A total of three thousand senior staff attended the second emergency council. Jason sat at the head of the table, flanked by twenty of the colony's top scientists.
The audience murmured nervously. Many were hearing the full truth for the first time. The news of the orbital decay had turned their faces pale, but the promise of a solution kept the order maintained.
Jason scanned the crowd. The "troublemakers", the former bureaucrats who had been spreading rumors and dissent were absent. They were currently sitting in a holding cell.
Jason felt a pang of guilt, but he pushed it down. It was a political purge, plain and simple. But he couldn't afford to have saboteurs in the ranks when the clock was ticking. He told himself it was for the greater good, and he hoped history would agree.
"The meeting will come to order," Jason said, his voice cutting through the noise.
"Comrades, you know the situation. We have six months. The Moon is falling. We need to leave."
"The viability of our escape plan hinges on a single variable: the mass of the Alien Ship."
"If it is too heavy, we cannot move it. We will be forced to seal ourselves inside and hope the hull survives the impact with Earth. That is a desperate, last-ditch option."
"But if it is light enough... we can fly it out of here."
"Our scientists have spent the last few hours measuring the mass of the vessel. I will let them announce the results."
Three thousand pairs of eyes locked onto the stage. The tension was suffocating. It felt like waiting for a biopsy result, magnified a thousand times. This was a verdict on their survival.
Jason glanced at the scientists. Their expressions were unreadable not happy, not sad, but... confused. They looked like men who had just seen a ghost.
What did they find? Jason wondered.
A physicist stood up. He looked nervous under the scrutiny. "We utilized over twenty independent methodologies to determine the mass. The results were consistent across all tests."
"The mass of the Alien Ship is..."
He paused, swallowing hard.
"1.0386 million tons."
The room exploded.
"What? That's it?"
"Only a million?"
"Is that good? Is that bad?"
The number was baffling. 1.03 million tons was vastly better than the "hundred quintillion tons" nightmare scenario. But it was also... weirdly light.
For context, a Nimitz class aircraft carrier weighed about 100,000 tons. The Empire State Building weighed roughly 370,000 tons.
This ship was a sphere fifteen kilometers in diameter, twice the height of Mount Everest. Yet it only weighed as much as three Empire State Buildings? It was impossibly light.
But for the engineers in the room, the number was still daunting.
Humanity had never launched anything close to a million tons into space. The Victory, the pinnacle of human engineering, weighed 5,000 tons at launch and only 500 tons in orbit.
The tyranny of the rocket equation meant that to lift a million tons, you needed millions of tons of fuel. And to lift that fuel, you needed more fuel.
"Can we build an engine with ten million tons of thrust?" an engineer shouted. "How much fuel would that take? Where do we store it?"
These were the hard questions. Even with the "light" weight, the physics of moving it were a nightmare.
Just as the debate began to spiral, Felix, the Chief Physicist, stood up.
"Everyone! Listen to me!" Felix waved his hands frantically. "The number is not the point! We discovered something else!"
The room quieted down.
"1.0386 million tons is logically impossible," Felix said, his voice trembling with excitement. "Think about it. We have spent thirty years building labs inside that ship. We have moved in heavy machinery, reactors, steel, lead shielding."
"We estimated the mass of the *human equipment alone* inside the ship to be at least two million tons."
"Yet the total mass of the ship, hull included is only 1 million tons?"
"It violates the law of conservation of mass! It's absurd!"
"We thought our instruments were broken. So we ran a test. We transported 10,000 tons of raw ore into the ship's cargo bay. Then we measured the mass again."
Felix grinned like a madman.
"It was still 1.0386 million tons."
"We didn't believe it. We added another 10,000 tons. The result? 1.0386 million tons."
"Do you understand what this means?" Felix shouted. " The mass of the ship is constant! It doesn't matter what you put inside it. The external mass never changes!"
The hall erupted again.
This time, it wasn't confusion. It was ecstasy.
Jason rubbed his nose to hide his grin. He understood immediately.
It was a cheat code.
It was like a "Inventory" from a fantasy RPG. You could stuff an entire city inside, and it would still weigh the same as an empty bag.
This broke the tyranny of the rocket equation.
In conventional rocketry, 90% to 95% of a vehicle's mass is fuel. Most of the energy is wasted just lifting the fuel itself. That is why space travel is so hard.
But now?
They had a magic box with a fixed mass of 1 million tons. They could load it with a hundred million tons of fuel, fifty thousand people, factories, farms, and lakes of water.
And the engines would only ever have to lift 1 million tons.
It was the ultimate loophole.
"If we have the capacity," Jason thought, his eyes shining, "we can literally dismantle the entire Moon Base and shove it inside. We don't need to worry about weight limits. We just need to build an engine strong enough to push a million tons."
And pushing a million tons? That was difficult, but within the realm of human engineering.
They had a chance.
"We can do this," Jason whispered. "We can actually do this."
If they couldn't escape the Moon with a cheat code like this, they deserved to go extinct.