The First Cut of the Season

The tungsten winch drum did not scream until the cable reached nine-tenths of its breaking strain.

That metallic shriek vibrated straight through Alkaios's boot soles, up his shin bones, and rattled the fillings in his molars. On the foredeck of the Phronesis, the deck plates were crowning. Four heavy steel rivets had already sheared clean off their girders, pinging into the sulfur clouds below like stray musket balls.

"Alkaios!" Bailiff Kyprianos shrieked from the rim of the wharf, clutching his wool cap against the wash of the tug's secondary rotor. "Slack the line! You're dragging the whole slipway over the lip!"

Alkaios didn't touch the brake lever. Touching the brake lever meant letting forty tons of iron-bark log snap back toward the tavern roof, and the tavern below was where he still owed a substantial bar tab.

More importantly, his lift coils were choking on dead air. The analog voltmeter on the steering pedestal showed twelve volts and dropping fast. If the tug lost altitude now, the log wouldn't fall alone. It would yank the Phronesis down into the poisonous tectonic floor of Aithria, ten thousand feet beneath the clouds.

"The line is fine, Bailiff," Alkaios shouted through the open wheelhouse window. "The pier is fine. The rivets are merely clearing their throats."

Emerald letters floated across his vision, crisp as printer's ink. A faint grid of green lines painted itself across the mass of gray timber suspended over the abyss. Where the trunk met the underside of Canton Seven's spruce pilings, three thick, gnarled root cords held the wood fast like rusted steel cables.

The tugboat wasn't just lifting a log. It was trying to haul the entire floating canton by its sub-framing.

Alkaios grabbed the locking pin, jammed it into the throttle wheel to hold forty percent reverse thrust, and kicked the wheelhouse door open. The wind off the cloud shelf tasted of bitter sulfur and burned grease. He sprinted down the narrow gangway toward the starboard equipment rack.

There, bolted to the bulkhead, hung the pride of his salvage operation: an eight-foot, twin-handled industrial plasma-chainsaw with notched carborundum teeth. Its combustion bulb had been empty since last autumn, and the starter cord was held together with tarred twine.

As his calloused palms closed around the taped grips, the emerald text flared brighter.

"Draw whatever you want," Alkaios muttered, "so long as it doesn't come out of my pay."

The metal casings of the tool shuddered in his hands. The rusted iron casing turned pale jade, cold green fire licking along the guide bar. The dull carborundum teeth began to hum at twenty thousand vibrations per second, whining with a pitch so sharp that every dog in Canton Seven started howling in unison.

On the pier fifty feet above, Kyprianos stumbled backward, his shagreen clipboard clattering against the cobblestones. "By the Baron's teeth! What did you wire to that motor, Alkaios?"

"Standard municipal maintenance, Bailiff!" Alkaios yelled back.

He vaulted onto the gunwale, balanced on the narrow steel cap, and looked down. The main taproot was four feet thick, twisted like wet hemp, and locked around the Canton's lower suspension brace. Under ninety tons of opposing strain, the wood was harder than forge-tempered pig iron. A bad cut would bind the blade instantly, tear the saw from his grip, and whip the severed cable through the wheelhouse.

The green lines hovering in his sight condensed into a narrow, pulsing notch on the underside of the curve.

Alkaios didn't need to read the manual twice. He leaned out over the drop, wedging his left hip against the Phronesis's bow rail, and brought the humming blade down into the compression zone.

The teeth bit.

There was no spray of sawdust. Instead, a torrential fountain of emerald embers and hissing steam geysered into the wind. The emerald plasma severed cellulose and iron-fibers with the ease of a hot wire through sheep tallow. The wood shrieked as internal hydraulic pressure released, venting fragrant pine oil and ozone.

Alkaios pivoted his wrists, driving the saw's nose into the lower tension zone at thirty-four degrees.

The taproot snapped with a sound like a naval cannon firing into a quarry.

The sudden release of three thousand pounds of counter-torque jolted the Phronesis. The bow leaped upward five feet into the air. Alkaios's boots lost their grip on the wet rail, his body tipping outward toward the empty miles of fog. He hooked his right forearm around a stay-cable, hauling himself back onto the diamond-plate deck with a grunt that felt like a pulled rib.

The severed root whipped back into the Canton's timber skirt. A blinding surge of jade light traveled up the chainsaw's guide bar, through the housing, and straight down into the ship's bronze conduit runs.

The generator in the bilge, dormant for three weeks, gave a throaty roar. The voltmeter on the pedestal snapped from twelve to ninety volts, pinning the brass needle against the maximum stop.

Alkaios lowered the humming saw, blinking away the green afterimages dancing across his eyes. "Compost credits," he breathed, wiping a streak of sticky green sap from his chin. "Wonderful. Just what I needed to buy groceries."

Below the tugboat, the forty-ton iron-bark log tilted. Freed from its mooring grapple, it rolled off the ledge of Canton Seven and dropped into the troposphere, tumbling end over end until it vanished into the sulfur soup below.

A vast silence fell over the waterfront.

Bailiff Kyprianos stood frozen on the wharf edge, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, staring at the empty space where forty tons of imperial timber had sat ten seconds earlier.

Then the harbor warning sirens changed their rhythm. The low, mournful dock horns cut out, replaced by three rapid, clattering war-bells.

Alkaios turned toward the open sky.

The clearing of the massive log had opened the eastern flight corridor. Two hundred yards out, cruising through the gray mist with their gasbags humming and their steam vents closed for stealth, sat a two-hundred-foot warship.

Its hull was sheathed in riveted black iron. Its twin directional screws churned the cloud layer into frothing white wakes. Along its lower deck, four broadside gun-ports stood wide open, the brass muzzles of heavy imperial grape-cannon leveled dead on the Phronesis's waterline.

Mounted on the cutter's forward bridge rail was an enamel plate bearing the crossed axes of the Zephyrian Timber Syndicate.

Alkaios killed the saw, let it drop onto the deck, and gripped the tug's brass throttle.

"Bailiff," he called out without looking back, "if the Customs Office asks about that log, tell them it fell on its own."