The industrial workbench in the maintenance bay of Substation Kuiper-01 was littered with cold-rolled star-jade plates, stainless steel U-bolts, and two empty cans of synthetic cutting oil.
Austin sat on his steel stool, leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, revealing the heavy titanium lumbar framework bolted across his spine. The thirteen hundred and fifty pounds of certified lead ballast slugs hummed with a deep ninety-four-G thrum, pinning his torso to the stool with unyielding mass.
Hovering just an inch off his shoulder blades, two faint, shimmering plumes of sapphire-violet light drifted upward toward the overhead ventilation ducts.
To former Grand Inquisitor Xuan Ming, the sight was breathtaking. He stood ten paces back, gripping a yellow clipboard with white knuckles. Those two plumes looked like the holy wings of an ancient void seraph, radiating blinding cosmic power.
To Austin, they looked like a twelve-percent thermal efficiency leak.
"Master Austin," Xuan Ming whispered in hushed awe, his eyes reflecting the shimmering sapphire plumes. "Those... those are the Wings of the Void Monarch! The ancient texts speak of the First-Dawn Phoenix whose feathers cast off the weeping embers of unmade creation! It is said that a single feather of that light can incinerate an entire solar empire!"
Austin didn't look up from his blueprint. He picked up a steel scriber and etched a clean alignment mark across the copper casing of a four-inch toroidal coil.
"They aren't wings, Xuan Ming," Austin said dryly. "They’re high-temperature parasitic thermal venting. When you push two point five zettawatts through a Level Ninety-Two rotating core, the polar Hawking radiation leaks out along the spin axis. If I don't vent it, the thermal buildup will melt my shoulder blades."
Xuan Ming blinked, his feathered pen hovering uncertainly over the inspection checklist. "Thermal... venting? But the spiritual pressure—"
"A lot," Austin grunted. "About eighty-five megawatts of lost revenue every minute. That’s pure profit floating up into the ceiling tiles. I am not running a two-point-five-zettawatt municipal grid just to heat the empty vacuum of space."
A translucent amber diagnostic display blinked across Austin’s vision:
Tie Kuang walked in through the airlock, carrying a heavy crate of newly machined star-jade toroidal coils. His copper scales were dusted with gray basalt powder from the rail yards on Ceres.
"Here are the chokes you drew up on the napkin, Boss," Tie Kuang said, setting the heavy crate down on the bench with a solid metallic thump. "Cold-rolled star-jade alloy, turned on the heavy lathe to zero point zero one millimeter concentricity. Chonker reamed the internal bore out to four inches, and we wrapped each core in seventy layers of high-purity copper foil."
Austin picked up one of the heavy toroidal rings, inspecting the internal bore with a critical eye. He ran a gloved thumb along the beveled chamfer, nodded in approval, and set it on the table.
"Good finish," Austin said. "Clean bore. If we mount these directly over the T-two and T-four vertebrae along the ballast frame, the induced magnetic field will capture the polar Hawking emission before it expands past the static limit. We can feed the captured flux directly into the primary busbars running down the legs."
"You're going to mount high-voltage magnetic chokes... directly onto your spine?" Tie Kuang asked, scratching his chin with a claw. "Boss, that’s twenty-two thousand kilovolts of circulating induction right next to your central nervous system."
"The spine is already grounded to the thirteen-hundred-and-fifty-pound lead ballast," Austin replied, picking up a heavy cordless impact wrench. "Lead is a great radiation shield and a decent electrical damper. Plus, I’ve got two layers of neoprene gasket between the steel brackets and my shoulder blades. As long as the U-bolts are torqued to eighty foot-pounds, it won't vibrate loose."
He handed Tie Kuang a torque wrench and a handful of three-eighths-inch stainless steel locknuts.
"Tie Kuang, hold the backing plate steady against my left shoulder. Xuan Ming, watch the torque indicator. When the needle hits eighty, you say 'stop.' Got it?"
"I... I shall serve as the Guardian of the Sacred Torque," Xuan Ming declared solemnly, clutching his yellow clipboard like an altar boy holding a hymnal.
Austin leaned forward against the workbench. Tie Kuang positioned the first heavy star-jade choke against the titanium bracket mounted along Austin's upper left shoulder blade. The sapphire plume of Hawking radiation instantly hissed as it made contact with the cold star-jade bore, swirling into a tight, magnetically contained helix.
*BRRRRRRRT. CLACK.*
Austin squeezed the trigger of the cordless impact wrench, driving the first stainless U-bolt tight through the titanium mounting plate.
"Sixty foot-pounds!" Xuan Ming called out, his eyes wide as he stared at the analog dial on the torque wrench. "Seventy! Seventy-five... EIGHTY! STOP, SACRED FOREMAN! THE HEAVENLY TENSION IS SEALED!"
Austin released the trigger.
*CLACK.*
The second U-bolt was torqued into place on the right shoulder with equal precision.
The moment both magnetic chokes were secured, Austin reached down to his hip console and engaged the secondary induction shunt.
*HUMMMMMMM.*
A deep, resonant harmonic vibration pulsed through Austin’s ribcage. The two plumes of escaping sapphire light did not scatter into the room. Instead, they were violently bent inward by the twin magnetic fields, looping down through the copper-wrapped star-jade toroids and feeding straight into the primary grounding busbars running down Austin’s legs.
A soft, golden chime echoed in his retinal display:
Austin rolled his shoulders, feeling the solid, rigid bracing of the new brackets across his upper back.
The eighty-five megawatts of captured energy circulated smoothly down to his boots, warming the soles of his steel-toed work boots with a pleasant, dry heat that felt like standing on a heated bathroom floor in midwinter.
"Now that," Austin said, exhaling with deep satisfaction, "is what I call proper energy conservation. No drafts. No wasted BTUs."
"It is the Divine Armor of the Double Dragon," Xuan Ming murmured, dropping to one knee. "The twin serpents of the void have been bound to your shoulders, drinking the ancient light of dissolution and channeling it into the sacred foundation of your golden core."
"They're just standard line reactors," Austin said, buttoning up his heavy flannel work shirt and pulling his fluorescent orange safety vest back on. "Any three-phase motor drive over fifty horsepower needs them on the input side to clip the harmonic spikes. If you don't run line reactors, your inverter drives end up with fried capacitors inside of six months."
Tie Kuang chuckled, wiping grease from his claws with a rag. "Speaking of fried capacitors, Boss, how is our friend the Arch-Dominus doing out on the Ceres rail yard?"
Austin picked up his coffee mug, taking a slow sip of black roast. "How’s he doing with the gravel?"
"He complained for the first two hours that gravel-raking was a profound indignity to the dignity of the Seven-Star Palace," Tie Kuang grinned. "Then Pug walked over, sat on his lunchbox, and stared at him for forty-five minutes without blinking. Wu Ji picked up the rake. Right now, he and forty Grand Patriarchs have leveled about three miles of track ballast to within three-sixteenths of an inch. His shoulder joints are popping, but the grade looks surprisingly straight."
"Good," Austin nodded. "Tell him if he keeps that up, I’ll knock ten thousand spirit stones off his fine by Friday."
Before Tie Kuang could respond, the master alert klaxon of Substation Kuiper-01 began to wail.
*WHOOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOOP!*
A crimson flashing strobe on the main switchboard lit up the room in pulsing red light. On the large holographic star-chart above the bench, a section of the star-jade transmission line between Neptune and Uranus was blinking yellow, then flickering toward an ominous, deep amber.
Austin set his coffee mug down on the bench with a sharp *clink*.
"Which line?" Austin demanded, stepping up to the sensor terminal.
"Trunk Line Neptune-Four," Tie Kuang said, his expression instantly hardening as his claws flew across the capacitive touchscreens. "Forty astronomical units out. Someone is applying an uncertified inductive clamp to the main three-phase busbar. They aren't just tapping it—they’re attempting to sever the star-jade cable with high-frequency spatial resonance shears!"
Xuan Ming leaned over the console, his eyes narrowing as he recognized the vibrational signature.
"The Astral Shadow Flotilla!" Xuan Ming hissed. "The Concordat’s deep-reconnaissance saboteurs! They travel in stealth-cloaked void skiffs forged from hollow cometary ice! They have severed communication lines across a dozen star sectors to blind star systems before a total assault!"
Austin looked at the line monitor.
A continuous high-voltage transmission line carrying two point five zettawatts of municipal power across forty astronomical units was not just a wire; it was a pressurized, energized arterial conduit holding the entire solar system's electrical balance in place. Severing it under full load would produce a back-EMF arc flash capable of vaporizing an entire moon.
Austin reached out and unhooked his five-foot titanium-tungsten pipe wrench from the wall rack.
"High-frequency spatial shears," Austin muttered, his voice cold, steady, and dangerously quiet. "On an energized three-phase star-jade cable."
He strapped his yellow fiberglass hard hat tight beneath his chin.
"They're trying to cut a live utility line without calling for a locate ticket," Austin said, hefting the sixty-pound wrench onto his shoulder. "Tie Kuang, charge the shuttle bay. I’m going to go teach those amateurs what happens when you cut into a hot conductor."