The central staging bay of Substation Kuiper-01 was heavily braced with eighty massive, diagonal star-jade structural outriggers, welded directly between the overhead crane rails and the station’s solid titanium keel plate.
Austin stood in the center of the bay atop a six-inch-thick forged star-iron anchor pad.
His flannel work shirt hung unbuttoned from his heavy leather tool belt, revealing the massive, twenty-four-point titanium lumbar framework bolted across his torso. The existing twenty lead ballast slugs hummed with a deep, subsonic drone that rattled the loose washers in the steel bins across the room. Around his waist, the black vinyl electrical tape covering his belt buckle was vibrating at eighty kilohertz, glowing with a faint, violet Cherenkov luminescence that cast sharp shadows against the high-bay walls.
On either side of his hips, Tie Kuang and Arch-Dominus Wu Ji ran two heavy air tuggers. Linked by a steel spreader beam, they lowered the final four fifty-pound certified lead ballast slugs into position.
*RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT.*
"Brackets twenty-one through twenty-four aligned to within one-thousandth of an inch, Boss!" Tie Kuang shouted over the rising gravitational hum. "Guide pins are coated with high-pressure molybdenum anti-seize! NIST certificates verified, stamped, and logged in the permanent vessel registry!"
"Check the fluorocarbon manifold pressure!" Austin barked, his voice vibrating with a physical mass that felt like heavy iron plates grinding together in a jaw crusher. "When the mass jumps to ten Earth masses, the angular momentum is going to spike by a factor of ten! If those ten dynamic damper chambers don't hit eighteen hundred RPM the instant the pins seat, the gyroscopic wobble will wrench this entire substation thirty miles out of orbit!"
"Manifold pressure holding at thirty thousand PSI!" Wu Ji bellowed back, his hands steady on the hydraulic diverter valve. "Coolant chiller online at two Kelvin! Fluid lines purged of all vapor pockets!"
Austin reached behind his hips with both heavy work-gloved hands.
He grasped the four fifty-pound lead ingots, sliding their machined dovetail tracks simultaneously into brackets twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four along the lower lumbar harness:
*CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.*
Austin engaged his digital torque wrench, tightening the four hardened stainless steel locking pins in an alternating cross-pattern to ninety foot-pounds. The pins slammed home in rapid, concussive succession, sounding like a battery of heavy naval cannons firing in synchronized salvo.
Eighteen hundred pounds of certified lead ballast now hung suspended from Austin’s skeletal framework, locking his spine into an immovable, monolithic column of dense metal.
Austin reached down to his hip console and slammed his palm down on the master override button for his deca-chamber hydrodynamic fluid balancing gyroscopes.
*SKREEEEEEEEECH.*
The ten high-pressure fluorocarbon pumps screamed like a formation of diving jet fighters, their rotational velocity spooling up from sixteen hundred to exactly eighteen hundred RPM. The chilled synthetic fluorocarbon circulated through braided copper cooling jackets at thirty thousand PSI, absorbing the brutal angular shear with turbine-smooth, vibration-free perfection.
And then, his core breached the Level Ninety-Eight threshold.
A multi-tiered golden alert window exploded across Austin’s vision, blinding in its dazzling golden majesty:
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.*
The gravitational settlement that radiated from Austin’s dantian was so immense, so monolithic, that the fabric of space across the entire solar system instantly solidified into a rigid, unyielding lattice.
Beneath his steel-toed boots, the six-inch forged star-iron anchor pad settled into the keel by two-thousandths of an inch.
A staggering six times ten to the twenty-fifth kilograms was packed into a space smaller than the tip of a sewing needle. That was the mass of ten complete Earths—crusts, mantles, molten cores, and atmospheres. All of it sat inside a single, roaring dark core in a construction foreman's belly!
Under exactly one hundred and ten Gs of localized surface gravity, the ambient air in the maintenance bay was seized by an extraordinary optical and kinetic distortion.
Austin reached to his tool belt, unhooking a twenty-five-foot steel tape measure. He tossed it lightly into the air.
The tape measure did not fall straight down.
Austin’s ten-Earth-mass core grabbed the tape measure in a tight gravitational spin. It circled his waist three times at thirty miles an hour before Austin casually reached out and caught it: *snap*.
Xuan Ming and High Inquisitor Tian Luo fell prostrate onto the steel floorplates, their white hard hats knocking against the metal as their souls trembled before the terrifying, cosmic reality.
"Ten Earths..." Xuan Ming wept in religious ecstasy, clutching his aluminum clipboard with both hands. "Ten complete mortal worlds... bound within the dantian of the Master Foreman! The Ten Heavens of the ancient epoch have been forged into a single foundation pillar!"
"He has become the immovable coordinate of creation," Tian Luo whispered, tears streaming down his oil-stained cheeks. "The entire galaxy could crash against his boots, and it would shatter like glass against an adamantine anvil!"
Austin clipped the tape measure back onto his leather belt, entirely unimpressed by the cosmic theology.
"Look at that," Austin muttered, shaking his head with mild tradesman irritation. "A three-foot gravitational orbit around my hips. If I don't keep my tool pockets zipped, my spare wire nuts, washers, and pencil stubs are going to start forming an accretion disc around my belt buckle. That’s a serious occupational foreign object debris hazard, Tie Kuang. From here on out, every hand tool on this job site must have a positive retention lanyard clipped to the harness."
Austin reached behind his back, running a gloved thumb over the stamped lettering of his ASME Section VIII nameplate riveted to his central titanium spine. Under the massive hundred-and-ten-G static load, the Monel blind rivets were holding dead-straight, showing zero head distortion or tensile necking. The relief valves on his dual shoulder-mounted star-jade diverters hummed in cold standby, ready to vent up to one hundred zettawatts of thermal exhaust if internal chamber pressure surged.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the immense, rock-solid counterpoise of eighteen hundred pounds of lead ballast humming against his spine. With eighteen hundred pounds of counterweight holding him true to plumb and ten Earth masses of raw inertia anchoring his center of mass, Austin felt as solid as a mountain range cast from solid steel.
He picked up a heavy ten-gauge star-jade grounding strap from the workbench.
He clamped one end onto the titanium mounting bracket of his lumbar harness, and the other end onto the central busbar lug of Substation Kuiper-01’s main structural frame:
*CLANG-CLICK.*
The moment the grounding strap locked, the faint orbital wobble of the entire five-mile substation instantly died.
The station’s artificial gravity, its structural keel, and its forty-AU star-jade transmission lines locked into a rigid, unyielding geometric alignment with Austin’s core. The entire outer solar system was now physically anchored to the inertia of ten Earths!
"Keel grounded to master ballast," Austin announced, nodding with grim professional approval. "Substation is locked on station. Zero orbital drift."
Tie Kuang stepped forward, wiping grease from his dragon claws with a rag. "Boss... how does it feel carrying ten Earths in your gut?"
"Dense," Austin replied calmly, picking up his five-foot titanium-tungsten pipe wrench and resting it across his right shoulder. "Like eating three bowls of cold oatmeal before heading out to dig a trench in twenty-degree weather. Sits heavy, but it sticks to your ribs. Keeps you from getting blown over in a stiff breeze."
Before Tie Kuang could laugh, the deep-space auspex crystal at the center of the control room let out an ear-splitting, shrieking alarm.
*SKREEEEEEEEEECH!*
The four-foot crystal bowl began to boil violently, liquid starlight splashing over the rim and sizzling against the deckplates.
On the master holographic star-chart above the workbench, a colossal wall of dark crimson distortion—a trillion-zettawatt gravitational wave tsunami—was tearing through the Sagittarius boundary at eighty thousand miles per second.
The shockwave was twenty thousand light-years wide and three light-years thick: the concentrated, collapsing momentum of three billion stars falling inward toward the Galactic Core!
Xuan Ming’s face went completely bloodless.
"The core tsunami..." Xuan Ming shrieked, pointing a shaking finger at the holographic display. "The inward collapse of the central bulge has unleashed the First Tectonic Wave! It carries a trillion zettawatts of spatial compression! It will reach our coordinates in two hours! It will crush the Perseus Arm like an eggshell!"
Austin looked at the incoming crimson wall on the star-chart, his eyes narrowing behind his dark Shade-14 welding goggles.
He didn't flinch. He didn't order an evacuation.
He pulled a fresh carbon-copy pad from his tool belt, clicked his No. 2 grease pencil, and checked the pressure gauges on the hydraulic shoring lines.
"Two hours," Austin said, his voice dropping into a flat, steady, immovable contractor growl.
He strapped his yellow hard hat tight beneath his chin.
"Wu Ji, sound the general alarm across the Deep-Void Pipeline Corps," Austin commanded. "Every man to their shoring stations. Tie Kuang, pre-charge the hydraulic accumulators to sixty thousand PSI. Tian Luo, get your grease gun."
Austin gripped his five-foot pipe wrench with both heavy work-gloved hands, planting his steel-toed boots wide against the transuranic floorplates as ten Earth masses of monolithic mass locked into the bedrock of reality.
"The inward wave is coming," Austin said. "Let’s show that galactic core what happens when an unstoppable force hits an eighteen-hundred-pound lead-ballasted contractor."