In ancient training myths, gold was praised as the marrow of the sleeping earth dragon. White-gold was revered as the frozen tears of the sky white tiger. Heavy-core star-jade was worshipped as the divine bone of deceased astral lords who had dissolved into the ancient void.
To Austin, gold and white-gold were just elements seventy-nine and seventy-eight on the periodic table, and star-jade was an unnamed heavy-core that his spectrometer stubbornly labeled UNDOCUMENTED. He stood on the magnetic loading dock of Dreadnought Foundry 01 with a handheld X-ray spectrometer. Right now, those precious metals were creating a massive hazard in the ring’s main transit lane.
“Look at this mess,” Austin muttered into his helmet microphone, clicking the trigger on the spectrometer. The device beeped twice with a cheerful digital chirp, displaying a bright green spectral readout on its small, back-lit liquid-crystal screen:
“Seventy-two percent gold,” Austin said flatly, tapping the spectrometer against his denim-clad thigh. “Do you have any idea how soft pure gold is? You can’t build a load-bearing column out of it. It cold-flows under static squeezing like warm cheddar cheese. If you bolt an I-beam with gold bolts, the pipe rim will yield within forty-eight hours and your roof comes down on your head. It’s only good for spark plating, wire bonding, and high-flow rate grounding busways. As a load-bearing material, it’s essentially expensive yellow mud.”
