Chapter 8: The First Law of Roads

The survey stakes arrived on a Tuesday.

Brokk knew this because he had ordered them shipped on a Thursday, calculated the transit time through the Greenwood Approach's eastern entry track, and marked the expected arrival in his project ledger with the particular satisfaction of a man whose estimations prove correct. He had not visited the site himself. He had visited the maps — three of them, overlaid on his worktable in the capital's Engineering Commission chamber, each at a different scale, each annotated in his own handwriting with measurements that had come back from the preliminary survey team neat and precise and exactly as useful as he had required them to be.

He had not visited the site because there was, at that stage, no reason to visit the site. The preliminary survey had done what preliminary surveys do. The measurements existed. The maps existed. The plans existed, nine pages of them, drawn in his own careful hand, showing a road fourteen feet wide at standard gauge, graded for supply wagon traffic at a fifteen-to-one slope maximum, surfaced with compacted gravel over a rubble base on the flat sections and dressed stone on the grade changes. It was good road design. He had built roads across three mountain ranges and two river deltas and one stretch of active volcanic shelf that the Engineering Commission had told him categorically could not be roaded, and it could be, and now it was, and the road was still there. He knew how roads were built. This road would be built the same way.