The blast fire floor of Haven-Hold Steel Mill Seven was a roaring cave of heat, iron, and thunder.
Six pear-shaped Bessemer converters, each standing thirty feet high and capable of holding fifty tons of molten pig iron, hung suspended from massive pivot pin rings.
Above them, the newly installed thirty-six-inch zinc-coated ductwork hummed with intense shaking as it delivered captured deep-sea void-gas directly from the switching yard.
Before charging the converter, Giles Croft had reviewed the heat-powered counts with Aldous Swift-Current in the foundry lab.
On the slate blackboard, Giles had sketched the Ellingham diagram for oxide formation at raised heat levels.
“Notice the slope of the carbon monoxide line, Aldous,” Giles had explained. He tapped the chalk against the slate. “As heat rises above eighteen hundred degrees, carbon has an increasingly fierce affinity for oxygen, surpassing even silicon and hard dark metal. But traditional air blasts can’t reach those heat levels because cold air absorbs seventy percent of the heat.”
Aldous had nodded eagerly, his pencil racing across his notebook.
“And the void-gas is eighty percent reactive hydrocarbon without cold air ballast,” Aldous had realized. “It carries its own enthalpy. The moment it cracks in the bath, it releases heat instead of absorbing it.”
