The morning air at Rustgate Outpost smelled of cold stone oil, crushed limestone, and ozone.
Giles Croft crouched in the work trench with a sniffer wand connected to a portable helium mass-spectrometer.
He ran the brass tip along the circumferential weld of a twelve-inch stainless steel pipe.
The dial needle didn’t budge from zero.
“Good bead,” Giles said.
He stood up, his knees cracking in the chilly air.
“No pinholes between stations twelve and fourteen,” he said. “Borin, you can tell your crew they won’t be digging latrines this week.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung lowered his sight fire gauge and spat into the ditch gravel.
