At seven o’clock sharp the next morning, five sleek black-iron Spirit-Furnace Star-Trains glided across the newly built Canglan-Moon Permanent Sky-Rail and pulled up beside the temporary wooden platform in Dust-Rock Moon’s main crater.
HISSSSS—CLANG!
Five thousand carriage doors slid open at the exact same time.
Out stepped five hundred thousand veteran construction workers from Dry-Well Capital’s First, Second, and Third Engineering Divisions! Every single worker wore a warm, quilted crimson pair of Civilian Space-Overalls, a crystal-clear goldfish bowl helmet with a hot beef-broth straw, and carried a heavy iron shovel over one shoulder and a tin lunchbox in the other hand.
At the head of the platform stood twenty rows of green cast-iron Dry-Well Municipal Timecard Clocks managed by Abacus Su’s assistant clerks.
KA-CHING! KA-CHING! KA-CHING!
“Morning, Foreman Zhang! Did you take the 6:15 Express from the Red-Sand District?” a young bricklayer named Er Goudan grinned through his helmet speaker as he punched his cardboard timecard into Clock #4.
“Sure did! Forty-five minutes door-to-door from my courtyard in Dry-Well City all the way to the Moon!” Foreman Zhang laughed, checking the purple ink stamp on his card before giving his chest pockets a happy pat. “Back when I was a starving refugee in the desert, it took me two days on foot just to walk to Salt-Pool Town! Now I eat two eggs and a bowl of soy milk at home with my wife, hop on the morning Star-Train, and clock in on the moon for triple space-hazard pay plus…
