The two-point-five-zettawatt fault surge didn't dissipate into empty space. It fed straight back down Austin’s grounding cable. It surged through his star-jade busbars and poured directly into the spinning Kerr black hole in his dantian.
Austin stepped back onto the reinforced steel deck of Substation Kuiper-01. The deck groaned under him with a sharp, agonizing metallic screech.
*SKRRRRRRT.*
Beneath his steel-toed boots, four-inch titanium floorplates bowed downward by nearly three-quarters of an inch. Gravity around his chest climbed fast. It blew past ninety-four Gs and spiked hard toward ninety-eight Gs. The total mass of his internal core swelled past twenty-six moons. That was a full one-third of Earth's mass, squashed into a point smaller than the tip of a sewing needle.
"Tie Kuang!" Austin barked. His voice dropped into a heavy, rumbling bass that rattled every loose wrench on the shadow boards. "Pass me the auxiliary slug! Sixteenth bracket! Move! The anchor bolts are taking way too much shear!"
Tie Kuang didn't ask questions.
The massive dragon-man heard the dangerous hum of steel pushed past its limit. He lunged for the heavy lead storage locker. He hauled out a fifty-pound certified lead ballast slug with both hands. Thick muscles bulged under his copper scales as he sprinted across the groaning floor to Austin's side.
"Hold the bracket steady!" Austin ordered. His boots sank deeper into the metal. "If this load shifts two degrees off-axis, the floor joists will punch right through the bottom pressure hull!"
Austin reached behind his hip. He yanked the hardened stainless steel locking pin and slammed the heavy slug into the sixteenth auxiliary bracket of his lumbar harness.
*CLANG-CRUNCH.*
The locking pin snapped home with the sharp slam of a bank vault door.
Fourteen hundred pounds of certified lead ballast hung from Austin’s spine. The dead weight counterbalanced the wild spin of his black hole. His hex-chamber fluid gyroscopes screamed at fourteen hundred RPM. They pumped ice-cold fluorocarbon at twenty-two thousand PSI to keep his spin dead steady.
And then, his core breached the threshold.
A blinding, multi-layered golden alert window exploded across his vision:
*THOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.*
This had nothing to do with acoustic sound. It was a pure magnetohydrodynamic shockwave. It bypassed physical eardrums completely and shook the marrow of the skull.
Along Austin’s spin axis—projecting straight out from his shoulder blades where the magnetic chokes were torqued—the fabric of space ripped open.
Magnetic field lines wound tight as coiled clock springs around the black hole's spinning throat. The engine ignited with blinding fury. Twin solid beams of ultra-dense electron-positron plasma erupted from Austin’s shoulder blades! Each beam was barely four inches wide. Together, they carried five full zettawatts of focused thermal kinetic energy.
The twin plasma jets blasted out at near-light speed.
They shot straight up and straight down at a ninety-degree angle to his torso. They pierced through the reinforced titanium roof of Substation Kuiper-01 like wet paper. The beams didn't merely melt the metal. They instantly disintegrated the titanium atoms into bare atomic soup. Two clean, four-inch holes punched through twenty feet of star-jade radiation shielding. The twin sapphire-white lances shot hundreds of thousands of miles into deep space.
In the corner of the maintenance bay, former Grand Inquisitor Xuan Ming dropped flat on his stomach. He shook so hard his safety vest rustled like dry corn husks.
"The Twin Pillars of the Cosmic Void!" Xuan Ming wailed in hysterical, religious ecstasy. He slammed his forehead against the vibrating deck until it bruised. "The ancient breath of the Black Sun! He who bears the dual lances of creation and dissolution has awakened! The ancient prophecy of the First Epoch is fulfilled! The Seven-Star Palace is finished! The universe itself bows before the sovereign axis of the Great Unmaker!"
Austin didn't bow before any sovereign axis.
He looked up at the ceiling. He saw two neat four-inch holes punched through his new thermal insulation. A thick vein throbbed in his temple.
"My roof," Austin growled. His knuckles turned white on the handle of his five-foot pipe wrench. "I just put that R-sixty insulation batting up three weeks ago. Closed-cell spray foam rated for forty Kelvin. Do you know how hard it is to cure spray foam in a vacuum at forty Kelvin? It took three full days under heat lamps!"
"Uh... Boss?" Tie Kuang ventured cautiously. He kept a respectful distance from the blinding columns of sapphire-white plasma screaming inches from Austin’s ears. "I don't think closed-cell spray foam is rated for twenty-five billion Kelvin."
"Nothing is rated for twenty-five billion Kelvin if you don't install a proper flue-gas exhaust stack!" Austin snapped, his voice thick with furious tradesman outrage. "Look at the draft! It's pulling straight upward! That's five zettawatts of thermal exhaust blowing right through the shingles and into the Kuiper Belt! If a building inspector saw this, they’d red-tag the entire substation before lunchtime. They'd fine us twenty thousand credits for an unpermitted thermal plume!"
He dropped his wrench onto the steel bench with a heavy, ringing clatter. He turned toward the scrap pile in the corner and started digging through the salvage bins.
"Tie Kuang! Grab those two six-inch refractory star-jade ninety-degree flanged elbow pipes! The ones we pulled off the Ceres boiler overhaul last Tuesday! Get me the ceramic wrap, two rolls of high-temp mica tape, and four heavy-duty stainless hose clamps!"
"Boss, you're going to put stovepipes on the Twin Pillars of Divine Destruction?" Tie Kuang asked. His copper scales rattled in sheer disbelief.
"They aren't pillars of divine destruction," Austin grunted. He dragged two heavy, L-shaped star-jade pipes out of a wooden crate. "They're un-ducted boiler stacks. You never leave a high-velocity thermal flue open to the ceiling without an elbow diverter. That’s how you get soot, soot marks, and heat damage on your rafters. It’s basic HVAC code, Tie Kuang. Chapter Six: Chimneys, Vents, and Exhaust Systems."
Austin wiped grease off the flanged ends with his shirt sleeve.
He loosened the magnetic chokes on his shoulders just enough to slip the star-jade elbow pipes over the twin magnetic discharge nozzles. The six-inch ceramic-lined pipes groaned as the blazing plasma stream forced its way through their curves. The seasoned star-jade alloy glowed a deep, glowing hot orange under the load. But the inner ceramic liner held firm against the fierce high-speed friction.
Austin set two heavy stainless hose clamps around the base of each elbow pipe. He zipped them down with a magnetic nut driver: *ZIP-ZIP-ZIP-ZIP.*
He pulled out a digital protractor. He checked the angle of each elbow against his shoulder alignment to ensure dead-straight aim.
"Ninety-degree pitch confirmed," Austin muttered. The digital level beeped green.
With a firm, decisive shove of his heavy gloves, Austin swiveled the two ninety-degree elbow diverters forward.
Instantly, the direction of the twin plasma columns changed.
Instead of shooting through the ceiling and floor, the twin sapphire beams pointed straight forward over his shoulders. They blasted ahead like two massive industrial cutting torches!
A soft system chime rang in Austin’s vision:
Austin stood up straight. He rolled his shoulders to test the balance.
With the twin plasma columns blasting forward over his shoulders, the massive near-light speed recoil slammed straight into the fourteen hundred pounds of lead ballast along his lower spine. His ninety-eight Gs of local gravity anchored his boots like concrete foundation pilings. His fluid dampers hummed at fourteen hundred RPM in rock-solid balance.
He held up his hands. He felt the blistering, clean draft of five zettawatts of superheated gas whistling over his shoulders at near-light speed.
"Now that's much better," Austin said, nodding with grim satisfaction. "Controlled draft. Directional exhaust. And if I need to cut through heavy steel plate out in the yard, I don't even need to light the oxy-acetylene torch. I just lean forward and look at it."
Tie Kuang stared at Austin in speechless wonder.
From the front, Austin looked like a normal construction foreman in a yellow hard hat who had somehow bolted twin antimatter naval cannons to his back. The sapphire glare of the plasma columns washed his orange safety vest in brilliant neon blue. The light reflected off the dark lenses of his welding goggles like twin burning stars.
"Boss," Tie Kuang said slowly, his voice shaking with nervous awe as he checked his datapad. "Long-range radar on Ceres just picked up the main Concordat fleet."
Austin turned his head slightly. The twin plasma lances swept across the bay and singed a row of spare paint cans on the far wall. "How many?"
"Fifty more hundred-mile dreadnoughts," Tie Kuang replied, pulling up Ceres radar data on the terminal. "The Seven-Star Council dropped their heavy reserve fleet into the Kuiper Belt corridor. They’re lining up bow-to-stern across forty thousand miles of space. They want to blockade our main transmission line back to Earth. They brought their Grand Void-Siege Dreadnought Line."
Austin looked at the screen. Then he looked down at the two five-zettawatt plasma lances humming over his shoulders.
He grabbed his five-foot pipe wrench off the bench. He rested it casually over his shoulder right next to the left exhaust stack, then cracked his knuckles.
"Fifty dreadnoughts parked in a straight line across my transmission corridor," Austin murmured. His eyes narrowed behind his dark welding goggles. "Blocking the sun. Throwing shade over our solar collection panels. And ignoring the clearance envelope completely."
He turned toward the airlock with heavy, measured steps.
"Tie Kuang, keep the coffee pot on," Austin said. "I’ve got some hedge-trimming to do."