Human physiology was the ultimate rate-limiting step in town construction.
Giles Croft stood in the central mess gallery at Mile Nineteen. He watched the high-speed air-powered cargo carriages arrive from the lower valleys.
The building behind the cloud kitchen express was a masterclass in heat padding and air-powered transport.
To deliver piping-hot food across twenty upright miles of freezing mesosphere, Mistress Pippa had designed double-walled empty pocket transport canisters lagged with tightly packed aerogel and heated by small earth-heat storage stones.
“If you let broth cool down in a near-empty pocket,” Pippa had lectured her kitchen apprentices in Haven-Hold, “the fat separates, the starches congeal, and the soup turns into greasy wallpaper paste.
A working rigger doesn’t want cold grease. He wants boiling broth that burns his tongue and puts iron into his blood.”
Now, she stood on the staging platform. She inspected the quick-release valves on the delivery carriages.
The steam escaping from the relief vents smelled of toasted barley, roasted root vegetables, and sweet orchard cider, fully overwhelming the sharp, metal tang of ozone and cold steel that had dominated the apex for three months.
