On a normal commercial job, wiring a branch circuit was simple. You pulled three copper wires through a metal tube, strapped the tube to the floor joists, and tightened the screws to the listed torque.
The branch circuit on this job was one hundred and forty million miles long. It carried five hundred sun-blasts of direct current through interplanetary space, from the Azure Cloud Sphere’s orbital ring to the asteroid belt. That called for a bigger spool of wire and a lot more patience.
Austin stood on the aft flight deck of Dreadnought Foundry 01, forty-two thousand miles above the blue-green planet below. He wore a heavy denim work shirt, steel-toed boots, and a white foreman’s hard hat fitted with a dark welding visor. In his hands was a rugged yellow megohmmeter, a testing unit with two leads ending in bronze alligator clips.
The Cable-Laying Barge Alpha-01 rested on the launch rails in front of him. The two-mile-long converted Harvester dreadnought had lost its forward weapons bay to make room for a motorized cable spool forty-five stories high. Sixty million miles of glowing purple cable were wound around its steel drum. The cable was eight inches thick, with a solid star-jade core and a sheath of nine-times-refined gold.
