Inside the silver-steel drafting shack at the summit of the Stratospheric Skyway, the temperature was a comfortable sixty-eight degrees.
Beyond the triple-glazed picture windows, the black sky was full of activity.
Twenty-two thousand miles overhead, thirty mile-long Void Dreadnoughts ran their casting lines in steady rhythm. Their newly certified crews laid flawless welds in hard vacuum. Around them, the first one thousand parabolic mirrors held their half-mile grid, catching sunlight with five-hundred-meter graphene sails and beaming forty gigawatts of clean power to the summit receivers.
Austin sat at his drafting table in broken-in denim work pants, a clip-on leather harness, and a clean gray flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms.
He unscrewed his stainless steel thermos and reached into his tin lunchbox for a ham-and-cheese sandwich.
Then his lower belly ignited.
There was no gentle preheat cycle and no warning on the shop gauges.
Triple-alpha fusion erupted inside him all at once.
