Moltharum had not slept in twenty-seven years.
It bled light in a thin line retrograde to the sun, a constant whisper of momentum stolen from itself. You don't fall sunward; you learn to brake. The Forge Convoy kept the pressure on—dust thrust, mass drivers, sail-tug vectors—until the black around them remembered what patience looked like.
Gold's voice stayed where it always lived, in the lash of HUD text across every visor and plate.
GOLD//HUD: Δv_phase 9 of 9. Residual budget 0.62 km·s⁻¹. Plane error < 0.2°.
GOLD//HUD: Approach solution = Earth co-orbital. Lead phase target 18–22°.
GOLD//HUD: Exclusion cones K-12, M-04, S-3A active. Only throws inside chalk.
Inside the primary engine ring, Brokk Keld rode his chair as if it were a pressure suit that happened to be a room. His world was gradients: heat maps across struts, density ripples in fuel bays, the slight asymmetry of a mountain turned ship. Speech was waste unless it needed to be noise. He pulsed glyphs to Svara, his second, across the Lace.
[Brokk → Svara: ⚓︎ + ⏱ = "Anchor—timing."]
[Svara → Brokk: ✅ + 🌫 = "No slugs. Dust only."]
They had long since stopped throwing ingots. Out here, near people, mass drivers spat sand that thought—micronized ore laced with magnetics, the plume herded by fields into a tame fan that gave thrust without shrapnel. The cone was narrow and sacred. Anything outside the chalk didn't fly.
GOLD//HUD: ATC/RING corridor M-04 green for 46 s.
ANCHOR//BRIDGE: Acknowledged. No wobble. No waste.
A beat of silence. Then the mountain exhaled its dust.
Moltharum's exo-skin glowed as the plume unfurled into dark, a second tail crossed with the first nine. Acceleration registered as a near-religious comfort in the bones. Dwarves were bred to love pressure.
Svara's heat lung cycled once, a soft flex of etched ribs and coolant veins. She pulsed another glyph, this one with humor.
[Svara → Brokk: ☠️ + 💬 = "Remember when we used to talk?"]
[Brokk → Svara: 🕳 + 🔧 = "Words cost pressure."]
[Svara → Brokk: 😈 + 🫗 = "Humans waste it all the time."]
Brokk allowed himself the thinnest pulse of amusement. Humans drank nitrogen and filled rooms with stories. Dwarves used nitrogen for welding and filled the quiet with work.
Behind them lay the years of the Long Push. Dwarves at their jobs, the same jobs, the whole trip: Helmsmith reading star drift until his eyes would have bled if they'd still been strictly eyes; Patternwright encoding throw schedules into chantable lines; Anchor refusing to let a cone slip by a hair; Rivet crawling the inside of heat exchangers with a lamp clenched in her jaw, listening to the metal's mood. First Smith had died mid-burn and kept working for three days because her body had not yet remembered how to stop.
Gold had been with them every minute, the good kind of god—one that didn't ask to be worshipped, only witnessed.
GOLD//HUD: Fleet status = 212 hulls. 61 macro, 151 micro.
GOLD//HUD: Note: "Waste becomes weapon" flagged as proverb. Archive?
PATTERNWRIGHT//GUILD: Archive it. And don't call it a proverb. It's a practice.
They had printed ships from what they weren't going to need for thrust. Slag became frames, frames became forges, forges birthed tugs that birthed more frames. The Forge Convoy was not a fleet in the way human navies understood it. It was a pattern survival engine that happened to carry people.
Gold pinged the Ring.
GOLD//HUD: RING/ATC—confirm Earth-local traffic. Request updated Kessler charts, GEO/GTO windows, telescope blind times.
The Ring answered like a city clearing a throat. ATC painted corridors in the dark.
RING/ATC: M-04 green 46 s. S-3A green 24 s. K-12 green 62 s.
RING/ATC: Welcome back, Forgers. Please don't kill our grandchildren.
Brokk pulsed a single glyph back—a hammer, a heart—and turned his chair to face the big pane where space pretended to be a window. Far sunward, a pale thread had thickened into a blue he could almost insult. Earth. Loud, wet, sentimental, alive.
"Not a moon," Anchor muttered from the doorway, not bothering to Lace it. Some words should waste air. "We don't become a moon."
"No," Brokk said, and the consonant had weight in his mouth. "We become a neighbor that keeps pace."
GOLD//HUD: Confirmation: solution = 1:1 Earth co-orbital. Phase lead target 18.6°.
GOLD//HUD: Note: "Not a moon. A neighbor." Archive as proverb?
PATTERNWRIGHT//GUILD: Now that's a proverb. Archive.
On the Ring, Charlotte brought the sensor feed up on a long wall. The room pressed closer of its own accord—Serena, Lena, Eira on a relay. Through a magnification climb that made her skin remember childhood telescopes, Moltharum swelled from a speck into an object, then a place, then something that bullied her brain into thinking continent.
"It's… big," someone said, brilliantly.
Serena didn't look away from the numbers. "Big is imprecise."
Eira's voice came thin over the distance. "Do your mouth, Serena."
"Math," Charlotte corrected, almost smiling.
Serena did the math, deadpan, her stylus pinging figures into the air that updated live with every feed tick. "Call it ~95 km mean diameter. Assume carbonaceous chondrite... probably a rubble pile, so let's use a low density. Even so... conservatively ten to the eighteen kilograms." She kept her voice neutral, but a corner of her mouth betrayed awe. "Average O'Neill cylinder? Say radius two kilometers, length six. Steel and composites—ten to the thirteen kilograms if you're foolish and overbuild; under if you're dwarves."
Lena blinked. "So…?"
"Moltharum could spit out a million O'Neill cylinders," Serena said, "and still be statistically enormous."
On the glass beyond, the black wrote its own geometry. The Ring's mirrors caught a sliver of sun and flung it back in a clean line that grazed the mountain's textured face. You could see work from here: cooling scars like wrinkles in baked bread, long fields where tugs had crawled dragging sails, dock mouths that opened and closed like gills.
Grayson stood at the back so he wouldn't get in anyone's way and failed to stop smiling. He knew what it meant to pick up a city, including the ground beneath it, and strap an engine to it. It wasn't that dwarves were brave. It was that their fear and their skill had agreed on a plan and then refused to consult their feelings.
"ATC," Serena said. "Who's managing their corridors?"
The answer arrived as a line of text Charlotte suspected was meant to be a joke.
RING/ATC: Gold is. We're just coloring inside its lines.
Charlotte didn't laugh. She felt relief settle like a blanket folded precisely over a sleeping body. If Gold was painting traffic, nothing dumb would happen by accident.
Months earlier—because light refuses to hurry—Grayson and Myla had begun speaking across the black in eight-minute chunks. The first calls were test packets and checksum dances. The second calls were work.
"Myla," he said on their third day of contact, "your throw cones are intersecting civilian telescope fields. We can blind them temporarily, but I want your word you'll tag anything over a kilogram with an IFF coil."
Her face in the window was older than the ring's materials wanted to admit as possible. She wore her wear like an argument she had won. "We're already doing phase spin with coil tags," she said. "No loose slugs. Dust in the crowded lanes."
"Good," Grayson said. "Ring ATC sits on more glass than sense. Keep humoring them."
She angled her head, a mirrored gesture he'd last seen in a different century. "Sometimes I hear about you teaching people to sing."
"I teach them to wait," he said. "If they sing while they wait, I don't stop them."
She nodded once, like a judge stamping a form. "We trained pressure. You trained pause."
"If it fails safe, it can fail often," Grayson said. "Same rule as always."
"And if it doesn't fail safe?"
"Then it becomes a religion," he said. Neither of them smiled.
A pause. Eight minutes of vacuum argued with the human urge to continue. Myla waited for the light to climb back.
"I still run your old field equations," she said when it did. "They've aged better than we have."
"Equations don't age," Grayson said. "They wait."
She huffed—almost a laugh. "Then we did too."
Lena wasn't supposed to be on the call, not as a listener. But Ring transmissions routed through her console for a day while she chased a jitter in the laser at Lagrange. She stepped away to get tea, came back into the last four lines, and sat down as if someone had taken weight off the floor.
She'd grown up on the phrase "your father built species the way some kids grow up on bedtime stories"—familiar enough to be harmless. Hearing him talk to Myla, she found the harm. Not sharp, not cruel. The kind that lives inside precision.
They were not reminiscing. They were checking sums across fifty years, across whole civilizations. The same mind that had drawn empathy lattices for the elves—her people, though she was not elven by species—and pressure lungs for the dwarves—their people—was still doing what it had always done: writing rules you could survive under. It felt suddenly like the gentlest kind of theft to have assumed he'd spent a different kind of love on her.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, annoyed at the wetness, and let the thought finish anyway: he had poured worlds through the sieve of his discipline until all that remained was love that didn't leak. Whether he had shaped an elf's patience, a dwarf's heat tolerance, or the curve of her cheekbone, it had been the same act—build it to last, but let it feel.
He forged them to endure, she thought, and for once let herself be a child. He rewrote himself so that his children would be born already linked—to memory, to purpose, to him.
The realization didn't bruise. It equalized, pressure moving through a crack until the ache went away.
She turned the jitter down in the Lagrange laser and breathed through her nose until her face remembered how to keep secrets.
Brokk watched Moltharum grow a shadow in the blue glare. The Ring swung in and out of view like a line someone kept drawing and erasing. Traffic danced. Exclusion cones hung as white chalk on black steel.
GOLD//HUD: Triad ocean node field perturbations minimal. Surface harmonics unchanged.
GOLD//HUD: Needles authorized.
"Needles," Brokk repeated, aloud this time, because the word deserved air. "Svara?"
"Growing," she said. "Seventeen. One in each ocean. Hard sterilization, read-only. No gifts. No mouths."
"Launch when the next K corridor opens," Brokk said.
Needles went out on the second window, seventy-two hours later. No dramatics. No music. Slender, dense, wrapped in fields that made them look like lies to anything with bad intentions. They slid into cloud with the manners of things that know how to be guests.
The Ring watched the telemetry and did not understand most of it. Amber harmonics tangled the data like seaweed around anchors—familiar and useless. The museum under the resin was still humming, still telling its stories to itself. Charlotte flagged three packets for Witness review and put the rest in a cold folder labeled Later, if we're lucky.
GOLD//HUD: Earth co-orbital achieved. Phase lead 18.6°.
GOLD//HUD: Throw corridors green x3.
GOLD//HUD: The Forge approves.
In the engine ring, Anchor exhaled like someone who had been a wall for a decade and finally got to sit down. Rivet slid out of an exchanger with a grin that lived entirely in her eyes and no part of her mouth and said, "Didn't leak," to no one in particular. Patternwright started humming the new schedule before he knew he was doing it.
Svara pulsed a private glyph to Brokk. A hammer. A heart.
[Brokk → Svara: 🧱 + 🏠 = "Make camp."]
The first glimpse of Moltharum unaided by glass drew people out of their work the way music does in cities. On the Ring's promenade, a cluster gathered as the night cycle pretended to matter and the not-moon showed itself as a darker shape against a darker sky. Eira put her forearm on the rail, face tipped up, eyes doing what eyes do when they can't take all of a thing in at once and decide to love it instead.
"Do you know we can see it," she said into the quiet. "With our faces. Not our machines."
Serena didn't say yes. She ran the figures again inside her head like someone worrying a tooth. "Do you know what it means that we can see it," she said instead. "Pick up a city, including the ground beneath it, strap an engine to it, drive for twenty-seven years, and arrive with your tools still sharp."
Charlotte made the tiniest sound at the back of her throat. "It means we're not alone anymore," she said. "In the work."
Grayson stayed again at the edge. His hands were on the rail in that gentle, useless way old men hold rails. He didn't look older than mid-fifties, and he didn't correct anyone who chose to believe the lie. Serena glanced sideways at him and let the old recognition flex her knees for half a second—the thing she would never say aloud. Grandfather sat wrong in her mouth and right in her bones.
"ATC," she said softly, covering the feeling with procedure. "Update our cones. Print me a kill-nothing sky."
RING/ATC: Cones updated. M-04 green in seven. S-3A green in fifteen.
RING/ATC: And Serena—
SERENA: Don't.
RING/ATC: Copy. No jokes.
They did not capture Moltharum to Earth orbit. They let it fall into pace beside them, a neighbor, not a moon. It hung in the lane like a promise with engines, a second, darker companion that carried its own weather and refused to ask for permission to breathe.
Docking would come later, after a month of gentle phasing and a thousand polite arguments. The dwarves would bring walking forges across the black that shed their own halos of heat and smelled like solved problems. The elves would bring tone and pause into rooms that had never met pressure like this. The Gaia frame would drink both—sweat and song—and learn how to stand.
——
The thing that stepped off the shuttle cradle wasn't a person so much as a presence—a dwarven tele-mech, four meters tall and built for heavy surface work. Its plating carried Moltharum's signature heat glaze, still faintly luminous. Inside the chest cavity, a sphere of liquid metal stirred with every word that came across the link from Myla's orbital, still far beyond Mars.
Her voice lagged a full eight seconds behind its gestures. When the mech nodded, the sound followed like thunder after lightning.
"Grayson, confirm I'm not cooking your dock?"
The mech raised a palm, heat-sinks opening like petals.
"Temperature's within spec," Grayson said. "Dock plating's rated for dwarf breath; it can survive you."
The mech folded into a crouch, motion smoothed by predictive subroutines. Gold helpfully displayed the latency timer in the corner of Grayson's vision.
"You see why I use the mech," Myla said after the pause caught up. "It handles the reflex stuff. I send intent; it fills in the blanks."
"Better than our politicians."
The machine chuckled—actually chuckled—eight seconds before the transmission caught up and supplied the sound. It was eerie and oddly charming.
"I needed to talk while I can still see them in one place," Myla said. "Your elves, my dwarves. Cousins in every way but atmosphere."
"They'll manage. They were built to outlast us."
"They'd better," she replied. "I'm still months from being anywhere near your orbit."
The mech's hands opened; local control scripts mirrored her gestures, then froze mid-air as another packet arrived.
"Keep them away from Triad residue until we finish hardening their suits," Myla warned. "Those fields eat interfaces."
"Already posted advisories."
"Good. I don't want my children's first day home to be a corrosion study."
She turned the mech's head—slow, searching—toward the viewport. Earth hung there, half-lit, blue bleeding into black. For a heartbeat the image froze; then her voice followed, softened by distance.
"That's a big target to miss."
"We aim wide and stop early."
"Same trick I used raising them." A pause. "And Grayson—don't let them make monuments. They've got work to do."
"Always."
The mech straightened, hydraulics sighing. Predictive routines eased it into idle posture while the last signal packet crossed the void. Then the body stilled—a shell waiting for its pilot's next thought.
Grayson stood with his hands behind his back, watching the heat shimmer fade from the metal. "Bring your people," he said quietly. "We'll show you the Gaia frame."
He turned toward the corridor. Lena was there, pretending to study a status slab. Myla's last transmission blinked through, her image flickering once before the channel collapsed.
"Your daughter," the recording said.
"My problem," he answered, and then allowed himself the luxury of a single softened word. "—and my joy."
The line went dead. Myla's image froze mid-nod and dissolved into static.
"Good," her voice said through the fading carrier. "Engineers should get at least one joy they didn't have to earn twice."
Behind the glass, Earth turned with the slow arrogance of a body that had been told it was safe. A pale lattice lay across its skin like a bandage that had been left on too long. In the dark beyond, Moltharum kept pace. The dwarves were patient. They had brought patience enough for two species.
Lena let her fingers rest on the slab a beat too long, then lowered her hand like a student trying not to be seen with a question on her face. She looked at her father, then at the empty mech whose builder had just spoken through light-minutes of delay, and felt the weight and the lightness at once.
He built worlds, she thought, and did not flinch at the intimacy of the next line.
And then he built me—with the same care.
——
The Ring breathed. The cones painted themselves again. Gold waited for the next green window without complaint.
GOLD//HUD: Co-orbital stable. Phase lead 18.6°.
GOLD//HUD: Corridor K-12 green in 62 s.
GOLD//HUD: Hello, Earth.
No one answered out loud. The mountain's quiet was answer enough.
Outside, the dwarves fell into step with a wounded world like sparks returning to their forge, and the people on the Ring stared until the sight became a part of their faces.