City of Heaven is a geo- synchronous space station connected to Terra by a system of twelve nano-carbon tethers. City of Heaven consisted of more than fifty nodes of communities, all connected through additional space-borne tethers.

City of Heaven construction began in 863 ATH...

The tethers connecting the various nodes of City of Heaven were constructed by nanites out of captured asteriods. The tethers are the giant cabling grids that hold City of Heaven in a fixed position over Terra.

Tethers contain an internal grid work of power and gaseous feeds that traveled back and forth between City of Heaven and Tether Base. Each Tether accommodates ring transports to ferry passengers and cargo between Terra and city nodes. During holidays and periods of increased travel, multiple ring transports are stacked to deliver more passengers on a single tether. However, no more than three rings can come down a tether in a single stack.

Twelve tethers five hundred forty kilometers in length attach City of Heaven to Terra. From Center Node out to a distance of sixty-four thousand kilometers stretch additional tethers and a launch node for travel to Luna. The additional tethers also served as a counter-balance to ensure that tether sections below City of Heaven, never fell into the gravity well of Terra. If tethers were somehow disconnected from Tether Base, they would either remain dangling in relative place until repairs were made or the tether would begin a slow rise, because of the mass and force of the counterbalance.

Tethers were constructed of nano-carbon flexsteel. The first tether was installed in two sections. A smaller section was built by human work crews to a height of three kilometers above sea level. Construction was then taken over by self-reproducing nanites to build the remaining atmospheric portions of the tether, molecule by molecule. Meanwhile, nanites in space constructed the orbital portions of the first tether in the same way, using materials gathered from asteroids captured between Terra and Luna. The nanites stitched the core of the space-borne tether section from orbit, down to the planet surface, to meet the ground-based tether. All surface-to-space tethers were constructed in the same manner.

Tethers are thirty-five meters in diameter. They are multilayered constructs around a grid that also encased conduits for power collection and transfer, communications, and gas delivery to emergency stations along the ground-to-orbit tether. The outer layer of a tether is covered with a spiraling set of magnetic pulsators, used to drive a transport ring upward by means of controlled magnetic levitation. Co-pulsators line the inner surface of the ring transport, providing additional propulsion. Together, the spiral-oriented pulsators and co-pulsators act as interlocking magnetic gears turning at extremely high velocities, like a corkscrew, to drive the tether transport up to its destination. The tether and inner ring surfaces never came into contact with one another and an equal distance between the surfaces is always maintained.

Much of the power for tethers is provided by fusion generator stations, located at equal points along the tethers. A total of eighty-six micro-fusion reactors in city nodes and tethers allow workers and residents to maintain community life. Each node contains its own fusion reactor, with the remaining smaller versions located at strategic points along the ground-to-orbit tether.

In case a transport had a catastrophic malfunction, tethers contained emergency hatches and pressurized survival rooms (known as evac-ports) at each kilometer up the length of the tether from the surface to Center Node. Eva-ports provide for evacuation and survival until a rescue team arrives. Although no ring transport has ever failed or required the use of tether evac-ports, worker pods use them from time to time in cases of emergency.