In the standard commercial electrical contracting handbook, laying a branch circuit was a straightforward matter of pulling three twelve-gauge copper conductors through three-quarter-inch thin-wall electrical metallic tubing, strapping it to bar joists every ten feet with two-hole zinc clamps, and torquing the lug screws to forty inch-pounds.
When your utility branch circuit was one hundred and forty million miles long, carried five hundred exawatts of direct current, and stretched through the hard, unforgiving vacuum of interplanetary space from Earth’s orbital ring to the asteroid belt, the job required a slightly larger spool of wire and considerably more patience.
Austin was standing on the aft flight deck of Dreadnought Foundry 01, forty-two thousand kilometers above the blue-green marble of the Azure Cloud Sphere. He was wearing his heavy-duty denim work shirt, his steel-toed boots reinforced with titanium caps, and his white supervisor hard hat fitted with a dark Shade-14 welding visor. In his hands, he held a heavy-duty industrial megohmmeter—a rugged yellow plastic testing unit with two six-foot test leads ending in heavy bronze alligator clips.
Resting on the orbital launch rails before him was the *Cable-Laying Barge Alpha-01*—a converted two-mile-long Harvester dreadnought whose forward weapons bay had been hollowed out to accommodate an immense, motorized cable spool forty-five stories high. Wound around the colossal steel drum were sixty million miles of midnight-purple, glowing cable, eight inches in diameter, extruded from pure r-process transuranic star-jade jacketed in nine-times-refined gold shielding.
Beside Austin stood Tie Kuang, holding a five-gallon bucket of graphite-infused synthetic wire-pulling lubricant, and Grand Inquisitor Xuan Ming, who was holding an official triplicate spool-inspection manifest on an aluminum clipboard.
Down on the spooling deck, former Sovereign Chen Tian and Elder Mo Fan were diligently checking the guide pulleys. Both ancient cosmic horrors were wearing fluorescent orange vests over their tattered robes, their yellow hard hats buckled securely under their chins, checking the tensioner bearings with feeler gauges.
"Austin," Tie Kuang said, gesturing with his greasy wooden paddle toward the bucket. "The disciples from the Alchemy Pavilion wanted to smear the cable with Sacred Nine-Essence Lotus Oil. They claimed it would imbue the holy wire with the fragrance of celestial enlightenment and speed its passage through the stars."
Austin rubbed his temples beneath the brim of his hard hat, letting out a long, exhausted sigh.
"Tie Kuang, what happens to organic lotus oil when it’s exposed to absolute zero in a hard vacuum?"
"It outgasses volatile organics, boils off its moisture, and polymerizes into a rock-hard black tar," Tie Kuang recited dutifully, having memorized page twelve of the Hazardous Materials Manual.
"Exactly," Austin said. "It turns into black tar, seizes the guide pulleys, causes forty thousand tons of drag on the payout capstan, and snaps the cable like a dry spaghetti noodle sixty million miles out. We use synthetic graphite-silicone compound only. Zero outgassing, zero freezing, and a friction coefficient of zero point zero two. If I see lotus oil within fifty yards of my payout sheaves, I’m demoting the entire Alchemy Pavilion to washing gravel."
"Understood, Austin," Tie Kuang grinned, vigorously stirring the dark gray graphite sludge. "Synthetic silicone only."
Austin turned to Xuan Ming. "All right, Xuan Ming. Clip the black ground lead of the megohmmeter to the dreadnought’s main grounding busbar. Hook the red lead to the central star-jade conductor of Spool Alpha. Let’s see what kind of insulation resistance we have on this run before we let the barge drift past Mars."
Xuan Ming stepped forward with military precision, clamping the heavy bronze jaw onto the exposed purple core of the star-jade cable with a loud, metallic *CLACK*.
Austin pressed the test button on the yellow tester, cranking the internal DC test generator up to ten thousand volts.
The analog needle on the meter jumped off its zero stop, sweeping smoothly across the dial and pinning itself firmly against the right-hand peg at infinity.
Austin nodded in mild approval. "Infinity. That's what I like to see on a megger test. No pinholes in the extrusion jacket. Zero dielectric leakage to ground."
Xuan Ming let out a long, trembling breath of religious ecstasy, his white supervisor hard hat gleaming beneath the harsh glare of the binary suns.
"The... the Sacred Dragon Cord of the First Dawn," Xuan Ming murmured, his eyes wide as he gazed at the sixty million miles of glowing purple cable wound around the drum. "The ancient sutras of the Upper Void spoke of the Great Weaver who spins the threads of karma to bind the distant wandering stars to the primal throne. We hold sixty million miles of heaven’s own sinew..."
"We hold an eight-inch extruded high-voltage direct-current transmission cable," Austin corrected flatly, unhooking the test leads and wrapping them around the meter’s storage cleats. "And right now, it’s not binding karma, it’s going to provide three-phase exawatt power to the automated strip-mines on Vesta and Ceres. You don't run alternating current across astronomical distances. AC produces massive capacitive reactive line losses and radiates gigawatts of electromagnetic interference into deep space. High-voltage direct current in a bipolar configuration gives you pure, zero-loss bulk power transfer. If you want to melt twenty-billion-ton nickel-iron asteroids into usable I-beams in deep space, you run an HVDC transmission line directly from the planetary Dyson Swarm."
Tie Kuang dipped his paddle into the bucket, smearing a generous coating of graphite grease across the primary brass guide rollers.
"Austin," Tie Kuang said, his voice crackling over the radio. "The Southern Sword Saint and Emperor Wu have assembled eighty void-suited sword cultivators on the trailing tender barge. They are armed with pneumatic wire-tensioners and optical laser alignment trackers. But... Jiang Taixu is arguing with Emperor Wu again."
Austin rubbed the bridge of his nose. "What are they arguing about now? It better not be stair nosings."
"No," Tie Kuang chuckled. "Jiang Taixu claims that laying a sixty-million-mile cable through the void is an act of supreme sword intent, arguing that the cable must be laid along the 'Celestial Path of the Azure Phoenix,' curving around the orbit of Mars to harmonize with the planetary feng shui. Emperor Wu insists that according to the Sacred Municipal Building Code, utility lines must follow the shortest straight-line geodesic path to minimize electrical line drag and project costs."
Austin picked up his radio microphone, switching to the cable-tender frequency.
"Jiang Taixu! Emperor Wu!" Austin barked, his voice flat, dry, and cutting through their headphones like an industrial band saw. "Shut up and listen to me. Space does not have a feng shui bird, and utility cables do not make scenic detours around planetary orbits. A curve of ten million miles adds twenty-six billion dollars in unnecessary star-jade cable, creates an unacceptable capacitive line-charging delay, and leaves the wire exposed to micrometeorite shearing along the outer rim. We are running a straight laser geodesic from Station Four directly to Ceres Terminal Alpha. If either of you touches the thruster gimbals to curve that line, I’m putting you both on manual cable-spooling duty with hand cranks for the next three weeks."
Across the radio band, the two monarchs froze in terror.
"Understood, Lord Architect!" Jiang Taixu gasped, instantly letting go of the steering thruster yoke. "A straight line! The shortest path of the Sovereign Vector!"
"The Great Yan Empire fully endorses the straight-line geodesic!" Emperor Wu echoed frantically. "We shall not permit a single arc-second of curvature to waste the holy star-jade!"
Austin lowered the radio, tossing it onto his clipboard. "Idiots. It’s basic Euclidean geometry."
He turned back to the control console of the cable barge.
Deep within Austin's chest, his five-kilometer dense neutron star core spun at exactly twelve hundred revolutions per minute, radiating a steady, monolithic fifty-exawatt baseline through his physical body. Around his hips, his localized accretion ring—the tin lunchbox, utility knife, brass sharpener, crescent wrench, reciprocating saw, spirit level, and linesman’s pliers—drifted in their smooth, patient twelve-foot-per-second circular orbit, completely undisturbed by the vacuum of space.
He reached down to the console, slapping the primary pneumatic clutch lever.
*CLANK-WHINE-HUUUM.*
The massive sixty-foot electric winch motor on the cable barge engaged.
The giant steel drum began to rotate, spinning slowly on its low-friction magnetic bearings. Out through the aft guide hawsepipe, the thick, purple star-jade cable slid smoothly into the black void of space, paid out at a constant, controlled speed of sixty miles per hour.
As the glowing purple line stretched outward from the Geosynchronous Ring, cold-gas thruster tugs positioned along the cable’s length fired in brief, synchronized bursts, keeping the line under constant, thirty-thousand-pound static tension to prevent snarls and loops in zero gravity.
Down on the planet below, in the valley of the Azure Cloud Sect, Abbot Xuanji was standing on the roof of his newly opened all-night electric laundromat. The ancient abbot adjusted his brass telescope, looking past the twelve-thousand-mirror Dyson swarm into the outer dark.
Through the eyepiece, a brilliant, hairline-thin purple laser line stretched out across the cosmos, reaching toward the distant Asteroid Belt like an endless thread of divine silk.
"Behold," Abbot Xuanji whispered, wiping a tear of joy from his wrinkled cheek as the aroma of citrus detergent and steamed sticky rice drifted up from the laundromat's exhaust vents. "The Lord Architect stretches the Cable of Boundless Power into the outer dark. Even the wild rocks of the void shall soon have warm laundry."
High in orbit, Austin checked his resin digital watch, saw that the gravitational time dilation was holding steady at zero point zero zero four two percent, and made a quick notation on his checklist.
"Barge Alpha is underway," Austin said, pulling his thermos of black coffee from his canvas bag. "Tie Kuang, prep Barge Beta. Once Alpha passes the orbit of Mars, we start laying the return neutral line. You can't run a DC transmission circuit on a single leg. You need a return path, or you’re just charging the asteroid belt like an oversized capacitor."
Tie Kuang grinned through his helmet, raising a thumb. "Barge Beta is on the rails, Austin! Two hundred thousand tons of gold-clad return conductor ready to roll!"
Austin took a sip of hot coffee, looking out toward the distant red speck of Mars and the glittering band of asteroids beyond.
"Good," Austin said. "Let’s go wire up the solar system."