In town civil defense manuals and disaster preparedness handbooks, there were explicit, highly detailed protocols for almost every conceivable emergency. Category-5 tornadoes, hundred-year flash floods, dangerous chemical train derailments, heavy-duty ammonia leaks, and three-phase power yard arc flashes.
There was, however, no standard running procedure in any county town code for an employee whose internal organs were about to undergo a core-collapse sun-hot blast.
Austin stood in the master control room of the Geosynchronous Ring, thirty-six thousand miles above the Azure Cloud Sphere. He wore his heavy-duty denim work shirt and a steel-heavy tool belt. His Shade-14 welding visor rested on the brim of his white spun-glass hard hat. In his right hand, he held a tuned six-inch stainless steel fine-scale measuring tongs. In his left, he gripped a heavy light metal clipboard displaying the final world-size holding checklist.
In the upper-right corner of his field of vision, the amber-red digital timer was flashing with relentless, indifferent care:
[CORE COLLAPSE BLAST TIMER: 00:02:59... 00:02:58...]
“All sectors, all spires, this is Lead Master builder,” Austin spoke into the world-size broadcast microphone, keeping his voice measured and steady despite the copper tang of ozone on his tongue and the seventy-eight-G vise crushing his ribs. “We’re three minutes out from scheduled heat venting. Confirm shelter-in-place rule-following across all twelve mid-belt stations.”
