00:00:00.
The red digits vanished.
For one heartbeat, nothing happened. Wind whispered through the porch rafters. Relays hummed in the battery trench.
Then the space inside Austin’s dantian folded inward.
His body did not move, but he felt the collapse in his bones. The dense hydrogen shell around his stellar crucible had spent three days balanced between heat and gravity. Now gravity won. The shell plunged toward the center of his soul.
KAAAAAA-BOOOOOOM!
This was no quiet breakthrough on a meditation cushion. Austin had started a star.
Hydrogen fused into helium inside his core. The temperature climbed to five million degrees and held there.
Brass fanfare blasted through his head. Green light filled his vision.
Austin read the gravity figure twice.
“Sweet mother of rebar.”
More than one percent of the Moon’s mass was packed into a sphere the size of an orange inside him. If the containment mesh slipped, Sunset Peak and forty miles of surrounding granite could disappear down his throat. Even with the mesh holding, twenty-five times normal gravity pulled at his knees and lower back.
“Containment’s tight. My balance isn’t.”
Then he saw the blueprint reward.
“Maglev rail and vacuum tubes. Finally. I’m tired of watching that freight hoist crawl every time the foundry pours a billet. Next week, we start boring transit tunnels.”
He did not have time to plan further.
The waste heat arrived.
WHOOOOOOSH!
Ten units of raw heat burst through his skin. The air around him flashed white-hot, and a shock wave tore across the porch.
Without the cooling system, the cedar would have ignited. The brass hardware would have melted. The granite beneath the lodge would have cracked apart.
The eight radiator towers took the hit instead.
KA-THUMP! KA-THUMP! KA-THUMP!
Pressure sensors opened the emergency valves. Thousands of gallons of cold coolant surged through the underground lines and into the radiator coils.
The coolant flashed into vapor and expanded to hundreds of times its volume. Above the towers, the fans jumped from a standstill to three thousand RPM.
SCREEEEEECH-ROAR!
Eight white plumes blasted from the tower housings and punched two miles into the storm clouds. Their roar drowned out the thunder.
The heat went into the upper atmosphere, exactly as planned.
Austin looked down. The boards beneath his boots were not smoking. The cedar rail felt cool. Even his tea sat undisturbed except for a few ripples.
“Cooling loop held. Line pressure steady. No scorched lumber.” He tapped his pencil against his leg. “That Vault 04 scrap just paid for itself.”
Around his steel-toed boots, eighty-four new fragments snapped into orbit.
SNAP-SNAP!
There were two hundred and eighty now. Black glass, cold iron, silver-steel bearings, copper beads, and drops of star-gold spun around his shins in five nested rings.
The local gravity field jumped to twenty-five times Earth’s pull.
The lead weights in his pockets dragged at his legs. His two-pound clipboard suddenly weighed fifty.
Austin braced his back and held the board level.
Then the sky changed.
The containment mesh trapped almost all the fusion energy, but some light escaped. A three-hundred-foot sphere of golden fire formed above Sunset Peak, crowned with loops of solar plasma.
It looked like a second sun.
CRACK-BOOM!
Its light pierced the purple clouds. Midnight vanished across the Western Continent, the Southern Deserts, and the northern palaces of the Great Yan Dynasty.
Thirty kingdoms and three empires were plunged into bright noon.
Two thousand miles away, the Grand Astrologer dropped his brass star compass.
“A SECOND SUN!” he screamed. “A SECOND SUN RISES IN THE SOUTH!”
Roosters woke in ten thousand villages and began crowing. Owls and bats lost their bearings. Wolves dove into burrows to escape the light.
On Mount Clear Sky, fifty thousand trench workers dropped their tools and fell into the mud.
“The Sovereign has lit the dawn! The True Sun walks the mountain!”
Austin stepped to the porch rail and caught the full glare reflected from the clouds.
“Ah—hell! My eyes!”
He threw an arm over his face and stumbled backward. After fumbling with his tool belt, he pulled out a pair of Shade-14 arc-welding goggles and strapped them over his hard hat.
The blinding white glare became a dark green glow.
Austin planted his feet and glared at the sky like a foreman inspecting bad drywall.
“Who approved this lighting? The bloom is blown out. Somebody cranked the exposure slider past eleven and pushed it to the live world without testing it. You can’t even see the ridgeline!”
He slapped the clipboard against his thigh.
“I need welding glass to stand on my own porch. It’s an unplayable visual bug.”
Two miles overhead, the storm vortex tightened. Violet lightning gathered in its center, as if the heavens were enraged by the illegal second sun.
Austin checked his pocket watch.
The lightning rods were grounded. The capacitor bank stood empty and ready.
The construction foreman was ready for inspection.