Crater #8, three miles west of the No. 1 Planetary Volcano Forge, was a flat, circular basin two miles across with a natural ramp facing the open sky.
Early the next morning, Chief Shi Gang and fifty thousand gleaming black-chrome Star-Iron Golems marched into Crater #8 carrying colossal, twenty-foot-thick hull plates of Hundred-Refined Star-Steel on their shoulders like waiters carrying dinner trays.
“Set the keel plates down in the center, brothers!” Chief Shi Gang boomed happily, pausing to take a sip from a five-gallon hip flask of Old Guo’s Spiced Motor-Oil before wiping his mouth with a shiny wrist. “Lord Pei says today we aren’t building train cars—we’re building a flying iron castle that can swim through the stars without tracks!”
Beside the command platform at the edge of the crater, Ye Guhan, General Tie Zhan, Boom-Pot Sun, and Abacus Su crowded around Pei Xuan’s blueprint table, each trying to pitch their own design ideas for the empire’s very first space warship.
“My Lord, a space warship should clearly be shaped like a giant flying sword!” Ye Guhan said earnestly, holding up a charcoal sketch he had drawn on the back of a noodle menu. “Make it one mile long, razor-sharp on both edges, and put a tiny open-air platform on the tip where I can stand in the wind and slash passing comets!”
