In the freezing, sunless void between Uranus and Neptune, forty astronomical units from the warmth of the inner planets, the star-jade transmission trunk line hung like a taut, glowing golden thread against the infinite sea of black.
The cable was four feet in diameter, constructed from alternating layers of braided r-process star-jade, cryogenically stabilized graphene foil, and high-purity copper mesh. It hummed with a quiet, terrifying vibration—carrying two point five zettawatts of balanced three-phase direct current to the deep outer monitoring stations.
Clustered around the glowing conduit, twenty stealth-cloaked corvettes of the Concordat Astral Shadow Flotilla hovered in complete silence.
Their hulls were not forged from metal. They were carved from the dense, ancient core ice of dead comets, infused with dark-matter stealth runes that absorbed radar, light, and spiritual consciousness. To any conventional sensor array, they appeared as nothing more than a cluster of drifting, harmless space gravel.
Aboard the lead stealth corvette, Shadow-Inquisitor Mo Yan smiled a cold, razor-thin smile through his porcelain mask.
"Behold the lifeline of the mortal barbarian," Mo Yan whispered, his voice transmitted through tight-beam telepathy to his twenty ship captains. "They believe their crude copper threads can bind the celestial void. They do not realize that in deep space, a single cut to their energy cord leaves their entire empire blind, frozen, and helpless in the dark."
Beside him, two Void-Artisans were maneuvering a colossal pair of *Abyssal Spatial Shears*—a sixty-foot mechanical pincer forged from condensed neutronium and inscribed with nine tiers of spatial severance arrays. The jaws of the shears opened wide, their razor-sharp edges glowing with pitch-black void-fire as they prepared to clamp down on the glowing star-jade cable.
"Are the spatial severance runes primed?" Mo Yan asked.
"Primed and synchronized, Lord Inquisitor," the Lead Artisan reported, sweat freezing on his brow in the sub-zero cabin. "Upon the closure of the jaws, a localized spatial fracture will tear the cable at the molecular level. Not even immortal jade can withstand the shear."
"Sever the tether," Mo Yan commanded, flicking his sleeve. "Let their barbarian lights die."
The sixty-foot jaws of the spatial shears began to close.
They were less than two inches from the star-jade jacket when a heavy, muffled *CLANG* echoed through the vacuum.
Mo Yan blinked, his porcelain mask tilting downward in confusion. "What was that vibration? Did a micrometeorite strike the hull?"
"No, Lord Inquisitor," the Artisan stammered, pointing a shaking hand toward the forward optical viewport. "Someone... someone just landed on the cable."
Mo Yan leaned forward, pressing his face against the frost-rimmed glass.
There, standing directly atop the four-foot star-jade trunk line in the airless, frozen void of forty astronomical units, was a lone human figure.
He was wearing a heavy flannel work jacket beneath a fluorescent orange safety vest with reflective silver chevrons, insulated steel-toed work boots, and a bright yellow fiberglass hard hat with an elastic chin strap. Bolted across his lower back was a rectangular steel framework holding thirteen hundred and fifty pounds of certified lead ballast. Slung casually over his right shoulder was a massive, five-foot titanium-tungsten pipe wrench with an eight-inch serrated jaw.
Across his eyes, he wore dark Shade-14 oxy-acetylene welding goggles.
A translucent system notification hovered before Austin’s eyes as his boots locked onto the star-jade conduit:
Austin looked down at the twenty cloaked cometary ice corvettes clustered around the cable, then at the sixty-foot spatial shears hovering inches from the energized star-jade insulation.
He let out a slow, heavy sigh that fogged the inside of his welding goggles for half a second before the internal heaters cleared it.
He tapped the radio transmitter on his hard hat collar, broadcasting across the open high-voltage emergency utility band:
*"To the twenty unmarked cometary ice craft currently crowding Trans-Neptunian Trunk Line Four: back away from the conductor immediately. You are within the fifteen-foot minimum safe approach distance for an energized twenty-two-thousand-kilovolt transmission line. You are not wearing dielectric rubber gloves, you have not installed grounding clusters, and I know for a fact you did not call eight-one-one to log a utility locate ticket before bringing those shears out here."*
Aboard the lead stealth corvette, Mo Yan’s jaw dropped beneath his porcelain mask.
"He... he is standing on a bare transmission line in hard vacuum?" Mo Yan rasped, his aristocratic composure cracking into utter disbelief. "And he is lecturing us on... digging permits?!"
"Lord Inquisitor," the Artisan whispered, his teeth chattering. "Our optical arrays indicate the gravitational mass of that single mortal exceeds sixteen lunar bodies. His boots are compressing the star-jade casing by three hundredths of an inch simply by standing there!"
Mo Yan’s eyes flared with ruthless, desperate venom.
"He is alone!" Mo Yan hissed. "Decloak all vessels! Fire the Void-Draining Darts! Pin his soul to the void and close the shears! CUT THAT CABLE!"
The twenty stealth corvettes shimmered as their dark-matter cloaks dissolved.
Twenty jagged hulls of black cometary ice emerged from the shadows of deep space, their prow-mounted repeating dart launchers rotating toward Austin. Hundreds of six-foot spatial-disruption harpoons, tipped with cursed void-iron and designed to siphon immortal cultivation bases until the victim dried into a husk, shot toward Austin in a deadly, converging cloud of needle-like projectiles.
Austin didn't flinch. He didn't even drop into a defensive martial stance.
He simply unslung his five-foot pipe wrench from his shoulder, spun it through his fingers with the easy, casual familiarity of a veteran mechanic twirling a socket ratchet, and looked at the shears.
"Uncertified hot-tap under live load," Austin said, shaking his head. "I told you what happens."
Austin did not swing the wrench at the incoming harpoons.
Instead, he knelt on one knee, adjusted the knurled thumb-wheel on the wrench until the serrated jaws opened to exactly four and a half inches, and clamped the heavy titanium-tungsten head directly across the grounding shield and the primary energized phase-conductor of the star-jade trunk line.
He created a deliberate, dead-short line-to-ground fault.
*CLANK.*
"Grounding phase A," Austin said calmly.
Under normal electrical circumstances, shorting an energized utility line with a hand tool would result in a massive arc flash that would vaporize the lineman and weld the wrench to the cable.
But Austin was not a normal lineman.
Austin had an extreme Kerr rotating black hole spinning at near-light speed inside his dantian. Thirteen hundred and fifty pounds of certified lead ballast weighed down his frame, paired with twin magnetic chokes torqued across his shoulder blades. His body had virtually zero electrical resistance. He didn't fight the surge; he acted as a perfect superconducting bypass.
When the two point five zettawatts of high-voltage direct current met the dead short of the wrench, the current didn't blow Austin apart.
Instead, following the absolute laws of magnetohydrodynamic induction, the staggering two-point-five-zettawatt fault surge sought the nearest path of capacitive coupling.
And that path was the massive, sixty-foot neutronium spatial shears currently touching the outer shield of the cable—which were physically connected to the main power grids of the twenty cometary ice corvettes!
*ZAP-CRACKLE-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
A blinding, violet-and-gold arc flash, six miles wide and brighter than a thousand supernovas, detonated between the star-jade cable and the spatial shears!
Two point five zettawatts of raw, unbuffered current surged backward through the neutronium shears at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.
The surge slammed into the lead stealth corvette’s electrical conduits like an asteroid striking a glass window.
The ship’s dark-matter runes didn't just fail; they exploded off the hull in showers of violet sparks. Inside the cabin, every instrument console, jade communication crystal, and spiritual navigation orb flashed brilliant white and burst into flames. The two Void-Artisans operating the shears were blown backward through three bulkheads by the sheer electrostatic back-EMF, their robes smoking as their hair stood straight up on end.
And because the twenty corvettes were linked in a tight tactical formation by high-frequency resonance tethers, the fault current leaped from hull to hull in a blinding spiderweb of lightning!
*SNAP! CRACKLE! BANG! BANG! BANG!*
One by one, the twenty cometary ice hulls began to steam violently in the hard vacuum.
The cryogenic ice that formed their hulls—preserved for ten thousand years in the freezing depths of the Oort cloud—reached boiling temperatures in less than two seconds. Prow sections melted into slush. Steering nozzles blew off their mounts with sharp, pressurized hisses. The hundred-foot spatial disruption harpoons that had been fired at Austin lost their magnetic guidance the moment their launch capacitors burned out, tumbling harmlessly past his hard hat like spent matchsticks.
Within twelve seconds, the entire Astral Shadow Flotilla was dead in the water.
Twenty scorched, melted, steaming chunks of cometary ice drifted helplessly in the void, their engines completely fried, their cloaking systems permanently vaporized, and their crew stumbling out onto the scorched catwalks coughing up smoke.
Austin smoothly unlatched the pipe wrench from the star-jade line.
*CLICK.*
The blinding arc flash died. The transmission line settled back into its steady, quiet, two-point-five-zettawatt hum.
Austin inspected the jaws of his wrench. The hardened tungsten-carbide teeth were slightly discolored by the extreme electrical heat, showing a faint rainbow patina of oxidized titanium, but the metal remained rock-solid and true to gauge. He pulled an oily rag from his back pocket, wiped down the teeth, and slung the tool back over his shoulder.
He stood up on the star-jade cable, walking casually across the top of the conduit until he was standing ten feet above the shattered command bridge of the lead corvette.
Through the melted, transparent ice ceiling of the bridge, Shadow-Inquisitor Mo Yan was lying on his back, his porcelain mask cracked down the center, staring up at Austin with eyes dilated in sheer, uncomprehending terror.
Austin pulled a clipboard from his belt, clicked his grease pencil, and filled out a fresh carbon slip:
**NOTICE OF UNLAWFUL UTILITY INTERFERENCE (§ 1926.651)** *VIOLATOR: Astral Shadow Flotilla (Unregistered Cometary Craft)* *INFRACTION: Operating Uncertified Cutting Equipment Within High-Voltage Envelope* *ASSESSMENT: 150,000,000 Spirit Stones (Direct Line Repair & Surge Suppression Surcharge)* *DISPOSITION: All vessels impounded for municipal scrap remediation.*
Austin tore the yellow carbon slip from the pad, walked to the edge of the cable, and dropped it through the shattered viewport onto Mo Yan’s smoking chest.
"Next time you bring heavy shears near a live three-phase trunk line," Austin told the paralyzed Inquisitor, "make sure you call the utility company first. Because the next citation won't be a warning—it'll be a mandatory appearance before the zoning board."
Austin tapped his radio headset.
"Tie Kuang," Austin said.
*"Yeah, Boss?"*
"We've got twenty more disabled hulls out here near Neptune. Send Chonker with the heavy tow cables. We can melt down the cometary ice for auxiliary cooling water at the Ceres smelting foundries."