At midnight on the tenth day after the liberation of System #90, the great brass clock tower atop the central Star-Train hub of System #90 chimed twelve times.
DONG—DONG—DONG!
The deep, warm sound of the midnight bell traveled instantaneously through the quantum relay pipes of the Ninety-Sun Thermostat Grid, echoing gently across nine hundred inhabited planets, three thousand farming and mining moons, and five hundred thousand miles of bustling night-market streets.
Standing on the grand balcony of the System #90 Station Tower, Pei Xuan looked out over a star-field that had been completely transformed in less than a year.
Where there had once been freezing ice-worlds, choked junk-nebulas, overpriced pill monopolies, brutal warlord shipyards, locust-stripped dust bowls, pitch-black assassin rifts, taxed-to-death sun zones, ticking supernova bombs, and starving military borderlands, there now stretched a single, unbroken, brightly lit cosmic civilization: The Dry-Well Ninety-System Municipal Grid.
Along Ye Guhan’s twelve-lane Light-Speed Solar Highways, thousands of Spirit-Furnace Star-Trains glided smoothly on tracks of golden sunlight, hauling millions of tons of Meat-Belly Giant Potatoes, Golden-Ear Spirit Corn, and Honey-Glazed Space-Shrimp between systems for the price of a single paper Grain-Note.
Beside the highways, 100 Heavy-Duty Sanitation Void Whales in bright orange reflective vests swam on their midnight street-sweeping patrol, their brass vacuum snouts gleaming under the Solar High-Beam Streetlamps as they slurped up stray meteor dust and burped out neat stacks of refined Star-Iron bricks.
