First Steel in the Ground

The groundbreaking ceremony had drawn perhaps forty people. The construction of the Sanctuary Supply Depot drew six.

Adrian Pafistis returned to the site within an hour of the ceremony's conclusion, carrying the annotated drawings he had been refining with Grant Ironbach for the past week. The crowd had dispersed, the peafowl had wandered north into the settlement, and the boundary stakes stood in the afternoon stillness like the skeleton of something waiting to be fleshed. Adrian walked the Supply Depot footprint a final time — fifteen metres by thirty, its long axis oriented east-west to maximise the southern roof face for solar panels. He checked the drainage fall toward the Norong River, confirmed the setback from the Operations Hub footprint staked out twelve metres to the north, and satisfied himself that the formwork positions matched his drawings.

The five men from New Edinburgh were already waiting. They had arrived in Bixbus nine days earlier, part of a group of skilled tradespeople that New Edinburgh's parliament had agreed to send following first contact between the settlements in Bixbus's opening week. A patrol of Chewbathian Hunters, ranging further south than their usual circuits, had encountered Bixbus settlers struggling to erect perimeter fencing against Shadow Panther incursions. The encounter led to diplomatic contact, and New Edinburgh — a settlement with over 250 years of building expertise and no shortage of capable hands — had responded with practical generosity.

Alastair James Drummond, the crew's foreman, was a builder in his mid-forties who had spent his working life constructing and maintaining structures across Stewartshire. He carried himself with the unhurried confidence of a man who had raised walls in worse conditions than these and saw no reason to be impressed by dust. His approach to construction had been shaped by generations of New Edinburgh practice — techniques descended from the Scottish stonemasons and carpenters who had founded the settlement in 1762, adapted and refined through 250 years of building in Clivilius. The New Edinburgh tradition favoured heavy foundations, generous drainage, and a deep respect for what the ground would and would not tolerate. Alastair had never built with prefabricated steel or corrugated iron — New Edinburgh worked in stone, timber, and fired brick — but he understood structure, load, and the behaviour of soil under weight, and Adrian had recognised within their first conversation that the man's practical knowledge exceeded what any engineering textbook could provide.

Hamish Robert Kincaid handled the foundation work. A masonry specialist whose family had been laying stone in Stewartshire for four generations, Hamish brought an intuitive understanding of Clivilian ground conditions that Adrian found both useful and faintly humbling. When Adrian had explained the three-layer soil system — The Veil, The Shield, The Cradle — Hamish had nodded with the patience of someone being told something he already knew, though in different words. In New Edinburgh, builders spoke of the "crust" and the "living ground" beneath it, and they had long understood that the fertile layer responded to what was placed upon it. Hamish's particular skill was reading soil — pressing his palm flat against exposed ground, feeling for moisture content and density, assessing by touch what Adrian assessed with instruments. His methods were unscientific by Earth standards. They were also, as Adrian was learning, remarkably accurate.

Ewan Alexander Maitland, the oldest of the crew at fifty-three, was a carpenter whose hands bore the calluses of decades working with Clivilian hardwoods. He spoke little and observed everything. Where Alastair commanded and Hamish assessed, Ewan simply worked — measuring, cutting, fitting — with a precision that required no instruction. He had brought his own tools from New Edinburgh: a set of hand planes, chisels, and marking gauges that looked antique by Earth standards but were maintained to a sharpness that suggested they had never been merely decorative.

Callum George Baird was the youngest at twenty-two, and the only one of the five who had come to Bixbus as a warrior rather than a tradesman. He was strong, willing, and quick to learn, though his construction experience was limited to the fortification work that all Hunters were expected to contribute to at Chewbathia. Alastair had taken him on without hesitation — a young man who could lift, carry, and follow instructions without complaint was worth his weight in whatever currency Bixbus was eventually going to establish.

The first portal delivery of sanctuary-specific materials had arrived that morning, timed to coincide with the groundbreaking. Steel framing components, bags of Portland cement, reinforcing mesh, corrugated iron sheeting, rolls of insulation, boxes of bolts and fixings — all of it manufactured on Earth to Adrian's specifications and transported through dimensional gateways in crates that the New Edinburgh men examined with undisguised curiosity. They had seen portal-delivered goods before — New Edinburgh traded with settlements that had Guardian access — but the sheer volume and the alien precision of the machined steel components were something new. Callum picked up a pre-cut steel bracket, turned it over in his hands, and ran a thumb along the laser-cut edge with the expression of someone encountering a technology that rendered his own experience temporarily irrelevant.

Adrian gathered the crew around his drawings, spread across the same vehicle bonnet that Grant had used during the ceremony. He walked them through the build sequence: Stage 1 was foundation work — clear and level the building footprint within the broader sanctuary site, set formwork for the concrete slab, lay drainage channels, position reinforcing mesh. Four days. Hamish asked about the concrete — a material he had limited experience with, New Edinburgh favouring stone-and-lime construction for permanent buildings. Adrian explained the mix ratios, the pouring process, and the curing requirements. Hamish listened, asked two precise questions about how the slab would interact with The Cradle beneath it, and seemed satisfied with the answers.

Alastair divided the crew. Ewan and Callum began clearing the building footprint — scraping back the last of The Veil's dust and levelling the exposed Shield layer with hand tools. Hamish marked the formwork positions, driving timber stakes into The Cradle at each corner and running string lines between them to establish the slab edges. The string lines were taut and level to a degree that made Adrian check them with his own spirit level and find nothing to correct.

The work was physical, unglamorous, and immediate. Within an hour of the ceremony's end, the sanctuary site had transformed from a place where people had gathered to listen into a place where people were digging. The dust rose around the crew in pale clouds that settled on their clothes and skin and in the creases of Adrian's drawings. The sound of steel pegs being driven into Clivilian soil carried across the cleared ground to where Grant Ironbach stood near the boundary stakes, watching the first structure of his project plan begin to take shape.

Adrian checked the formwork alignment a final time, confirmed the drainage fall with Hamish, and left Alastair in charge. He had the Solar Power Plant site to inspect before dark, and the perimeter fencing crew needed his assessment of a section that had been damaged overnight — the settlement's predator problems had not paused for the groundbreaking. He told Alastair he would return in the morning to review progress and approve the reinforcing mesh layout before the pour could be scheduled.

Grant remained at the site until the light failed. He did not interfere with the work. He stood at the periphery with his project plan under his arm and watched five men from a settlement he had never heard of three weeks ago lay the foundations of something he had designed from memory and loss. The Norong River was inaudible from this distance, but the ground beneath the crew's boots was dark and rich where The Cradle had been exposed, and the formwork stakes cast long shadows in the late afternoon as though the building already existed in outline, waiting for the walls to catch up.