The first sign that Austin had reached the Capstone was not a golden halo, an angelic chorus, or a shower of sky lotus petals. It was that his cheap digital wristwatch was losing three seconds every single hour.
Austin stood in the central instrument bay of Dreadnought Foundry 01, comparing the liquid-crystal display on his fifty-dollar, water-resistant resin digital watch against the rubidium core clock mounted on the main navigation inner wall.
“Look at this, Tie Kuang,” Austin said. He held his wrist up to the inner wall and tapping the glass face with his fingernail. “The core wall clock says fourteen hours, twenty-two minutes, and sixteen seconds. My watch says fourteen hours, twenty-one minutes, and fifty-eight seconds. I changed the lithium coin cell battery three days ago and synced it to this clock when I clocked in. There’s no reason for an uncompensated quartz crystal oscillator to drift eighteen seconds in a six-hour shift unless the crystal’s ringing hum is experiencing severe gravity red-shift.”
Tie Kuang, who was sitting on an overturned wooden cable spool holding a three-quarter-inch drive torque wrench, blinked blankly beneath his clear visor. “Gravity red-shift, Austin? On a fifty-dollar wristwatch?”
“General relativity,” Austin explained, his tone flat and dry. “Einstein’s field equations. Gravity time dilation in a strong gravity pull. Time runs slower near a dense mass. Clocks at sea level run slower than clocks on a high mountain peak by a few nanoseconds a day because of the Earth’s gravity well. But right now…
