Lady Millicent Croft didn’t believe in miracles.
She believed in double-entry bookkeeping, standardized tare weights. The total, unbending certainty that an adult human working on a cold frontier needed two thousand two hundred calories of carbohydrate and protein every twenty-four hours to avoid dying in a ditch.
The logistics of feeding fifty million people needed an unblinking grasp of freight speed.
In Lady Millicent’s mind, the continent of Aethel-Terra was not a collection of romantic landscapes and feudal fiefdoms.
It was a closed heat-powered system of production centers, transit halls, and heat consumption sinks.
“A freight train traveling at thirty-five miles an hour carries twelve hundred tons of bulk cargo,” Millicent had lectured the country transport guildmasters three months earlier.
“If that train is delayed by two hours at a water stop, forty-eight thousand citizen-hours of flour spreading are lost.
A delay in logistics is matching to arson: it destroys wealth and invites ruin.”
