Janitors of the Late Space Age

Sev's communication with Apex Corporation, his employer, was unidirectional. All his reports were met with automated approval messages, as long as they fitted into prescribed budgets. Come to think of it, this was true of Earth in general. It was living in its own world, with refined ore coming in and orders pouring out. Initially, its orbital factories were pumping out ships and prefabricated modules for the Big Expansion, and it lasted... for as long as it was profitable. Space...
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Sev's communication with Apex Corporation, his employer, was unidirectional. All his reports were met with automated approval messages, as long as they fitted into prescribed budgets. Come to think of it, this was true of Earth in general. It was living in its own world, with refined ore coming in and orders pouring out. Initially, its orbital factories were pumping out ships and prefabricated modules for the Big Expansion, and it lasted... for as long as it was profitable. Space tourism, mining, philosophy, colonization, even missionary work - everything seemed to be expanding at the same time. Too bad it turned out to be so... hollow. When the profits declined, everybody started cutting their losses and retreated to Earth. Only the Ceres miners were left behind, stuck up there with nowhere to go back to, after decades spent adapting to a life without gravity. Things still worked out for Earth, in the long run, but the thought that humans are a race meant to decipher all the mysteries of Cosmos seemed more distant now. Still, all this couldn't have been for nothing! The Big Expansion, the great bubble of aspiration bursting so... silently?--- Late Space Age finds space engineers at their lowest point - being reduced to little more than glorified janitors of abandoned space colonies. The story is set decades after a failed colonization of Mars and the asteroid belt. After an initial boom, made possible by revolutionary, modular spaceship construction, it quickly became apparent that support for these colonies is too costly and gives little in return. A slow, grueling retreat took place and those left stranded on distant chunks of rock and uninhabitable planets were left to fend for themselves. With each passing year, the stars grew more distant and now everybody seems to be coming to terms with the bitter truth:Maybe we are not meant to be a space-faring race. In this critical moment, a bizarre incident threatens to trigger a system-wide migration. Three space engineers - a forgotten explorer from Mars, a feral, space-born kid from the Ceres asteroid, and a pilot that lost her ship in the incident - find themselves in the right spot to sway the outcome but it soon becomes apparent that the terrible conflict might ignite a new era of space exploration...