In Austin’s experience, the most infuriating thing about optical glass on a construction site was not heat, glare, or drifting focus.
It was fingerprints.
“Commander Xue Long,” Austin said over the construction channel, his voice dry and completely without divine grace. “Did you touch the face of Mirror 4,112 with your bare leather gauntlets?”
On Dreadnought Foundry 04’s zero-gravity assembly truss, the former Vanguard Commander froze.
The four-eyed terror of the Star-Devouring Citadel floated thirty yards above a curved quartz mirror five hundred meters wide. A lime-green safety vest covered his spiked void-armor. A yellow plastic hard hat was tied to his curved horns with stainless baling wire. His tool harness carried two cordless impact wrenches, a pneumatic grease gun, and a box of lint-free microfiber rags.
Around him, two hundred former dreadnought officers in matching vests and hats checked the alignment pins on the mirror’s three-axis gimbal.
“I was only steadying the arm while we torqued the azimuth pivot bolts to twelve hundred foot-pounds, Lord Master Builder!” Xue Long pleaded. All four red eyes blinked in panic.
“You left an oily thumbprint on the focal sweet spot,” Austin said. He was a thousand miles away on the ring’s central transit platform, watching through his telescope. “At full solar flux, that grease will reach four thousand degrees in six-tenths of a second. The thermal shock will crack forty square yards of polished quartz. Do you know how long it takes to grind a five-hundred-meter mirror blank?”
