For the next three days, the Ten-Sun Greenhouse & Bug-Fryer Belt hummed like a warm, golden beehive.
Every six hours, another harvest of Rank 7 Golden-Ear Spirit Corn ripened across the fifty billion acres of circular solar farmland. Automated harvester-crabs—modified from the mining machines back in the Heavy-Metal Cluster—rolled gently down the two-foot-wide rows, plucking the glowing yellow cobs while leaving the stalks to regrow under the warm Sweet-Spring mist.
Down in the newly built residential towns along the inner rim of the rings, the one hundred and fifty billion refugees from the Barren Dust Sector were eating three hot meals a day for the first time in months. Sweet corn chowder, steamed corn-flour buns, and roasted meat-potatoes filled every cafeteria table. Children who had arrived looking like little bundles of dry twigs already had round, rosy cheeks, and the elderly farmers spent their mornings weeping with joy as they walked beside the endless golden fields.
Yet on the morning of the fourth day, every refugee in System #41 suddenly stopped chewing their breakfast.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ—!
It wasn’t the gentle, soothing hum of Pei Xuan’s purple bug-zapper grid.
It was a harsh, metallic, bone-rattling screech—the sound of a hundred billion pairs of serrated iron wings scraping together as they tore through the fabric of space at warp speed!
