The Lunar Districts draft a lift-priority code before the next shortage

The Lunar Districts are rich in almost everything except the one thing that actually moves the rest of it. Lift.

That's the quiet fact sitting under a draft now circulating through the south-polar councils: a standing priority schedule for outbound lift slots, written after a transfer window closed with pallets still parked on the rim aprons. The window filled. The cargo didn't. Perishable medical stock went up. A season's worth of Verne-bound hull plate did not. One settlement contractor watched his bonded freight miss its ride by nine days and its market by a quarter.

So now we rank things. In writing.

The current draft reserves fifteen percent of outbound lift for emergency and medical freight, allocated ahead of the general queue no matter who booked first. The rest gets scheduled by a formula the councils are still fighting over. Part reservation, part seniority, part whatever the drafting committee can get seven districts to initial without anyone walking out.

"The window doesn't negotiate," said Councillor Reyes of the east habitat bloc, who chairs the drafting group. "It opens, it closes. If we don't decide the order, the launch manifest decides it for us, and the launch manifest answers to whoever booked first and shouted loudest."

The fifteen percent is the easy part. Nobody campaigns against ambulances.

The fight is over what counts as one.

Verne Station's shipwrights want protected slots for shipyard components. Their case: hull sections, reactor cores, and life-support assemblies aren't ordinary freight. They're the critical path for vessels already under keel, and a slipped delivery idles a whole dock downstream. The yard just chartered an apprenticeship guild and has no patience for watching trained crews stand around waiting on plate.

"A missed slot isn't a delayed shipment, it's a stalled hull and a hundred people with nothing to weld," a Verne logistics steward told me at the rim office. "Call that an emergency, because it is one."

The outer settlements see it differently, which you could've guessed without a council meeting. A protected slot for Verne is a protected slot stolen from someone's growth freight, the modules and soil and machinery that decide which young colony expands next window and which one waits two years for the one after. New Kanem's lunar agent has already filed an objection that the draft "entrenches the established at the expense of the arriving." Colony-speak for they got here first.

Which is the whole thing, really. Lift is where abundance stops being abundant. Energy's cheap. Climbing out of the gravity well isn't, and no amount of fusion changes how many slots a window holds.

I asked Reyes what happens to the contractor whose bonded freight missed its ride.

"Under the new code, he'd have standing to contest his place in the queue," she said.

He doesn't yet. The code is a draft. His cargo is still on the apron.