“Engineering Fleet One through Ten! Lock tow-cables! Sing on the beat—one, two, heave!”
General Tie Zhan stood on the open steel bridge of the lead tug-ship, a half-eaten pickled-pork bun clenched between his teeth, and waved a giant red signal flag with both armored hands.
Behind him, ten thousand heavy Star-Engineering tug-ships roared in unison. Their spirit-furnace engines belched blue-gold flames as they hauled seven moon-sized Star-Iron & Brass Thermostat Clamps straight toward the raging red sun at the center of Solar System No. 1.
Across the radio channels of the entire solar system, the booming voices of five hundred thousand Dry-Well construction workers echoed like thunder:
“Dig the ditch and lay the brick! Soup is hot and meat is thick! If a mountain blocks the train, chop it flat and pave the lane!”
Down on the ten frozen planets orbiting the star, eight billion local ice-miners heard that cheerful work song blasting out of their emergency cave radios and thought they were hallucinating.
Inside the main underground plaza of Deep-Frost Cave No. 1 on the first planet, Elder Bing—the white-bearded local magistrate of the miners—stood in front of a cracked crystal periscope wrapped in six layers of patchy bearskin quilts. Around him, two hundred thousand shivering families huddled around tiny, sputtering stone braziers, their breath freezing into white snow before it even hit the ground.
