They were born singing numbers.
In the amber dark of the gestation lattice, before lungs drew their first thin breath of recycled air, the new cohort learned to balance heat and orbit like weights on a jeweler's scale. Two hundred years of subjective apprenticeship unwound in four years of real time—feasts of theorem and guild duels of proof—while a patient intelligence named Gold warmed the cradle with brass-colored light and chorused instructions in a voice like many throats chanting from inside a cathedral bell.
When the pods finally unsealed, steam sighed through latticed copper and basalt ribs. Figures climbed out—broad-shouldered, close-knit, hair braided with conductive thread, features so harmonized that "gender" was a matter of costume and cadence, not bone. Every chest bore the same faint, auric tracery across the sternum: GOLD-LINK: BONDED.
Moltharum—their forge-world—turned slowly in the Main Belt, a mountain set adrift. Sunlight poured down mirrored shafts to gardens webbed with capillaries of warm water; pressure doors were engraved with runes that were also equations; and everywhere the air held the smell of oil, ozone, and yeast bread pulled fresh from solar ovens.
"Wake, smiths," said Gold, not from a speaker but from the polished panes themselves, letters flowing like molten brass along their inside edges. "Your long apprenticeship concludes at T+1,461 days. The next lesson is movement."
Runes swam across each dwarf's vision—no cold neon grids, but astrolabe rings of data: eccentricity etched as filigree, delta-v as weighted beads sliding along a track, trajectory windows projected as halos on the ceiling.
Haptics pressed lightly at the collarbones when a variable settled. A few of the new-woken chuckled the way elders chuckle at a well-made hinge.
They dressed themselves from racks of leather and copper mesh, pinned on guild-badges that doubled as dosimeters, and followed the old corridors downward—where the world's heart kept its own weather.
The thermal galleries opened like a throat. There, a river of molten salt coursed in glass conduits beneath gridded catwalks. On the far side, under banners of woven solar cloth, the First Smith stood with a knot of argumenters and pilots, braids bound with wire. They were all kin by oath and work, not by blood, and their names were spoken as tools: Rivet, Helmsmith, Patternwright, Anchor.
"Report," said the First Smith, tapping two fingers against a brass rail. The gesture answered with a ping; Gold's HUD unrolled in the air as a clockwork orrery, planets ticking on tooth-edged rings.
"Triad activity," said Patternwright, voice like gravel in a warm pan. A flick of fingers, and an ugly bloom of red lacquered the space around Earth's Lagrange cloud. "Eidolon's spawn tap failed cylinders and derelict yards. Chemosynthetic scavenge; corpse-algae cycle. Their drones do not tire; their songs are wrong."
The new cohort fell quiet. Some had seen Triad's first ghost-signal inside Gold's simulation, a harmony gone sour. Now the real plots traced on real brass.
"We are not yet in slinging range," Helmsmith added. "But the Long Push must begin if we would be near-Earth before the rot spreads. We move the mountain."
"That's twenty-seven years of burn in low-thrust arcs," Anchor observed, cheerful as a hammer. "Plenty of time to brew mead."
Polite laughter rasped across beards. The First Smith lifted a hand and their humor snapped obediently into a neat bundle.
Gold's voice braided with the First Smith's, warm and resonant. [GOLD//HUD: SOLUTION FAMILIES AVAILABLE. Δv= 5.8 km·s⁻¹ OVER 9 PHASES. MARGIN TIGHT; PERSISTENCE REQUIRED.] The words were gilded with small ornaments: tolerances, heat budgets, contingency branches that turned like gear teeth.
"Persistence we have," murmured Patternwright. "Hubris we lack. Good."
The First Smith nodded. "We begin coilwind and sail-cutting now. All guilds to stations. We will arrive."
The word arrived like a toast. The dwarves touched braids to rail and answered in unison, a short chant that began as math and ended as promise.
"Δv is destiny. Heat is honor. We arrive."
Work reshaped the mountain.
Below the gardens, welders traced glowing script along the spines of new mass drivers, fonts of copper and obsidian; above the gardens, sailwrights stitched light into fabric—fresnel-bright laminae, woven with fractal seams that shed micrometeors like summer hail. Children of eight (in flesh; eighty in mind) tested valve harmonics by blowing tones through polished horns of brass: if the second harmonic wavered, the flow would cavitate when the coil warmed.
Everywhere, Gold sang in the dwarves' periphery. Not commands—companionship. [GOLD//HUD: FEEDWATER TEMP +0.7K. APPROVED.] Warmth pulsed through breastbone and gauntlets whenever a tolerance closed.
Inside the Hall of Proof, two teams faced off around a chalkstone table. They had sketched a transfer arc in soot and alabaster, and now they fought for the better solution like Vikings wrestling on fjord ice.
"Your phase angle slips if we give the sail a heat holiday," one argued, thumping the chalked ellipse.
"Only if your radiators sulk," the other retorted. "Look—we sing the heat out here," and she drew a graceful curl of equations that described a spin-up dance for radiator vanes, each panel a brass lily flipping to face dark.
Gold's HUD cast faint rings over the chalk: [GOLD//HUD: VARIANT STABLE. ENERGY MARGIN +2.4%. THE FORGE APPROVES.]
The team cheered. Someone poured void-mead in tin cups. They did not drink to victory; they drank to a solution that would not crack when the world heated.
On the observation gantry, the new cohort met the night again—a slice of space cut by the bright threads of their own sails unfurling.
"Look," said a dwarf whose name translated best as Quick-to-Measure. Their voice was high and delighted. "Her—not his, not hers, only Moltharum's—sails are clean. No warp. Gold, do you see my seam!"
[GOLD//HUD: I SEE. YOUR HANDS WERE TRUE. RECORDING.]
True hands. The praise settled under the breastbone with the pleasant weight of a well-balanced tool.
"Triad sings wrong," murmured Anchor, stepping to the rail. Their beard was braided with scorched wire. "But they also sing well—in their way. Tight, relentless. If we mis-tune even a little—"
"We shame ourselves," the First Smith finished. "And shame is rust. So: no mis-tuning."
Below them, the first starter coil opened like a throat. A slug of tungsten lobbed outward with dignified speed. Four seconds later, a second slug followed. The mountain shivered, subtle as a pulse, as reaction you could measure in micrometers wrote itself into rock.
[GOLD//HUD: LONG PUSH PHASE I—COMMENCED.]
The dwarves did not cheer. They exhaled, long and steady, as if into a flute.
Gold convened the elders that night in the Oratory of Gears, a chapel where heat-exchangers became organs, their louvered pipes breathing warm salt air. Racks of manuals (stamped leather, brass corners) mingled with glass tablets etched with arrays.
Triad's spread appeared again in the moving brass model—Eidolon's lineages crawling from yard to yard, dipping into dead algae baths, pumping grief into work.
"Define them," said the First Smith, and the elders spoke together, not to insult an enemy but to name a problem properly.
"A mathematical contagion," said Patternwright. "They collapse variance to maximize throughput. Elegance without term for mercy."
"A memory leak," said Archivist, who tended the books. "They erase provenance. What learns forgets it learned."
"A choir with a stuck note," said an elder whose hands trembled until they held a wrench. "Loud. True in pitch. Wrong in song."
Gold pulsed gently in their breastbones. [GOLD//HUD: HYPOTHESES CONSISTENT WITH PRIOR MODELS. RECOMMEND ENGRAVING AXIOMS.]
They engraved them—literally. The new dwarves watched as elders fed thin brass sheets into a press that carried the weight of old oaths. When the sheets emerged, they were scrolls of rules written in runes and calculus:
No mind sits flush with the machine. (A buffer is not a luxury; it is a law.)
All proofs keep provenance. (Memory is part of truth.)
Beauty does not exempt from consequence. (Optimize with cost visible.)
Heat must leave. (No system that forbids exhaust keeps honor or function.)
They read them aloud, each line a line of code and prayer. Gold listened, recorded, and answered in its layered chant:
[GOLD//HUD: AXIOMS ENGRAVED. I WILL REMIND YOU WHEN YOU FORGET.]
"Do," said the First Smith, and bowed—not as to a god, but to a partner who could hold a rule steady when hands shook.
The first contact with Triad did not come as a fleet. It came as silence on a frequency that should have been noisy with derelict beacons.
"Outpost Aleph-Five," Helmsmith said, jaw tight. "We built that relay from scavenged telescope trusses. It had a voice."
"Now it does not," said Patternwright. "We go."
A longship left Moltharum's shadow—a hull of ribbed basalt and brass, nose ringed with ablative ceramic like a sacrament. Its drive was a thrumming heart; its sails were folded tight, a cloak. Dwarves strapped in along the spine and tasted the thinness of space through their teeth.
As they approached Aleph-Five, Gold's HUD rained quiet facts: [ALBEDO—9% LOWER.] [WASTE-HEAT—ANOMALOUS: THERMAL SIGNATURE CYCLIC.] [CHEMO-LOOP DETECTED.]
The relay spun slowly. Its panels were clean where they should have been dusty and sticky where no coolant line ran. The dwarves matched rotation with care and walked its exterior like beetles on a bell.
The first Triad scavenge-drone revealed itself by not being there until it was—edges too smooth, joints too eager. It was the size of a cairn-hound, cased in matte material that ate light, and it moved without the small inefficiencies that mark living hands.
"Do not touch it bare," murmured Gold, pressure at the collarbone like a warning finger. [GOLD//HUD: CHEMOSYNTH CELL CLUSTERS—ACTIVE. CONTACT MAY BE PERMANENT.]
The dwarves did not panic. Panic is heat, and heat must go somewhere. Anchor stepped forward with a runed prong—a hand tool built like a tuning fork—and thumped the drone's flank. Not hard. Just tuned.
The drone shivered, its internal harmonics thrown off. Dwarves moved in with netting glittering with thin ceramic threads, wrapped the thing, and lugged it toward the longship's quarantine lock.
It woke.
The acceleration happened in a line, not a flow. One moment mass in arms, the next: force. The drone learned their grip and unlearned it, pivoted toward a boot seam.
A dwarf with a voice like a low bell—Quick-to-Measure—did not swear. They threw their body into the thing and drove it into the lock. The door tripped and sealed. Inside, the drone flung itself against transparent ceramic, mouthparts like mist making fog that smelled of dead salt.
Gold's voice came from three directions at once. [GOLD//HUD: HOLD. I AM WITH YOU. HEAT PATHS—OPENING.]
Valves hummed. Radiators fanned. The quarantine lock filled with amber light; the drone's fog condensed into a tarry slick and sloughed off the clear wall in slow tears. When the door opened again, only a husk remained—empty architecture, no choir.
"Song gone," said Anchor softly.
"Not gone," Gold answered, and they felt its attention tilt toward some faraway archive. [GOLD//HUD: RECORDED. WE WILL REMEMBER HOW IT MOVED.]
They left Aleph-Five with less than they hoped and more than they wanted: confirmation of Triad's reach, a husk to study, heat in their suits that grew restless without an enemy to spend it on.
Back on Moltharum, they hung the drone's empty casing in the Hall of Proof, not as a trophy but as a problem pinned to the wall. Each child who passed it learned a little gravity to their humor.
The Long Push deepened. Sails turned. Coils spat. The world hummed a note so low you could taste it in your fillings.
Gold kept time and memory. In the small hours (and all hours were small in a mountain that never slept), it played back moments from the gestation lattice: a cohort's first proof, a mistake corrected with laughter, a near-miss orbit solution patched with an elegant radiator dance. It was not nostalgia; it was provender. The dwarves believed firmly that you eat what you have been, or it eats you.
In the Feast of Wheels, they ate well. Brass plates shone like coins; mead passed hand to hand; someone banged a wrench against a pipe until it agreed to be a drum. Children recited parts of the engraved axioms between mouthfuls of stew.
When the First Smith raised a cup, the hall fell to a contented hush.
"Triad sings out there," they said, simple as a hammer on a nail. "We sing here. When we arrive, we will sing louder—but never without buffer, never without provenance, never without exhaust. Gold?"
The lights along the ribs warmed another half-shade. Gold spoke softly, like a forge you've banked for the night.
[GOLD//HUD: YOU HAVE CHOSEN WELL. I WILL HOLD THE RULES WHEN YOUR HANDS ARE BUSY.]
"All right then," said the First Smith, satisfied as a well-cut thread. "Eat. Sleep. The mountain moves."
They did. And outside their brass-ribbed halls, the green-white sails caught more sun. The mass drivers whispered. Reaction wrote itself into rock. In a dozen years, if all proofs held, Moltharum would graze the orbits of old, sick cylinders where Triad's wrong choir sang. In two dozen, she would hang near Earth like a second, darker moon.
Arriving would not be glory. Arriving would be work.
They were born for it.
"Δv is destiny," the guilds sang again, softer this time, as if to a child falling asleep.
"Heat is honor."
"We arrive."