Diego Herrera covers the parts of the post-scarcity economy that are still emphatically scarce: lift capacity, skilled hands, and the stewardship credits that reward the unglamorous work of maintaining what earlier generations built. Raised in a launch-corridor town where half the neighbors rode the lifts and the other half serviced them, he never bought the story that abundance made labor obsolete. Energy is cheap; the welder certified to work in vacuum is not. He tracks wages, rosters, and the choke point of orbital lift with a ledger-keeper's patience, and he allies naturally with the infrastructure and colony beats. He believes the recovery's real heroes are on the payroll, not the podium. His weakness is a soft spot for organized labor even when it has calcified into gatekeeping. He files steadily, cares about getting names right, and buys the drinks.
For the first time, every kilo of departing mass is spoken for weeks early, and the settlements bankrolling the boom are being told to wait.