“An automated bathhouse and registration conveyor belt?” Abacus Su adjusted his spectacles, his eyes lighting up behind the thick glass lenses. “My Lord, do you mean we don’t have to hire fifty thousand clerks to dip brushes in ink and ask every refugee how to spell their grandmother’s maiden name?”
“Half of these folks from Worlds 41 to 45 were never even allowed to have a family name under Blood-Moon Monarch,” Pei Xuan said, looking out at the millions of shivering, pickle-scented refugees crowded across the orbital dock of World 40. “Their old iron tags only had mine-pit numbers stamped on them. If we make them stand in a cold line for three days filling out paper forms, they’ll think we’re just another bureaucratic sect.”
He turned to Tie Zhan and Ye Guhan. “Clear the fifty-mile orbital flatland on the east side of World 40’s station. And bring up those ten thousand empty oak pickle barrels and rusty iron ore carts—don’t throw a single plank of wood away!”
“Yes, my Lord!”
Tie Zhan waved his command flag, and three hundred Giant Magnet-Toads hopped out from the cargo train cars. With loud SLURP-CRUNCH noises, the iron toads sucked up the thousands of rusty ore carts, chewed the scrap iron into flat, gleaming steel plates, and laid down a fifty-mile-long foundation deck in fifteen minutes flat.
