Space Dock

The machinery on Callisto's surface continued to hum, construction sites remained bustling, and the great construction effort pressed steadily onward.

The Orbital Mass Accelerator continuously launched supplies into the dark Sky Dome.

The night sky here was forever dark, and so was the daytime sky.

Amid the Interstellar Dust, even the starlight of old struggled to reach them.

A satellite in orbit captured an image.

The glow of Callisto, humanity's last harbor, was like civilization's final candle flame, flickering precariously in the boundless darkness.

Beyond that, wherever one looked, there was nothing but darkness.

Interstellar Dust blocked most of the signals from the universe—Electromagnetic Waves—leaving the humans on Callisto as though they were cut off from the rest of the world.

Quiet to the point of silence, dark to the point of loneliness.

If humanity's last survivors were to sleep forever here, they would leave quietly too, like an insignificant ant dying in some dark corner.

To avoid becoming such ants, humanity worked day and night without rest.

Huge quantities of steel, nonferrous metals, and rare metals were processed into semi-finished products on the ground, packaged, loaded onto Electromagnetic Catapults, and launched toward Callisto's synchronous orbit. Among the countless items sent into space, aside from all kinds of semi-finished construction materials, there were modular equipment assemblies.

More than two years had passed since the Great Cylinder Spaceship construction plan was proposed, yet there was still no sign of a spaceship in Callisto's orbit.

It was not that humanity had failed to work hard. Rather, the actual construction of the spaceship had not even begun. A ship that large could not be built on a planet, so throughout the two years since the plan had been proposed, every piece of material sent to synchronous orbit had been used to build a Space Dock.

Yes, a Space Dock.

The technology for constructing Space Docks had already matured before the disaster. In fact, many large transport ships in the past had been manufactured in Space Docks.

Humanity was merely building another Space Dock now. It was not their first time, so they were highly experienced.

The difference from before was that this dock was larger, because the Great Cylinder Spaceship it was meant to build was larger than any vessel humanity had ever made.

However, because it was intended for one-time use, this Space Dock was far cruder than earlier docks. Many things did not need to be designed for a long service life. Thus, it was the largest dock in history, yet it was built at extraordinary speed.

For that very reason, it looked very different from the Space Docks people imagined.

When people spoke of a Space Dock, they often imagined a fortress-like structure in space, or a construction formed from two rib-like frameworks joined together.

Most conventional Space Docks were like that. The Space Dock once in Earth's synchronous orbit had looked like ribs joined from both sides, though that dock had used the Tiangong Space Station as its industrial core.

But now, there was no industrial core at all. Thus, the first step in building this dock from scratch was actually to establish its industrial core.

Over the past years, countless construction modules manufactured according to blueprints had been sent into space day and night, then pieced together in synchronous orbit like a puzzle.

In space, they were assembled into Living Modules, Mechanical Arms, Machine Shops, Remote Synchronized Construction Robots, Small Transport Ships, and all manner of other equipment.

These things formed the core of the Space Dock.

Calling it the core of a Space Dock was somewhat misleading. In essence, it was a large Space Station. An ordinary Space Station had more comprehensive functions, while the dock core focused on industrial construction, but both were large structures in space.

After more than two years of work, the Space Dock had finally begun to take shape before people's eyes.

It consisted of a core roughly the size of the Tiangong Space Station, along with L-Shaped Rails and Work Corridors extending upward, downward, left, and right from the core.

It looked like a chip growing long legs.

The rails and Work Corridors extending from both ends of the dock core were the longest, measuring more than 1,800 meters from front to back combined.

During the subsequent shipbuilding project, components sent up from the ground would first undergo further processing in the various workshops within the dock core, then be carried along the rails to the Work Platforms at the ends.

There, the first step of spaceship construction would take place—laying the keel.

Engineers would travel through the Work Corridors to the Work Platforms to carry out their tasks.

Because they were building a Great Cylinder Spaceship, laying the keel here meant assembling an Electromagnetic Central Axis Bearing.

With laser positioning assistance, the core section of this finished central-axis bearing, over two hundred meters in diameter, would be assembled here. Afterward, the Space Dock would begin from this central axis and gradually construct the planned Great Cylinder Spaceship.

Because it was a relatively crude Space Dock rushed into completion, it could not remain fixed in place like a fully equipped dock and build the entire spaceship from beginning to end.

After completing one section of the spaceship, this half-sized Space Dock would use its thrusters to slowly shift around the spaceship's central axis to the areas where construction had not yet begun.

It could be called a mobile Space Dock.

Once it completed a circle around the central axis, the spaceship would be finished.

To begin constructing the spaceship as soon as possible, the designers came up with this Space Dock design.

Though it was a rushed creation, it suited humanity's current circumstances perfectly—there were too few people.

To be honest, if they had built a complete dock, humanity might not have had enough people to fill all the positions in it.

Even this half-sized Space Dock already had as many as eight thousand workers and engineers, nearly one-tenth of the entire human population of the base.

In two and a half years, humanity had built a Space Dock from nothing in Callisto's synchronous orbit.

The power of technology gave everyone hope, but Yue Yuan, along with those who knew the reserves of nuclear fission minerals, remained deeply worried.

Today, after finishing the construction report on the Space Dock, Yue Yuan headed into the alien spaceship wreckage again. It was not because some major secret had been discovered. Five minutes earlier, the Excavation Team had reported signs of what appeared to be alien remains.

They had apparently found them while excavating and clearing out the alien spaceship's cockpit.

Before the disaster, such a discovery would have been enough to shock all humanity. But now, it was little more than an interlude.

Yue Yuan went to take a look merely out of curiosity about alien life. It was not as though he knew how to analyze remains; he was simply there to watch.

The door leading from the alien spaceship's cockpit into the hull had already been opened, and the cockpit, once filled with layers of soil, had been cleared out. When Yue Yuan arrived, he even saw something resembling a seat.

Why only resembling one? Because that thing looked like a wine glass rather than a seat.