Space stations monitor wide fields around their positions. Dangers surround them on all sides. Their denizens picture rocks the size of ships in their nightmares, when really all it takes is a pebble the size of a fingertip, with enough speed, to punch a major hole in a hull. Even with modern self-repair technologies, that tends to ruin someone’s day. Junk lasers and ablative plating help, but only go so far.
Any station that wants to survive keeps LIDAR and camera arrays on a steady monitoring sweep backed by AIs, but again that goes only so far: those systems are expensive, and space stations are built and maintained by the lowest bidders. For every station, then, there’s a horizon beyond which no routine scanning is done. A ship, a yacht for example, orbiting just beyond that horizon, could escape detection for a very long time, particularly if John Feeney is paying people not to notice it.
Six months is a very long time to anyone waiting on that ship who is unaccustomed to solitude. A guy gets refused docking rights at three different stations, he starts to take it personal, starts to want to come home. Eventually the decent booze runs out, and the better drugs. Eventually a person has played every game, watched every movie and serial in both VR and flat, gotten bored with all the pornography. Eventually even the robot-delivered food and water becomes yet another reminder of how very badly a person has been betrayed by his friends and his kin.
Wilfred “Nuke” Feeney watched, spellbound, as a ship slowly and delicately exploded off the port side. He felt he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life. All tangerine orange and aneurysm red through the camera filters, struggling and writhing like a poisoned animal, throwing off sparks and debris for the lasers to burn up. He felt as though the universe was putting on a show for only him, finally sending him a sign. He watched a long time, idly scratching the hard blinking bulge in his chest, thinking. Thinking.
Wilfred “Nuke” Feeney had him an idea.