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The Mothball Stations. Everybody’s heard rumours about them. Well. Everybody in the salvage and exploration games, anyway. One of those conspiracy theory sort of things. Everybody’s heard a story. Mostly, everybody’s heard different stories.
The base of the idea is this. Somewhere out there, in some system, there’s a network of space stations. I’ve heard a few different numbers, but thirteen’s a pretty common one. Thirteen stations, orbiting various planets and moons around the system. Thirteen lost, abandoned stations. Except they’re not. They’re not abandoned. They weren’t shut down and left to rot.
They were mothballed. Put up and put in. Whatever they were, those thirteen stations, they were intended to be reactivated. They’ve been running silently this whole time.
It’s such a strange, specific sort of a detail. Mothballed stations. Given the utter lack of consistent detail on anything else in the stories. The mythology, nearly. Nothing else is agreed on. But everybody says they were mothballed. Everybody says, they were meant to wake back up.
Lots of people talk about the Claimer Wars when it comes to the Mothball Stations. Makes the most sense, maybe. Lots of stuff wound up started and then abandoned while the borders were getting flung around like so much confetti back then. Sleeper stations, that’s a rumour you can believe, in that sort of context. Things meant to steal back lost ground, once they were reactivated.
But that’s why it also doesn’t make sense. Because somebody, some government, finds a bunch of pre-made stations in their recently claimed or reclaimed system, they’re not just going to let them sit there, right? They’re not just going to leave this whole network of foreign objects just lying around their system orbits. No. They’re gonna take ‘em over, or they’re gonna blow them up. You’re not going to leave sleeper stations knocking around in the middle of the Claimer Wars.
Maybe the stations were designed to look dead, people say. Maybe they were designed to hide themselves. Maybe that’s why there’s all these rumours, but nobody who’s ever actually found them. At least not official-like. Not so’s anybody else can go and visit them again afterwards. But there’s a thought. That they hid themselves. That they’re in some system, right now, maybe even an occupied system, and nobody has a damned clue. Maybe there’s one over your head right now.
Or maybe they were taken over. Maybe they were repurposed, maybe they’re in active use right now, by some successor colony or government. Maybe you make drop-offs to ‘em all the goddamned time, and you just don’t know.
Kind of a boring ending, really. A story from the Claimer Wars, a rumour, that ends up just mundane like everything else. Bunch of stations that just got taken over and are used these days to ship ore and dry-dock shuttles.
Unless they still ain’t been reactivated. Unless they’re in use, and they look normal, and there’s something lurking under it.
But that’s not what most of the stories are. That’s not the romance, that’s not the mythology, although it is the basis for a conspiracy theory or two hundred. No. No, in most of the stories, the Mothball Stations haven’t been found yet. In most of the stories, they’re still out there. Waiting for explorers. They’re in some old abandoned or barely-charted system, powered-down and waiting, ready for the first breathing body who steps aboard to wake them back up.
And then … what? What happens then? Nobody knows. Nobody ever has any clear idea what the Mothball Stations were for.
Say it was a government. Say it was during the Claimer Wars. What would they put out there, and what would they just close up and leave instead of moving or destroying or abandoning? What would you put on a station that was going to keep going, with or without you? What would you leave somewhere you couldn’t control, but plan some day to come back to?
Always made me wonder how the stories got started. ‘Cause it’s such a specific thing. Mothballed stations. Not abandoned, there’s all sorts of abandoned things out here, especially from the Claimer Wars. Abandoned, that’d be one thing. Shut down or half destroyed or just floating in the void, some corpse of a station drifting in stable orbit. That’s fine, I’ve seen those. Abandoned systems, systems that got bypassed and left once the big trade routes went in. Or systems too poor to spend money going out and cleaning up system junk when it’s stable and it’s not going to crash down on anybody’s head any time soon.
Not that some of them haven’t come down. But, you know. Tale as old as time, huh?
So yeah. Abandoned stations, those are a thing. Mothballed, though. Put into hibernation. And then left. For hundreds of years. Nearly half a millennium since the Claimer Wars. What sort of thing do you just leave for that kind of time?
Of course, probably wasn’t meant to be that kind of time. They were supposed to be woken up a lot sooner, most people think. Some government or coalition or, hell, maybe even raider group that got wiped out or subsumed into somebody else somewhere along the way. Records lost or destroyed. You’d think it’d be hard to lose thirteen whole stations, but I’ve got cousins in systems and archives. There’s whole planets got lost in the Claimer Wars. Named something else by somebody else, is the general presumption, taken over and renamed, and nothing but a dead end for the few records remaining of the old name. Like the stations, maybe. There probably weren’t whole planets actually blown up or nothing.
Maybe.
So it could be like that. Maybe somebody found some record somewhere, some docking bill or construction bill or top secret government memo mentioning the thirteen stations. Maybe it blew up. Maybe it became a myth.
But there are … There are stories. About people who actually found them. Or one of them. There’s stories. They don’t go anywhere, there’s never anybody anyone can actually point to and say they’ve been there, there’s never any system people can pin down and say, one of them’s in here. There’s no details, there’s no records, there’s no names.
But there are stories. People who’ve been there. People who’ve found them. And there are stories … of what they found.
Not everybody thinks the stations were made during the Claimer Wars. Some people think the stations were found during the Claimer Wars. That they’re … older than that. Sometimes much, much older. Spacer stories, like always. Who here was wondering when I’d mention the aliens, huh?
What kind of thing do you put in hibernation and then leave to be woken up later? Why do you put it in hibernation? Why do you leave it? Why didn’t you ever come back?
I think that’s the bit of it that always catches me. Somebody put these stations up, packed them away, put them in hibernation mode. They weren’t abandoned. Somebody meant to come back. So why didn’t they?
I’ve heard stories, versions on the myth, that they were meant to hold people. The stations. That they were meant to store people. In hibernation. In stasis. That somebody, one of us or some alien, was forced to run, and the stations were made to hold everybody they couldn’t take with them. Maybe it was the Claimer Wars. Maybe it’s half a colony, left behind by those with ships, on a promise that somebody would come back for them later. And no one ever did.
Or maybe it was older than that. Maybe they weren’t built during the Claimer Wars, maybe they were only found, and that’s why there’s no records of them down the line, just stories.
I heard a story, out by Vichter 5, that somebody found one. A Mothball Station. And it was full of …
Maybe there was a disease, they said. The species that built the stations, maybe it was facing a disease. Or something else. Some species-ending event. And they didn’t know if they could solve it in time. But they wanted to save somebody. Some few. So they made the stations. They put people in them. Their best and brightest, maybe. And they froze them, and they put the stations to sleep, and they hoped …
They hoped some one of their own would survive to wake everybody up later.
And the thing of it is, it’s all fairytales. It’s all made up. Nobody knows. There’s no proof the Mothball Stations are even real. It’s a story somebody made up. Sleeper stations from the Claimer Wars or hibernation pods full of alien bodies. It’s all just spacer fantasy. If there were thirteen stations out there in some system, ready and waiting to wake back up, we’d know about them. We’d be able to put them on a map. It’s some left-over fragment of a record, is all it is. It’s some bit of a memo somewhere mentioning stations put on standby and waiting to be reactivated, that somebody found and made up a whole myth about. And then somebody else and somebody else and somebody else, and then here we are. Talking about the myth of the mothball stations.
But you do … you gotta wonder. Just a bit. It’s such a specific thing.
Thirteen stations, out there in some system. Hidden or out of the way. Running on low power. Hiding … something. Some secret. Weapons or bodies or experiments or something else. Something somebody lost, way back when, centuries ago, and meant to come back to.
Something, maybe, that somebody still intends to come back to. Even half a millennium or more on.
It’s a hell of a story, whatever else it is. You’ve got to give it that. It’s sure one hell of a story.
Enough to make a body want to go looking, maybe?