey was outside, supervising the remote-controlled robots and making sure no one was coming to check things in too much detail.

The remote-control system’s advantage was that there was no one coming inside the hangar on a regular basis. Someone had been paid to build the exterior of a fusion engine, without being aware of the lack of an actual engine. Everything was done remotely; the designs were operated on a three-dimensional program and the robot interpreted and reproduced those designs in reality. This way of doing things was the same as in Nate’s time, even though the robots and programs used were different. This was one of the reasons why no one had known about the Hadron collider being built with the materials of the fusion reactor. The men in charge had only realized that when coming personally, and at that time, the temporal engine had been finished already. With a bit of luck, it would camouflage the modifications on the ship as simple repairs.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The redesign of the collider had been the most dangerous part. The Saviour’s crew had gathered a large amount of money to pay a ship architect to come and transform the metal ring at the front of the ship into something more in style with the rest of it. To do that, he had come in person, intrigued by the pictures he had received. And then his interest grew. Fortunately, the collider had not needed much change, mainly adding decorations everywhere on the ring except around the impact chamber, which meant it had been finished quickly. The man had been paid a hefty sum, and having spoken with him, Nate knew he did not understand what he was seeing. That was not the part that interested the architect, he was an artist and it was the old design that tickled his curiosity. Still, the young man was far from reassured. The architect only needed to open his mouth around the wrong crowd and then…

On another note, he had done spectacular work. The ship had been repainted in silver colour, and the golden hues on the accelerator made the top look like the sun. It now looked like a ship carried by a star. Nate liked that vision of the vessel, surprisingly close to the real way the ship moved.

As he approached the bar door, it opened automatically.

Honey was already inside, a glass of whiskey in front of him.

“Honey? Really? At this hour?” Nate asked.

The man with bear-like appearance turned around with a guilty look. “What? It is eight pm! I can have a pick-me-up after a long day of work, can’t I?”

Nate checked the time on his phone. He needed a new one, as this one was currently incompatible with every current system. But to buy one he needed money and a new identity.

“Oh. I thought it was earlier than that.”

“Hard to tell the time when you box yourself in. Do not worry. In the next rotation, just a few months from now, you’ll definitely be able to roam around the station, and you’ll get a paycheck!”

“But not on Earth.”

“Most likely, no. The way they check your identity around the space lift after the attacks of…”

“I’ve seen.” Nate cut him off. He had no desire to go back on apocalyptic news number seven.

“Come and sit down! What do you want?”

Nate didn’t listen to the mechanic. He went to the other side of the counter and pushed on the warm water icon on the coffee machine.

“Really? I thought I had found a comrade after hearing you had a drink with my niece. That’s the third night in a row that you drink tea!”

Nate shrugged. “Tea supplies were not prioritized fifty years ago. I did not have access to it on the lunar station. Four months without any. I am three-quarters British. I have stereotypes to perpetuate.”

“Tch. What about your remaining quarter? You can’t forget about that one!”

“As it is Japanese, I believe tea is also quite essential to it.”

Honey sighed in desperation.

Nate put an Earl Grey teabag in his cup, then filled it with almost boiling water.

“And why should I listen to the recommendations of an American only drinking American whiskey, when there is century-old scotch in the cupboards?”

“Because he knows what is best! Nothing is as good as…”

“I give! I give! For all that is holy, no more talks about American alcohol supremacy.”

“Mhph. You’re going back to your history lessons?” The mechanic changed subjects.

“No, I can’t watch any more depressing news for today. I thought we could eat together.”

“Still nothing about what happened fifty years ago?”

Nate’s expression darkened. “Nothing. Site’s stock value plummets sharply after the disappearance of the ship, and no one even talks about the company after that. Gets rebought by a cruise ship conglomerate. To be more precise, no one mentions the ship’s disappearance, I can only guess it’s what caused the stock market value to suddenly drop. No mention of the God’s View, no mention of a destroyed hangar or an attack on private grounds.”

“Mhh. I would recommend not pursuing your search any further, then. I’m not the conspiracy theory kind but…”

“Yeah. I thought about that. I did not push more. Even if it is not the American government, for a group to be powerful enough to just make something like Site disappear from the stock market…it’s scary.”

There was a short silence, finally broken by Honey.

“I’ll accept your generous proposition, but I’ll be the one doing the cooking, this time.”

“It’s space food. You just put it in the microwave and…”

“And that is the precise state of mind pushing me to take charge.”

“…And that’s how Tess managed to dodge four missiles without any countermeasures!”

Honey, glass in hand, was sharing his tales with the captain. It seemed that they had known each other for a long time, and had been members of the same military spaceship before working on the Saviour.

“Four?” Nate only half-believed him.

“Four! Or three, I don’t remember. What pissed me off the most was that afterward, we could not even blame China for the attacks on the asteroid miners, because the attackers were ‘pirates’. The same pirates that were all speaking mandarin and had managed to get themselves a spaceship. Really, politicians, I never understood them.”

“What about Oliver?”

“Oliver came much later. The United Nations had recruited me and Tess to be part of their new lost ship initiative. LSP in short. It was a shit name so we call ourselves the Space EMT's.”

“Because putting ‘space’ in front of a word makes it cooler?” Nate watched the mechanic gulp down his third glass of whiskey.

“Exactly!”

“And so? Oliver was also recruited?”

“No no no. The little countries of the United Nations allied to create their own ships. Not all paid the same, everyone had different objectives. It was a mess. At the start, it really was just me and Tess in charge of a three to five men ship. Only two was rough, we barely slept at the beginning.”

“I can’t believe that. A ship is such a large investment, why do things so unprofessionally?”

“So many countries teaming up is beautiful on paper, but the different objectives, the completely different methods and thinking processes… Personally, I think it’s a miracle we actually managed such a global space system. Ten years to create. Unbelievably fast.”

Nate thought about it for a moment. He was having a hard time comprehending; the birth of the space branch of the United Nations was an event thirty years in the future for him. From his point of view, such a wacky organization could never have seen the day.

Honey continued his story.

“It was our fifth…no sixth mission. Just after our first time off. I had gone visit my sister and my very little niece. She was so cute at the time…” He sighed. “Well, after getting back on the job, Tess and I were full of energy. We had spotted a distress signal coming from a mining vessel the second it was sent. Well, three seconds for the message to get to us I guess.”

“You were close.”

“Very. In total, there are sixth space EMT ships, four in service at a time. We patrol around the asteroid belt of Jupiter, on the road between Mars and Earth, or on the path between Jupiter and Earth. Those are the three spots with the most incidents. Even on very used roads, dust or micrometeorites strikes are not that uncommon, and neither are technical issues. Also, you won’t believe how many captains we had to help because they had forgotten to refuel in hydrogen or because of inefficient approach manoeuvres.”

Nate grimaced. “If something like that had happened in my time…The astronauts doing that would have been the laugh of the whole world.”

“Oh, if we can prove the error is human, that’s still the case today, but unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. We lack the budget for investigations and, of the dozens of ships we found with no fuel left, we only managed to prove the incompetence of one of their captains. They had left their comms channel open while we were refueling them. Funniest audio of my life.”

The young man facepalmed. “That reminds me about the theory of Henry Thorncraft. He foresaw that the more space travel would become mainstream, the fewer astronauts would be well trained. The rise of idiocy in numbers.”

“And he was right. Look at me, I forgot everything about relativity. We had to study it though.”

“There are differences between forgetting about complex physics and refueling your ship.”

“You are not wrong about that.” Honey smiled, showing his teeth.

Nate sighed.

“So, to go back to the story, Tess and you responded to the mining vessel’s call.”

“Exactly. We quickly understood this wasn’t your usual rescue operation. They were being shot at. A pirate ship was trying to steal their catch. Have to say, those miners had found a particularly decent asteroid. It had to be worth millions. Oliver always was good at getting the best deals out of things. He was the captain of the mining vessel; its name was the Crater. Paid by his dad.”

"His dad?"

"Ah, me and my big mouth. It's not my secret to tell."

"Sure, I won't pry, so?" Nate sat down comfortably in the bar’s coach. Honey was forgetting to drink, focusing on his story.

“A beautiful ship, to be honest. Our first mate had done quite the…mhh…interesting modifications. An exploration Corvette was shooting at them. Compared to the Crater, it was a mosquito, but honestly, the mining vessel had no chance. Even Oliver could not manage to get a permit to arm a civilian ship. He survived the missile barrage with drone countermeasures, decoy flares, and a few manoeuvres that would have cut every other mining vessel on the market in half, but by the time we arrived, it was too late. Another mining vessel, competitors, were boarding his ship, and we were in deep trouble. The Corvette was out of missiles, so we could have just abandoned them, but Tess, who was slightly more hot-blooded at the time, wanted to save them. We tried to threaten them at first. Told them they had been caught in the act, that the international police was going to put them all into a little coffin of a cell the moment they stepped back in the Lagrange Station.”

“They didn’t give up, I suppose.”

“No, they opted for a violent counter-attack. The Corvette was on us, but Tess had anticipated their move. We had our own drones, and even if they are completely harmless for big ships, they are still lumps of metal, and against small ships like the Corvette… They did not expect us to accelerate towards them then drop our drones at their face at the last minute. Still, even with the Corvette out of the picture, we were still at a dead end. The competing mining vessel had taken the Crater crew hostage, and neither I nor Tess felt capable of saving them action-movie hero style. Fortunately, while we distracted them with our shitty negotiation skills, Oliver was escaping. He hacked and reprogrammed the aeration system on both the mining ships and knocked out cold everyone inside. We left the pirates inside the disabled Crater, so that they could get picked up by a military ship later. We picked every valuable we could off their mining vessel, scrapped it, and then it was just a matter of bringing back Oliver and his crew to the Lagrange station. And write the longest report of my life about the events. When headquarters heard what we had used the drones for, ho ho. They were really unhappy. While we brought them back, Oliver and Tess got closer, and once back on Earth, he asked if he could stay with us. A year later, he and Tess got married.”

“He asked to be part of your crew, and the United Nations just said yes?”

“He was captain of a ship belonging to a private corporation, he had the experience and expertise. There were no problems. It wasn’t that simple when Shiina and then Sam came aboard. Familiar reasons aren’t enough for the administration. Oliver has a way to get what he wants though. High-ranked friends.”

“Which explains why he’s the one in charge of my fake ID.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, thanks for the story Honey.”

“It’s one of the more boring ones. Oliver always adds the part about ‘when she appeared from the airlock, I knew she was the one.” And other vomit-inducing rainbows like that.”

Nate smiled. “Cute. At first glance, I would have never guessed they were together.”

“That’s because our captain is too serious. Work first, then relationships.”

“I see.”

“Instead of a love story, our best rescue story is one of a research vessel. They had no comms open, no lights. A crew of fifty, gone. And get that, they were a facility experimenting on extra-terrestrial micro-organisms…”

Nate laughed joyously. “Fine, tell me about your horror story. It will definitely help me sleep.”