Seventy merchant galleons approaching an unmanaged runway was not a commercial boom.
It was an air traffic disaster waiting to happen.
Lord Giles Croft stood on the timber staging at the center of the sky-wharf, surveying the newly raised foundation stones.
The wind whistled through the staging poles. It carried the sharp scent of hot pine pitch from the timber yard below.
“If seventy independent captains try to land at the same time using visual line-of-sight,” Giles said, tapping his wooden ruler against his thigh, “we’ll have mid-air collisions, wake-rough churning roll-overs, and forty tons of burning debris scattered across the main deck.”
Beside him, Master Duncan Stone-Splitter leaned on a sixty-pound iron maul.
“The boys have the six-sided foundation dressed, Lord Giles,” Duncan said.
“Solid granite cut stone, linked dovetail joints.
