6:05 PM — Five hours and fifty-five minutes until the Hundred-Year Black Blizzard.
At the Dry-Well Central Star-Gate, all four giant railway lanes glowed bright gold at the same time!
CHOO-CHOO! CHOO-CHOO! CHOO-CHOO!
One hundred heavy freight trains thundered straight out of Black-Iron Moon (World #3) and Thunder-Peak Planet (World #6), hurtling across the starry sky at full speed toward Frost-Mirror Star!
Standing on the open flatcars of the first fifty trains were Chief Shi Gang and all 500,000 Star-Iron Golems, each one holding a pneumatic pipe-wrench in one metal hand and ten tons of freshly cast Black-Iron Home Radiators under the other arm!
On the next fifty trains rode General Tie Zhan, 300,000 Furnace-Blood Martial Soldiers, and Thunder-Hawk King Lei Zhen leading all 100,000 Express Thunder-Hawks carrying coils of insulated copper power cable and boxes of double-pane glass windows!
Down at Frost-Mirror Central Station, Pei Xuan stood atop the command tower with his Fusion Cube wide open, his hands moving across the golden holographic map of the entire planet like a master commander conducting a symphony.
“Six hundred million households across five thousand glacier towns and villages!” Pei Xuan’s voice boomed across every worker’s communication badge on the planet. “We don’t have time to dig underground trenches for every village before midnight—so we are fusing Self-Connecting Volcano-Core Radiator Networks! System—fuse!”
