The Slab That Made Them Wait

Three days had passed since Callum Baird had driven the first steel anchor pegs into the Cradle soil, and the Supply Depot site had transformed from marked ground into something that looked like the beginning of a building. The formwork was complete — timber boards set on edge around the perimeter of the fifteen-by-thirty-metre footprint, braced with stakes at half-metre intervals and levelled to a precision that Hamish Kincaid had achieved by eye before Adrian Pafistis confirmed it with instruments. Inside the formwork, drainage channels had been cut into the exposed Cradle layer and filled with gravel to direct water away from the slab's underside. Reinforcing mesh — prefabricated steel grid panels delivered through the portal in flat packs — lay across the full footprint on small plastic spacers that held the mesh fifty millimetres above the ground, ready to be encased in concrete.

Adrian arrived at the site before dawn. The pour was the first critical milestone of the sanctuary's construction — a stage that could not be paused, restarted, or corrected once it began. Concrete was unforgiving in that respect. It set on its own terms, and a slab poured in sections would crack along the joints as surely as a promise made in halves. The entire 450 square metres had to be poured, spread, and screeded in a single continuous operation, which meant the crew needed to work without significant interruption from first light until the slab was finished.

The cement had arrived through the portal three days earlier — forty-tonne bags of Portland cement stacked on pallets alongside aggregate and sharp sand, materials manufactured on Earth and transported across dimensions for the purpose of laying a floor in a storage shed in another world. The mundanity of it was easy to miss. The sanctuary's concrete slab existed because an inter-dimensional supply network had decided it mattered enough to deliver the ingredients.

Water was the more immediate logistical challenge. Concrete demanded large volumes, and the sanctuary site had no reticulated supply. Alastair Drummond had organised a water relay from the Norong River the previous afternoon — a chain of containers filled at the riverbank and transported to the site by hand and by the settlement's single available utility vehicle, which made the round trip in twelve minutes and held enough water for approximately three cubic metres of concrete per load. The filled containers stood in rows along the eastern edge of the formwork, catching the early light.

Hamish Kincaid supervised the mixing. A concrete specialist he was not — New Edinburgh built with stone, lime mortar, and fired brick, and Hamish had laid more lintels than slabs in his career. But he understood proportions, he understood consistency, and he had spent the previous two evenings studying the mix ratios that Adrian had written out for him on a sheet of paper now so handled that the pencil marks were beginning to blur. The mix was straightforward: one part cement, two parts sand, three parts aggregate, enough water to make it workable but not soupy. Hamish had mixed a small test batch the day before and let it set overnight, pressing his thumb into it that morning to assess the cure. He pronounced it acceptable. Adrian, who had tested it with a compression gauge, agreed.

The crew assembled at first light. Alastair, Hamish, Ewan Maitland, and Callum Baird formed the core team. Two additional labourers from the settlement, Jerome Smith and Kain Jeffries, had been assigned to the water relay and mixing duties for the day. The operation ran in a continuous loop: water and dry materials fed into the mixer, wet concrete shovelled into wheelbarrows, wheelbarrows pushed along plank runways laid across the formwork, concrete tipped and spread with rakes and shovels, then screeded level with a long straight-edged board that two men dragged across the surface in overlapping passes.

It was punishing work. The dust that defined Bixbus found its way into everything — lungs, eyes, the folds of clothing, the surface of wet concrete where it had to be brushed away before it set into permanent blemishes. The Clivilian air was still and warm, and the physical effort of mixing, hauling, and spreading concrete in continuous rotation produced a sustained exhaustion that conversation could not survive. By mid-morning, the crew had fallen into a rhythm that was wordless and mechanical — the clang of the mixer, the scrape of shovels, the wet slap of concrete hitting the mesh, the slow drag of the screed board.

Hamish worked the pour face, directing where each barrow load was tipped to maintain an even spread. He had developed, over the course of the morning, an instinct for how the concrete behaved against the Cradle soil beneath it. The reinforcing mesh sat on its spacers above the ground, and when the concrete flowed around and under it, there was a moment — brief and easy to miss — when the wet mix seemed to settle differently than it did on the formwork's timber edges. The Cradle was warm. Not hot, not dramatically so, but measurably warmer than the surrounding dust, and the concrete closest to the soil surface lost moisture fractionally faster than the rest. Hamish adjusted by directing slightly wetter loads to the centre of the slab and keeping the edges — where the formwork timber insulated against the ground — at standard consistency. He did not explain this adjustment to Adrian. It was the kind of correction that came from watching material meet ground, and Hamish had been watching materials meet Clivilian ground his entire life.

Adrian checked in twice during the morning — once to inspect the pour's progress at the northern end, where the drainage fall was most critical, and once to assess the screed quality across the first completed third of the slab. Both times he found the work acceptable. Both times Alastair acknowledged his assessment with a nod that contained neither deference nor resentment, merely the professional courtesy of one competent man recognising another's authority. Adrian left each time within twenty minutes. He had the Solar Power Plant formwork to inspect and a meeting with Terry Saba about cable routing that could not be postponed.

Grant Ironbach appeared at the site around midday, carrying a canteen of water and his project plan. He stood at the formwork's edge and watched the crew work the pour face southward, the wet concrete spreading in a grey tide across the reinforcing mesh. The slab was approximately half complete. Grant said nothing to the crew — he had learned in the first days of construction that his presence was welcome but his input was not required when Adrian's people were working. He watched for perhaps thirty minutes, made a note in the margin of his project plan, and returned to the main settlement.

The pour reached the southern formwork edge in the late afternoon. The final barrow loads were tipped and spread, the screed board made its last passes, and Hamish walked the full length of the slab one final time, checking for low spots and surface irregularities. He found three depressions that required additional concrete and one section near the western edge where the screed had left a slight ridge. He corrected both with hand tools and a bucket of wet mix, working with the attentive patience of a man finishing a piece of work that would outlast the building placed upon it.

The completed slab stretched across the full fifteen-by-thirty-metre footprint, grey and wet and perfectly level within the timber formwork. It looked, in the late afternoon light, like a still pool of stone — solid enough to stand on but not yet solid enough to build on. That was the problem. Concrete cured through a chemical process that could not be hurried by will, urgency, or the needs of a settlement that wanted its wildlife sanctuary built yesterday. The slab needed a minimum of seven days before it could bear the structural load of a steel frame. Adrian had been clear about this. Hamish, whose experience with lime mortar involved similar waiting periods, had confirmed it. The concrete would set on its own schedule, and the crew would find other work in the meantime.

Alastair had already spoken with Adrian about the waiting period. The Operations Hub site, twelve metres to the north, needed clearing and levelling — the same preparatory work they had done for the Supply Depot the previous week. The crew would shift to the Ops Hub first thing in the morning, begin its foundation preparation, and return to the Supply Depot once the slab had cured sufficiently for the steel frame to be erected. The two builds would interleave, each one's waiting period filled by the other's active construction. It was efficient, practical, and precisely the kind of scheduling that a settlement with limited labour and unlimited ambition required.

The crew downed tools as the light softened. The slab was roped off with stakes and twine to prevent foot traffic during the curing period — a precaution that Hamish insisted on despite the fact that the sanctuary site saw almost no casual visitors. The formwork would remain in place for at least three days, holding the slab's edges true while the concrete found its strength. Water would be sprinkled on the surface morning and evening to prevent the top layer from drying too quickly and cracking — a task that Callum volunteered for, less out of technical understanding than out of an unwillingness to leave the site entirely.

The first permanent foundation on the Bixbus Wildlife Sanctuary site lay cooling in the Clivilian dusk. It could not be walked on, built upon, or used for anything at all. It simply had to be left alone to become what it was going to become. In a settlement where everything happened at the speed of necessity, the concrete slab imposed a different tempo entirely — the slow, patient chemistry of calcium silicate hydration, indifferent to schedules, deadlines, and the ambitions of displaced conservationists. The sanctuary's first lesson in construction was also its first lesson in waiting.