The best time on any major construction project, in Austin’s considered skilled opinion, was after the ribbon was cut, the politicians had packed up their speeches. The second-shift upkeep crew had taken over the sweeping.
Back on Earth, when Austin had completed a sixty-million-dollar town sewage treatment plant or a twelve-mile four-lane highway bypass, the politicians and county commissioners would always show up in rental limousines. They would smile for local news cameras, pose with chrome-plated novelty shovels, shake each other’s hands, and give grand speeches about civic progress and economic revitalization. But thirty minutes later, the cameras would leave, the folding chairs would be stacked into the back of a pickup truck, and the real magic would begin: the quiet hum of approved pumps, the smooth trickle of clean treated water, and the calm, unrushed click of a torque wrench checking pipe rim bolts in the dark.
Up here, thirty-six thousand miles above the slowly rotating turquoise sphere of the Azure Cloud Sphere, that same quiet magic had settled over the cosmos.
Austin was sitting on an upturned wooden cable reel on the outside watching terrace of Station One. His heavy work boots—heavy with silver-steel toe-caps and scuffed with gray concrete dust and silver-steel filings—were propped comfortably on the lower rail of the schedule-40 zinc-coated steel guardrail. In his hands, he held a battered blue fine china mug filled with piping-hot black drip coffee, steam curling into the thin leftover air of the terrace’s high-pressure glass dome.
