A small glass vial sat on the workbench. Inside was a handful of ash and a tiny, melted droplet of metal.
Iron slowly turned the vial between his fingers. Dry lines from his old analysis of this "thing" drifted back into his mind:
Traces of B-4 type polymers. Residual lithium salt content. High concentration of silicon oxide. Preliminary conclusion: Portable active protection ultrasonic emitter. Power source—integrated cell. "A pocket-sized toy," he muttered to himself. "Turning this into a full-scale dome... that's a brutal puzzle."
Trying to scale Schema Z head-on was technical suicide. It was a good thing they had the black ore. Its lattice was perfectly suited for containing high-frequency ultrasonic pulses.
Iron set the vial aside on the edge of the table. He pulled a thick stack of blank sheets over and picked up a sharply pointed pencil.
"Let's start with the resonant circuit," he murmured softly to the empty room.
The lead bit into the paper with a faint scratch. The first formulas, coil diagrams, and wave impedance calculations began to spill out.
Deep underground, in the damp, suffocating tunnels, the rhythm of life was dictated by the dull, rhythmic thud of pickaxes.
Noah stood on a stone ledge a few feet above the rest.
"Hey, sector three!" his voice barked out sharply. "Less whining, more working. Move it!"
The laborers cursed under their breath, wiping sweat from their brows without breaking their rhythm. Wheelbarrows, piled high with black stone, rolled in a steady stream toward the lifts.
Up on the surface, Dornheim was buzzing with an entirely different kind of labor.
Elyria flitted noiselessly above the bleak, gray buildings. The spirit was "decorating" Dornheim in her own unique way. Wherever she drifted, vines and grasping roots erupted through fissures in the stone, binding the loose soil in a vice grip. The ground hardened, the terrain smoothed over, and massive boulders crumbled into dust, clearing the way for future foundations and crops.
A little further along, near the settlement's perimeter, hammers cracked in rapid succession. Carpenters under Marek’s command were raising new barracks and boarding up breaches in the palisade. Marek constantly cross-referenced Iron's old, grease-stained blueprints, demanding flawless joint alignments from the men.
"Lift that log higher!" he roared at a young lad. "Iron said the frame needs to withstand a battering ram, and you’ve left a gap the width of a palm! Do it over!"
Deep into the night, inside the workshop.
Iron was covered in soot from head to toe. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows, his face deathly pale, his eyes bloodshot and burning.
The silicon substrate refused to fuse with the molten black ore. Iron tried blending them in every conceivable proportion, but the compounds remained hopelessly unstable. Small test cells either detonated with a dull pop—showering the workbench in acrid sparks—or instantly flash-cooled into brittle, useless slag.
The engineer tossed the ruined crucibles into a corner once more.
A dead end.
A total dead end.
Iron leaned back heavily in his chair and retrieved the vial. He tipped the ash into his palm, catching the tiny, melted droplet of metal between his fingertips. He held it up to his eyes, squinting at it in the dim light.
"You... Of course! Frequency modeling—how did I miss that for so long?"
Iron snatched a chunk of charcoal and slashed a heavy line through the old blueprint of the pocket emitter. Pinning down a massive, clean sheet of parchment, his hand began furiously sketching a completely different design.
On the paper, the silhouettes of a massive, monolithic structure emerged. A colossal stationary emitter tower anchored by a heavy black ore core, destined for the dead center of the settlement.
Iron smiled—and pressed the charcoal into the paper, calculating the coverage radius of the future tower.
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