Ready for Test

The royal carriage arrived shortly after four in the afternoon.

By then, the Oriel Central Power Station had already been operating Unit One for nearly three hours under partial load. Arcada's public circuits remained energized while engineers monitored every instrument with an attention that bordered on suspicion. The generator carried several government buildings, workshops, pumping stations, and a limited section of street lighting without showing any serious instability.

The true test would begin after sunset, when nearly nine hundred street lamps and hundreds of connected buildings demanded power at the same time.