The trouble with carrying so much mass in your gut, Austin wrote in his daily checklist, was that light stopped traveling in straight lines.
On a normal job, light was dependable. It struck a surveyor’s prism at a known angle, passed through a transit lens, and went straight from your flashlight to whatever rusted flange you were inspecting.
Once your personal mass passed five times ten to the twenty-third pounds, general relativity became a workplace hazard.
Austin stood on the maintenance gantry above the Iron-Crag Primary Rail Terminal, forty feet over the crater floor. He held an LED work light in one hand and a set of dial gauges in the other. He was checking wheel-flange wear on Bogie Four of an automated sixty-car ore train.
Above him, the airless sky was black and full of sharp stars. Far away, the Canglan-Lunar system glowed gold.
Austin switched on the work light and aimed it at the train’s front axle.
The beam never reached the axle.
Instead, it bent at a right angle near Austin’s belt buckle, whipped around his waist, and shot straight back into his eyes.
