No heavenly bells rang. No golden petals filled the sky. The change began with the smell of scorched nylon.
Austin stood on an exterior catwalk in the Geosynchronous Ring’s central power yard, thirty-six thousand miles above the Eastern Ocean. He was fastening a bundle of high-voltage sensor cables to a support post with a blue plastic tensioning gun.
Snap.
The gun clipped the tail of the black zip tie. Austin reached for another fastener. Behind him, the tie he had just tightened turned yellow, became brittle, and crumbled into gray ash. The fragments drifted away into space.
Austin blinked behind his Shade-14 visor. He pulled another nylon tie from his tool belt. Before he could loop it around the cable bundle, the plastic curled like a dry leaf under a heat gun. It snapped into three pieces between his gloved fingers.
“Great,” he muttered into his helmet microphone. “Cheap imported ties. I knew I should have ordered the UV-stabilized ones. Or maybe...”
A deep rumble passed through his ribs.
It was not the steady hum of the orbital foundries or the vibration of the twelve tether spires. It came from behind his breastbone.
