Tungsten Carbide

One

"My final's due Thursday and I still haven't figured out what element I need to complete the embrittlement," Honey sighed. Tadashi slipped out of his lab coat and hung it up on the coat hook.

"Well, you still have two days."

Honey frowned. "I know, but what if I can't figure it out in time?"

Tadashi laughed. "You always figure it out."

"No, I don't. Remember the neutron radiation mistake?"

Tadashi's laugh faded. "Yeah. Okay."

"I almost killed Professor Callaghan."

"You did not, Honey. You've been beating yourself about that for, like, six months."

"Because he could have died!"

"He wasn't ever in danger of dying," Tadashi chuckled, taking Honey's lab coat and hanging it up. "Come on, it's late."

They walked out of the lab and down the hall towards the patio. Tadashi opened the door and Honey skipped out into the starry night. She leaned against the railing and sighed.

"So," Tadashi said, adjusting his ball cap and pulling himself onto the railing. "What have you tried already?"

"Carbide. Titanium, vanadium, zirconium..." She sat down on the rail next to Tadashi. "Nothing works."

"Well, those are all rock salt structured carbides," Tadashi said. "Right?" Honey nodded. "Then you should try a carbide with a hexagonal structure."

"... Like molybdenum?"

"Like tungsten, actually, is what I was thinking."

"Well, that's..." Honey's nose wrinkled as she thought over the process. "With... a radius of 139... I mean... and the thermal expansion- it..." She paused and looked up at Tadashi, her eyes shining. "It would work, wouldn't it?"

He smiled. She jumped up and ran to the door. "Come on, Tadashi! I have to try it!"

She bolted down the hallway and grabbed her lab coat, buttoning it as she rushed around her workspace.

"I need carbide! Tadashi, can you get the carbide?" 

He nodded and dashed down the hall.

"A dash of perchloric acid," Honey muttered, performing the task. "Cobalt and lithium peroxide- or maybe hydrogen."

She paused. "Tadashi?"

He was rolling an orb of tungsten carbide into the room. He looked up. "What?"

Honey wrung her hands together. "Lithium peroxide or hydrogen? They could have similar results but different processes. Or they could... explode." She bit her lip. Explosions were never a good thing unless you were expecting them.

"Lithium would be electrically charged, right?"

She nodded.

"So... how about hydrogen?"

Her eyes lit up.

Tadashi smiled and rolled the carbide onto its stand. He flicked the lever and the stand raised the carbide up. Honey reached for the hydrogen peroxide and applied it to the experiment.

"Super-heated to 500 kelvin, and..." She twisted the nozzle onto the bottle of super-heated liquid and skipped over to the carbide. The orb was coated in a pinkish-purplish dust from the spray of the concoction. 

"Now, it needs the electric charge to hold the chemicals," Honey said, reaching for the lever. She brought it down and the dust particles were zapped out of the air and onto the orb.