A freezing worker was a half-dead worker with a fifty percent labor penalty.
Lord Giles Croft stood in the fitting annex of Municipal Warehouse Four. He watched a team of sky-barge riggers shivering in the damp morning mist.
Outside, the mountain heat gauge read four degrees, but at twelve thousand feet. There, the barges patrolled, the high-sky wind plunged the liquid silver past twenty below zero.
A rigger named Jack stood holding a cold steel shackle, his fingers swollen red and stiff.
He tried to thread a split-pin through the shackle bolt.
His numb fingers fumbled.
The small bronze pin slipped from his grasp, clattering through the floor grates into the drainage ditch below.
“That’s the third dropped fitting this watch, Jack,” Giles said. His tone dry and was cold and exact.
