In the grand, poetic canon of mortal and immortal combat, warriors spent hundreds of years meditating upon sword intent, refining nine-fold spiritual flames, and carving complex spatial arrays into white jade magic charms.
Austin, having spent his working life as a general builder on everything from rail yards to warehouse moving belt lines, preferred a simpler equation. Striking force equals one-half mass times speed squared.
“If you have a two-hundred-sixty-five-thousand-half-mile circular magnetic floating stator track,” Austin explained over the internal dreadnought hum, calmly tightening a heavy copper busway end-post lug with a 15/16-inch box wrench, “and you have one hundred sun-blasts of clean, three-phase alternating current feeding into liquid-helium-cooled zero-pushback linear power-coil coils, you don’t merely have an ore transport railway. You have the longest mass driver barrel ever built. Any circular track can become a linear gun if you just turn off the holding magnet at the right degree of arc.”
Gathered around the main switching power yard on Dreadnought Foundry 01, Tie Kuang and Jiang Taixu listened with wide, horrified eyes.
“Austin,” Tie Kuang stammered. He pointed a thick, soot-stained thumb out the watching window toward the approaching Harvester armada. “The enemy fleet has formed a ten-thousand-mile line of battle! One hundred Class-X dreadnoughts are charging their spatial drills! The dark-matter void shields on The Void Devourer are glowing like black thunderclouds! What kind of spiritual treasure could possibly pierce a fifty-mile hull of solid void-iron?!”
