Chapter 2: SHAFT B
The tools were worse than the timber.
I spent the first morning cataloguing what the colony actually had versus what the work required. Hammers with loose heads. Chisels that hadn't been sharpened since someone's grandfather did the sharpening. A hand drill that would take six hours to accomplish what a proper bit could manage in one.
Work with what you have.
Edinburgh had taught me that. Municipal budgets didn't accommodate optimal materials. You designed around constraints, not despite them.
The foreman found me before I found him.
Brac was old for a dwarf—which meant old beyond any human measurement. Sixty years of mine work had compressed into his frame until he looked like geology made ambulatory. Grey beard cropped short enough not to catch in machinery. Hands that moved with the precision of tools themselves.
"You're the Valaris half-blood." Not a question. His Common was accented but clear, the vowels sitting differently than human speech.
"I am."
"Word is you've got ideas about Shaft B."
"I have a reinforcement plan." I held out the papers I'd sketched the night before—real paper, expensive, but some things required proper documentation. "Cross-braced timber at three load-bearing junctions. Shored arch at the transition point. Four days of work, six if the weather turns."
Brac took the papers. His eyes moved across them the way a reader scans text—not the pattern of someone pretending to understand but the genuine intake of someone who could read a structural diagram.
"Materials cost isn't justified." He handed the pages back. "Shaft's shallow. We'll get two more seasons out of it before we need to shore anything."
"You'll get sixty days." The system had refined its estimate overnight. "Maybe fifty-five, if someone puts too much weight on the arch section."
Something flickered across his face. "Based on what?"
"Based on load-path analysis." I pulled a second page from the stack—the calculation I'd done by hand, converting what the SEG showed me into mathematics a master miner could verify. "The junction stress here, here, and here is already past sustainable. The timber's been taking that load for months. Wood fatigues. Stone doesn't warn you before it falls."
Brac studied the calculations. His silence was a physical thing, dense and impenetrable.
"You've been here three days," he said finally.
"Long enough to measure."
"No." He looked up. "Long enough to think you've measured. Every young engineer comes in knowing exactly what's wrong with the work the old engineers did. Takes about six months before they understand why we did it that way."
"I'm not arguing the original installation was wrong for its time. I'm saying the load conditions have changed since then, and the structure hasn't been updated to match."
Don't argue. Demonstrate.
"Show me." I gestured toward the shaft entrance. "Walk me through your reading. Point to the places where my analysis is wrong."
Four days of work. Six with weather.
Brac didn't agree with my analysis. But he couldn't disprove it either, and when I started work the next morning with the four workers who'd volunteered, he was there. Watching.
Day one: junction reinforcement. We cut new timber from the colony's limited stores—I'd calculated the minimum viable material use, which meant no margin for error. The crossbracing went in at angles that made two of the human workers argue until Brac told them to shut up and follow the marks I'd chalked.
Day two: the arch began. Load transfer is delicate work. You can't just add support—you have to redirect stress away from failure points, which means understanding where the stress wants to go and giving it a path that won't kill anyone.
Day three: I was on the hammer alongside everyone else.
The physical labor felt different in this body. Konrad's arms knew the rhythm of swinging. His shoulders knew how to absorb impact. James Calloway had been competent at fieldwork, but Konrad Valaris had spent years building muscle memory I was only borrowing.
Borrowing.
The thought sat uncomfortably. This wasn't my body. These calluses weren't mine. The efficiency with which I could drive a spike into timber—that was inheritance, not skill.
But the design was mine. Every angle, every load calculation, every decision about where the stress would go when we finished. That came from eight years of Edinburgh training and whatever impossible gift had dropped this system into my brain.
The SEG updated in real-time as we worked. Junction one shifted from orange to yellow by day two. Junction two followed. The system was tracking structural integrity the way a medical scanner might track vital signs.
[Shaft B Structural Assessment: 67% — STABLE]
[Estimated Failure Window: Extended — Indefinite under current load conditions]
Day four: we finished the arch transition.
I set the last spike myself. The sound of metal on wood echoed down the shaft and came back changed—the acoustic signature of a structure that would hold.
[+23 DP — INFRASTRUCTURE MILESTONE: Shaft B Structural Integrity Restored]
[Current DP: 23/100]
[Tier Progress: 23%]
The notification pulsed once and faded. I wrote the number in my working ledger—a physical book I'd found in Konrad's belongings, half-filled with entries in a hand that wasn't mine.
My handwriting looked different. Thicker strokes. Different pen grip. The numbers were the same, though. The mathematics translated regardless of whose fingers held the pen.
Brac walked the finished shaft alone. I watched him tap supports the way a physician might tap a patient's chest—listening for resonance, for the sound of stress.
He didn't speak for a full minute.
"Holds better than I'd have put it," he said finally. Not to me. To the stone itself, or to the workers behind us, or to the air.
I didn't need more than that.
That night, one of the workers who'd been sleeping in a surface pallet moved into the mine housing. Brac had recommended the move.
I sat at the entrance after everyone else had gone to their beds, the SEG overlay mapping territory I'd barely begun to understand. Shaft A still showed amber—a lower priority, but still a problem. The aquifer sat seventeen meters below, untapped. The real ore body waited at thirty-five meters, patient.
Sixty days ago, this place would have buried someone.
The thought arrived without satisfaction. Preventing death wasn't a victory—it was minimum competence. The baseline for any engineer worth the title.
But in this world, apparently, it was enough for twenty-three points.
In this world, apparently, people watched you work before they decided whether to follow.
The teenager who'd watched me that first morning—Dav, his name was, son of one of the human settlers—appeared at the edge of the firelight. Still watching. Still not speaking.
I raised a hand in acknowledgment. He raised one back.
Then I turned to the ledger and began planning the aquifer project. Clean water. Real water. The kind of infrastructure that changes what's possible.
The shaft held steady behind me, its new timbers silent under load.