May 7, 2440
By six in the morning, the landing strip was no longer woods.
It was a mess.
Stumps, churned dirt, piles of limbs, sorted logs, shredded brush, and twelve tree cutters scattered across half a kilometer of newly opened ground.
Ellis Chakrobarty stood at the Leta crossing with Caleb Morrow and watched the first grader crawl off a lowboy.
Behind it came two bulldozers, a compact roller, an excavator, a loader, and three dump trucks.
Ravi looked up from the cooler he had been carrying.
“More machines.”
“Different machines,” Ellis said.
“That makes it better?”
“No.”
The tree cutters had not stopped. They were working beyond the landing strip now, widening the usable area around it and taking more of the future construction footprint.
The graders had a simpler assignment.
Make the roadside useful.
The previous day’s clearing was wide enough for a tractor-trailer to leave the road. Today Caleb wanted enough room for several of them to do it without everybody having to negotiate whose turn it was.
The bulldozers went first.
They shoved slash and loose debris away, knocked down the roughest humps, and began opening a broad staging area beside the road. The excavator followed, attacking the largest stumps where they would interfere with traffic.
Nobody was trying to make it pretty.
Not yet.
A dump truck backed toward the loader.
Ellis waved it farther left.
“Keep the good dirt separate.”
Caleb looked over.
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You sound like Matt.”
“That is an insult.”
“Runs in the family.”
By eight, the first semi came off the road without stopping traffic.
It pulled completely into the clearing, circled through the rough turnaround, and parked beside the equipment trailers.
Caleb watched it make the loop.
“That works.”
Ellis shook his head.
“It works with one truck.”
“So?”
“What happens tomorrow when there are six?”
Caleb stared at him for a moment, then waved the dozer operator farther back.
Ravi grinned.
“You sounded like Matt again.”
“Go carry something.”
“I knew that was coming.”
Farther down the strip, the cutters were still sorting timber as they worked.
The best walnut and oak went into separate rows.
Big cottonwood, gum, maple, lesser oak, and anything else worth milling went into the general log stacks.
The rest was becoming mountains of lower-grade material that somebody would eventually have to process.
For the moment, getting it out of the way mattered more.
Near noon, Sarah Kimble walked back from the far end of the cleared corridor with her survey tablet.
“Five hundred meters is good.”
“Width?”
“Forty everywhere that matters. More in a couple places because your tree guys don’t believe in straight lines.”
Ellis looked down the strip.
From the road, it was beginning to resemble something intentionally built rather than something violently removed.
Bare earth stretched away through what had been forest two mornings earlier.
The graders were working the near end.
Tree cutters were still moving at the far end.
Trucks came and went through the new pull-off.
“What happens tomorrow?” Ravi asked.
Ellis checked his phone.
Matt had sent him a message twenty minutes earlier.
Expect a shuttle. Make sure it has somewhere to put things.
Ellis looked back toward the staging area.
“Apparently we find out whether this is big enough.”
Ravi followed his gaze.
“For a shuttle?”
“That’s what he says.”
Ravi considered the half-kilometer strip.
Then he looked at the graders.
“I think we’re going to need more parking.”
Ellis nodded.
“Now you’re learning.”
