In the open-vacuum assembly bay of Dreadnought 06, five thousand former judges of the Upper Void Realm sat in neat rows on aluminum bleachers. Their white pressure suits gleamed beneath the harsh sodium floodlights.
Each judge held an ANSI-approved Shade-14 auto-darkening welding helmet on one knee. Flame-resistant leather bibs hung around their necks, and heavy cowhide gloves with Kevlar stitching covered their hands.
At the front of the vast bay, Austin stood on a raised steel platform.
He had set up a cast-iron welding table with two sections of four-inch structural silver-steel tubing clamped to it. Beside him sat a high-frequency inverter TIG welder, powered by a 480-volt feed from the dreadnought’s main busbar. A pressure cylinder held ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent pure argon for shielding gas.
Behind the table, Cerberus Pug was tethered to an eye bolt by a braided nylon lead. He sprawled across a padded rubber dog bed with three custom auto-darkening hoods fitted over his snub-nosed heads. The hound was fast asleep. His muffled, three-part snoring shook the deck plates, and his hind legs twitched now and then in zero gravity.
Austin clipped on his throat microphone and adjusted the volume on his chest control.
“Listen up, apprentices,” he said, his flat voice carrying through five thousand helmet speakers. “Welcome to Day One of the Sunset Peak Orbital Welding Academy. Over the next six months, we’re building the hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand-mile Geostationary Orbital Ring and deploying eleven thousand more collector mirrors. That means roughly four point two million linear feet…
