Tungstant wasn't happy. Well, that wasn't totally accurate, she was building, up to her antennae in a complex building project that was truly grand in scale, which she liked. What she didn't like was being rushed, and she was certainly on the clock with this one.
"Has Solant said anything?" she asked Cobalt as the two pored over the build maps in front of them.
"Nothing," her sister replied grumpily. "She's just saying we should 'continue to work to our timetable'."
"There's a wave coming and the Krath are knocking on the gates every day! I'd almost feel better if she told us to rush."
"If she told us to rush, we'd just say no," Cobalt noted wryly. "So why would she bother saying it?"
"So I have a chance to tell her to mind her own business and feel better," Tungstant replied.
"We don't need to feel better, we just need to get the job done. How much longer until the channels are complete?"
"Phase one is done. Phase two is still a few days away."
"When did you hear that?" Cobalt asked.
"Yesterday."
"And what about the core?"
"The core has a long way to go," Tungstant grumbled. "We're still finding design and build issues everywhere. It's impossible to say how long it's going to take to finish the whole thing. This is the problem with having to build something we've never done before to a deadline!"
"We knew about it going in," Cobalt reassured her sister. "Let's head down to the build site and check on progress. This place won't fall apart in the next hour."
"Some," Antgineer grunted, pointing in several directions with her antennae without bothering to turn around. "We've managed to solve the release problem, so I'm less worried about killing everyone in the fortress by mistake, which is a plus. The main problem continues to be our concerns about overlapping the tanks. Resonance could lead to a manifold rupture that would also kill everyone in the fortress."
"Don't the designs we received from Brilliant have resonance mitigation built in?" Cobalt asked.
"They do," Antgineer replied sourly, "but they were designed for a system that is a million times smaller than this one. Forgive me if I'm not satisfied that they'll be sufficient."
"What does Brilliant say?"
The carver looked at the two of them as if they were insane.
"Nothing useful. What did you expect?"
Tungstant sighed. Brilliant, on some level, probably hoped the thing would explode. That'd be great data for her.
"What we are building here, and what Brilliant has used in the past, are so different in scale they may as well not be the same thing. It's like blocking a trickle of water with some dirt compared to a dam built across a mighty river. The idea is the same, stop the water from moving, but the methods required are totally different."
This wasn't what Tungstant and Cobalt wanted to hear, but they trusted Antgineer enough to know she wasn't saying anything uselessly.
"Let us help," Cobalt said. "We can assist in coming up with a working design."
The carver before them rubbed her antenna against her head and nodded.
"That'd be helpful. We think we're about ninety percent of the way there, but the last part is always the hardest."