Dione Orbital Assembly Complex

Station

The Dione Orbital Assembly Complex was humanity’s greatest pre-interstellar construction site—a vast orbital shipyard built in the late 23rd century above Saturn’s moon Dione. Suspended against the black canvas of space, it glittered in reflected sunlight, its framework spanning kilometers and housing thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians. Here, the colony ship *Aurora* was assembled, tested, and prepared for her launch toward Kepler-452b, marking the beginning of humanity’s leap beyond the solar system.

The station was more than a shipyard—it was a monument to the end of the Earthbound age. Inside its pressurized halls, magnetic boots clanked softly along quiet corridors as crews worked through final checks, their holographic displays hovering above their arms like digital vambraces. Observation ports offered panoramic views of Saturn’s pale rings and the gleaming hull of the *Aurora*, secured by docking clamps that seemed reluctant to release her into the void. Within the assembly bays, enormous robotic arms and modular fabricators moved with surgical precision, building and integrating the ship’s rotating gravity rings, antimatter core, and Alcubierre field generators.

To the crew, Dione Station represented the cradle of their new beginning. Captain Aveline Morrow’s final moments before launch were spent here—reviewing systems, overseeing last-minute calibrations, and addressing her crew before humanity’s first leap to the stars. When the *Aurora* finally detached, the event was not marked by thunder or fire, but by silence: the gentle unlatching of clamps, the whisper of airlocks, and a ship slipping quietly away from its birthplace.

After the *Aurora*’s departure, the Dione Orbital Assembly Complex remained as a testament to human ingenuity and ambition. It symbolized the last great triumph of the Sol era—a place where humanity stopped merely reaching for the stars and began building the means to live among them.