Dwarf-sight. Seeing in the dark of the mountain.
Two lenses tuned to infrared and deep ultraviolet, found with no mount. The mount was a hand.
Focal lenses
Seized artefact · Optical discCopperplate · AETERNA · Plate XI · Focal lenses and the Kinetic Anchor
Weld joints on recovered structural plates span surfaces up to 12 cm (not 12 mm) with zero defects.
Two disc-shaped optical elements, 34 millimetres across, 6.2 millimetres at the thickest, biconvex, optically clear, colourless. The Soviet metallurgist named the material a single-crystal aluminium oxynitride — functionally the ceramic the West would later call ALON, first synthesised in 1981 and not commercially available until the mid-2000s. Surface figure λ/20 at 633 nanometres: about 32 nanometres of flatness. Diamond-turning work, recovered from a tunnel under the Urals in 1982. No mount was found.
Focal length 11.4 millimetres. Numerical aperture approximately 0.85. Peak transmission in the near-infrared, 750 to 1,100 nanometres, with a secondary peak in the deep ultraviolet at about 220 nanometres. The missing mount is the organism's own hand: five digital nodes as a living barrel. The Spetsnaz who saw 14-Alpha in a tactical searchlight reported eyes with no sclera and no iris. They were lighting the wrong band.
Ch. 9 ·
Dwarfs in Theory