The bridge of The Void Devourer was a mile wide, carved directly out of the hollowed-out core of an ancient, stone-hard supergiant star. But when Austin stepped through the blasted, high-pressure-cut blast doors, the vast black glass hall suddenly felt uncomfortably, claustrophobically cramped.
The floor beneath Austin’s heavy steel-toed work boots groaned with a deep, shuddering metal whine. His body now carried a total system mass of two point five times ten to the twenty-third pounds. That equaled more than three point three full world-size moons. Eleven hundred pounds of approved lead ballast counterbalanced the load, while four high-speed fluid gyroscopes hummed at eleven hundred RPM. Together, they radiated a crushing seventy-eight-G nearby gravity field.
Every step he took left a one-inch-deep depression in the ancient, unbending void-iron floor, the load-bearing grain of the metal compressing and cold-flowing under his soles like warm beeswax.
His tools drifted in a smooth, hypnotic circular orbit around his hips. His tin lunchbox, work knife, pencil sharpener, crescent wrench, and heavy back-and-forth saw whipped along at nine feet per second. They hummed with quiet, high-speed menace as they sliced through the dusty air of the bridge.
Behind him walked Xuan Ming, wearing his clean white work boss hard hat with the yellow Monthly Safety Champion star, carrying a light metal clipboard stacked with official carbon-copy fine ticket forms and a red ink pad. Flanking them was Tie Kuang. They carried a heavy tool canvas bag stuffed with lock-out/tag-out padlocks and brass tags, and Chonker…
