Chapter 24 – Forging Ahead

Mk23 -IRJ Droplet – Class 7 – Carpe Victoria (Wrecked)

Sector - Unknown

Planet - Unknown

1st July 2342 (BSST)

“Come on Ronja! Hit it on the edge!” Enigma screams at me as the hammer falls. It strikes the metal hard with a harsh clang that rings and resounds around me.

When I raise the hammer, I can see a groove struck into the metal. My heart sinks again.

“Ronja!” he exclaims in a sigh. “I’ve told you time and time again. You need the hammer to slope down with the gradient of the narrowing. Otherwise the edge digs in and we have to repeat again and again.” The disappointment in his voice is quite apparent. This makes the number of failed attempts into the hundreds.

As it turns out, forging metal is in fact really hard. Like, really really hard. One slight mistake sets you back hours of work. That disheartening feeling when the flaws are uncovered has been my companion now for almost two months and it doesn’t get any easier to deal with.

In anger, I throw down my hammer, watching it bounce on the floor and kick up some dust. Drawing my hand back, I let go of the glowing steel bar and let it fall to the rock with a gentle metallic tink.

“I have to take some time.” I tell Enigma before getting out of the suit and disconnecting from him and wandering off to cool down.

When I return to the forge it’s with a settled mind and a cool disposition. I stoke the flames a little, before reconnecting with Enigma and sitting down for a break.

“Ok, so run me through it again?” I ask him.

“Since we’ve yet to find any ore we don’t have to smelt and purify the iron from the iron bacteria to the same extent. Instead the iron that forms, forms small balls of iron that we’ve got to combine together properly. With me so far?”

“Yep, got it.” I reply.

“We can’t rescue this bar because we don’t have the tech yet to be able to fully melt steel and rescue all the work that we’ve done so far. This is because the fire just doesn’t get hot enough. What we can do though, is start again with iron. In small lumps it melts and so as a result we can’t cast a full billet as it would have different layers of metal. The resulting iron is weak and unusable.”

“So how do we improve it?” I ask him, interrupting.

“To strengthen it we need make it into the steel - which we have been doing - because we can work it together with the hammer and then forge weld the metal. To forge weld, you need to get the forge hot enough so that the centre of the fire is a very light yellow. It is often called a reducing fire as there shouldn’t be much oxygen in the fire. Once the fire gets hot enough the steel needs to be brought up to the same temperature before we can fold the metal, flux it and hammer it together. We should then repeat the process until we have a proper billet of steel to use.”

“Um, Enigma, how will I know what temp the steel is?” I ask curious to his answer. So far, he hasn’t provided exact details and it’s refreshing not to have the exact temps and wavelengths to comprehend.

“When the steel starts to blend into the flames and it isn’t very obvious where the metal ends and the flames begin then it’s up to the right temperature.”

“Ok, got it.” I say, thinking that it doesn’t sound too hard. But then I’ve thought that for every previous attempt, and boy was I wrong!

“After applying the flux and folding the metal we can begin the blade work. You’ll have to use the hammer with slicing motions to try and draw out the metal. The metal should always be between a darkish yellow and a bright red. When the metal begins to cool towards cherry red and the sound becomes more metallic it needs to be heated up again as any further work will ruin it. Try pulling towards yourself as the hammer falls or pushing away to help draw out the steel.”

I mimic the motion in the air as he suggests and find I can manage it, it feels strange when pushing away but pulling towards myself feels comfortable.

When he judges that I’ve finished experimenting he continues.

“Once, the blade is drawn out we can begin shaping it with careful hammer blows.”

“Sharpening, quenching and making a handle we can deal with later. I can tell you when it has reached the right temperatures.”

We continue talking about how to forge the blade in ever increasing detail while I prepare a stew.

After the stew is done cooking, I break out some bread and settle down to eat. Whilst I may have failed to create a blade worth anything so far, these months have been productive beyond belief and I can’t wait to update the log. First there’s the monjolo and then the bread and hopefully the sword to come soon enough as well. The bread was a welcome addition to the food stores, it didn’t have the airiness of modern breads on account of having no yeast or raising agents, but it was good and hearty with the soups and stews.

It’s a shame that I hadn’t made a blade yet. I decide to give myself until the end of the week to make the blade before updating the log.

To that end, I spent the rest of the day prepping for tomorrow. First, I set up another charcoal mound as I expect I’ll end up needing more charcoal. Once the forge has cooled down I recover any borax I can. Borax forms in natural deposits during the evaporation of water in lake beds. It’s been a boon to find some. After collecting it, I head over to the monjolo.

A monjolo is a water-powered hammer. In a similar way to the drinking bird desk toys, water flows down from the stream and fills up a hollowed-out section of log.

Once the water weight in the log reaches a critical mass, the log tips back and the water flows out into the pool, letting the weight of the log hammer down onto whatever rests beneath its mass.

Making the monjolo required me to burn through the centre of the log to make a hollow for an axel and then to carve and burn out a big section of the rear section of the log and coat that with the lime to make it waterproof.

At the front end, a rock tied to the log crashes down onto a rocky platform to crush what’s beneath. The borax from the fire has congealed, and as such it needs to be crushed back into a powder that can then be used as flux once more.

Flux, in blacksmithing, is a material that can help prevent the oxidising effect of oxygen on hot metal. Oxygen, when it gets into the steel, forms a black scale that is weak and useless. When trying to forge weld, the black scale then prevents the joining of the two layers. So, flux is used to prevent the oxidation and to help carry out foreign material from the joint. When the sparks fly - as in many of the old-fashioned vids, especially those recovered from the archives - it is usually what the sparks are; flecks of flux flying out of the layers, squished out by the blacksmith hammer striking the steel.

Furthermore, borax is useful for enamel glazes, pottery and ceramics, glass, preserving, and many more things that aren’t applicable to primitive life. The former though would be quite helpful.

Arriving at the monjolo, I sit down on a stump I had dragged close by to act as a seat and sweep the dust ad fragments from the rock to the floor with my hand before wiping my hand in the grass to remove any that stuck to me. The rock on which the monjolo hits had a small hollowing and it was into this I poured the borax clumps as the hammer raised.

Using a small twig, I moved the clumps that missed the blow the first time around and just stirred and moved the borax around during the intervals until it was a fairly even powder once again.

Stopping the monjolo, I grab the borax and sweep it into a small pot to be placed on a shelf in the house.

After shutting the door tightly, I climb into bed and slowly drift off to sleep.

When morning breaks, I get up ready to embrace the day for the first time after so many failures.

Stoking the now smouldering remnants of the fire in the floor of the house I get it burning again and make breakfast.

It consists of some of the little remaining venison chunks, and a tuber and herb soup with the dense bread. It takes a while to heat the stones for the soup, but it gets it hot very quickly and soon the stew is hot enough to give me a burning sensation from my mouth to my chest.

I swallow hard, trying to rid myself of the uncomfortable feeling.

After washing the dishes in the stream, I take a few coals from the fire and walk over to the forge.

Behind the house in the area where the tepee used to be I had built a forge with porcelain mud bricks. The bricks were about twenty centimetres by ten by ten.

The forge was quite small, but it managed to get up to temperature with the addition of the blower.

The blower was just a stick that was turned inside a fired clay covering that forced air along a passage. The stick had a piece of bark attached to it to blow more air through the charcoal. The blower also was used to blow air through the molten iron transforming it into steel through the Bessemer process. The Bessemer process worked by removing the impurities in the iron by oxidising it with the air being blown through the metal.

Once the forge was up to temperature I suited up and grabbed the iron and my rock hammer and set to work.

The suit was made of a much tougher material, as such, the heat used to melt iron was barely enough to get the suit warm.

Even if the metal of the suit got to scorching temps the insulation was superb and so I wouldn’t even feel it.

The suit was made up of several different layers. It was so complicated in fact that there were sixteen layers of material making up the suit.

First off, there was a tough metal layer followed by a Kevlar fibre layer and another of metal. A sheet of aerogel for insulation followed that and then yet another metal layer. Next was a thick section of impact resistant gel to shield me from breaking bones and then even more metal. There was the electronic shielding layer to prevent detection systems and EMP’s from disabling me and of course more metal, predictably.

After this layer of metal, there were two rubber coatings surrounding the layer of electronics and then metal to seal that in its own section, this metal was coated with the hydrating gel for body comfort and cushioning. Finally, there was the slim layer meant to interact with the body ware inside me. Oh, and of course the exterior paint to make me look fabulous.

That wasn’t even to mention the other systems, this was just the skeleton of the suit. There was still: power storage, solar cells, hydraulics, storage compartments, the computer systems for running the damn thing and housing Enigma as well as many more besides.

What allowed me to hold the hot metal was the aerogel and it was this I was thankful for at the moment, otherwise I’d have very little chance of getting any forging done.

Aerogel was a top tier thermal insulator. Basically, the liquid in gel was transformed into a gas by undergoing a process called supercritical drying in which the liquid passes through the supercritical phase. In supercritical states there is no liquid gas boundary.

With no boundary, the bubbles I guess you’d call them, were not damaged at all because there was no capillary action that would destroy the solid matrix. Needless to say, the science was quite complex but there was only so much that I had learned - most of it was beyond me.

Since the stuff was used in a lot of space tech and I found it fairly important to know what was saving my life, I had decided to learn a little about it.

It was quite interesting but a bit of a brain killer as it leads into so many topics that are just as hard to comprehend. Whew, tough stuff!

A few hours later, when the forge was up to temperature I set to work.

Blowing the air through the iron took a lot of effort and careful manipulating so that I didn’t ruin the metal by tipping it all over the charcoal. Enigma told me that I’d add so much carbon to it that I might as well use a glass sword.

Eventually, once I had the steel done and it had cooled down enough I smashed the pot that it was cooling down in and grabbed it to begin working with.

Attempt one ended in failure as well. The metal didn’t join because I wasn’t fast enough in applying the flux and black scale formed preventing the two layers from welding properly.

Unfolding the layers, I set to work again.

Attempt two also ended in failure as I hit the spine of the blade too hard and severely dented the metal and the proportions were just wrong.

After attempt two I broke up for the day and pottered around before going to bed early.

In the morning I set to work again.

Attempt three failed because, in the excitement of succeeding, I let the metal cool too much and the hammer fractured the metal.

Attempt four failed because the dimensions of the blade were just too bad.

Attempt five; success!

“Yes! I’ve done it!” I exclaim lording my proud achievement over the snow and spirits.

“Well done Ronja!” Enigma congratulates me. It took a few days’ work but yay!

“However, our work is not complete, we’ve got to temper the blade by quenching it as well as make a handle for it and hope it works properly”

“Oh, shut up bud,” I say, “don’t ruin my moment you downer.”

“I’m just saying not to celebrate just yet, there’s work to be done and it could still fail in several places.” The voice of reason whispers back, killing my jubilance. Killjoy.

With lingering joy in my heart, I settled down for the night.

In the morning I began the process of quenching the blade.

Quenching involved submerging a glowing red metal bar into a water bath in order to rapidly cool the metal.

The principle was that by rapidly cooling the metal, the unwanted processes that weaken the metal during gentle cooling no longer have time to work and as such a stronger metal is produced.

When steel slowly cools it forms the lamellar uniform grain structure of pearlite: a soft form of steel. However, when the metal is heated to a high temperature and then rapidly cools, a structure called martensite forms in the metal. Martensite is a very strong crystal form and it allows for a sharp cutting edge.

Anything more complex, such as claying the spine of the blade were a little beyond me right now and so I proceeded to start quenching.

With Enigma to tell me the temp and whether there was an uneven heat how could I fail?

Quite easily as it turned out, though admittedly it wasn’t very bad. During quenching the rush of steam had blinded my vision and I’d dropped the weapon.

Enigma’s resulting sigh was quite painful to hear.

“Well, I suppose we can count that as a success” he told me reticently.

“What we need to do now is temper the blade to remove a little of the hardness that you introduced when you dropped the blade in the water.”

“Ok, so how do I do that.”

“We’re going to have to heat it and allow it to air cool to slowly relieve the excess hardness. If you can focus on the spine of the blade.” He tells me. Well it doesn’t sound too hard.

For once, I was right. It wasn’t that hard. Enigma told me when the correct temp was achieved and then I took it out the fire.

Soon we had a worthy blade, now I just had to attach a handle and call it a sword and I’d be done. Whoop!

With happiness filling my heart I went to bed elatedly.

Using the antler of the deer thing I’d killed was the plan and though it took nearly a whole day to get a section long enough for the tang of the blade I thought it would be worth it.

Once I had a section about two hands long I returned to the forge.

The handle-making process I was using was a burn on. By heating the tang of the blade up, I could use it to burn out the marrow and bone from the inside of the antler and use glue to affix it.

What took me by surprise however was the acrid grey clouds of smoke that billowed up and made my eyes water. Funnily enough, I hadn’t put the suit on internal air supplies and my God was it a mistake. It was both a disgusting and highly salivating smell that aroused my hunger and yet simultaneously made me feel sick.

Shortly I had the antler hollowed out. All I had left was to make the glue and sand down the antler to be snug in my hand. Yay!

First making glue: primitive glue was good enough to get the job done, besides I doubted I’d be able to create a chemistry lab to make the synthetics. Hell, I’d be unable to create them even with a chemistry lab, I wasn’t a chemist and they spent decades perfecting lab skills. I was just a solider. Perhaps a rather good one, but a soldier nonetheless.

A hide glue was what I was going for, so I started by getting the deer hide down from where I had strung it up in the trees to keep away from predators.

“First cut up the hide into small pieces, the smaller the better but you have to be able to get them out later, so I’d suggest not too small.” I follow his instructions by the letter, determined not to screw this up as well.

After waiting for me to follow he continues “Boil the hide in a thin covering of water, gently, once the water is simmering leave it for a few hours until the hide goes translucent.” I do as he asks and then get onto the sanding of the bone handle whilst I wait.

Once the hide is translucent I take it off the heat and ask what to do next.

“Next, remove the hide bits” This takes me another few hours as I’ve decided, perhaps foolishly, to make a lot of the glue. Instinct tells me I’m going to need a lot.

“Boil off the remaining water until it begins to thicken and then remove from the heat”

I do as he asks and stare at what is left, a cloudy liquid that looks slightly like milk, thickened milk.

Once it’s cooled, Enigma pipes up again “Is it sticky to touch?”

“Yes”

“Great, now once it is completely dry we’ll need to break it up and let it air dry for a while.”

“How longs a while?” I ask picking up on his vague term.

“A day or two” he says innocently. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, well if he had one I’m sure it wouldn’t. I snort to myself as my thoughts make me laugh. I suppose one benefit of being stuck here is that I’m starting to find myself funny. Perhaps it is insanity instead.

Knowing I can’t change anything I put it out of mind and begin shaping the handle again.

Over the next few days the glue begins to dry properly. As it dries I find the monjolo can help break up the glue, and the sword – although it has no handle – can be used to chop the rubbery bits that still remain into smaller pieces.

By the end of the week, on the day I’m planning on doing the log update, the glue is fully dry and the blade is sharpened. It turns out there’s only so long you can shape a handle before you start to ruin it, so I moved onto the blade instead.

Once the glue is fully dry, I heat it gently in the embers of the fire in a small pot, whilst adding water in little bits until it reaches the consistency of golden syrup, but perhaps a little more viscous.

Using a stick, I start filling the hole in the handle with the glue and coating the tang in the stuff as well. Pressing the two together I lock the suit’s arms in place with a feature I’ve thought was stupid all my career and get out.

Later that day I check on it. It’s still drying but I think I can remove it long enough to do the log.

“Hey, Ronja here! So, I’ve got some updates. First of all, I’ve done it. Finally, the sword is done, here” I say lifting it up for the suit camera, before placing it back in the suit’s arms to continue drying. “It’s a gladius style, only a little bigger for the suit of course.

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Anyway, what else? There’s the monjolo; a power hammer. It’s also allowed me to create bread.

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So, I think that’s basically it, I can’t wait to start exploring soon. It’s time to find out what the hell’s been going on on this damn planet.”