Lux 5 interstellar lux a.., p.13
LUX-5: Interstellar (LUX and the New TECH), page 13
“I have Anna here researching who planned and pressured the ships. We will destroy them shortly but send Ore-IV back with the prisoners,” Paulus explained. “I’m concerned about that third ship. I’m not sure they could repair it, but they might be able to do so. They could, at least, reach your colony and they have powerful lasers.”
“I have constant drone patrols here that would stop any ship approaching the colony. I’ll try to get rid of any recalcitrant prisoners or reluctant immigrants over the next month. We are still patrolling for emergent spacecraft,” Lux said. “We have a good detection history when there are few spacecraft within the system. It would be extraordinarily hard if there were many craft.”
“Put those robots to good use and the settlers will need a school for their children shortly. Have the A.I.s teach them. There aren’t many and the parents can home school them too,” Paulus said.
“Thanks, dad…for everything. The robots will be a great asset. I’ll be sorting through files tonight. Night dad,” Lux said and signed off.
◆◆◆
New Arrivals
Lux felt like a one-man band. He went to the cafeteria they had set up and went in and asked for some peppermint tea if they had any. He sat down and pulled out a slate and started looking through newcomers’ files. He was intently studying the files when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked around to see Prissy smiling down at him.
“Hey boss. No rest for the weary?” Prissy said. “Can I help you with anything?”
“Yep,” Lux said with his best puppy dog eyes and his hands curled up in front of him like a dog begging.
She leaned down and kissed him on the nose. “Show me what’s got y’all twisted up.”
“It’s these one hundred new couples and their kids. I’m trying to learn what skills they have by looking at their files. I don’t know their names or their kids. How can I assign them anywhere?
I’ve got to get most of our prisoners sent back. I have to get housing built and I just figured out how to manufacture all the pipes for water, sewage, and electrical but I will need to move the prefab housing to excavate for all the pipes. Where do I put the people while I’m doing construction? The new robots can do the work,” Lux said.
Prissy laughed. “Is that all? I can clear up all that and ease your workload in a heartbeat. You need to delegate. You have all the designs, don’t you? I heard you got with Nobolick and you two figured out a way to make concrete.”
“I thought about delegating but all the people I know are working ten-hour days already,” Lux said.
“Here,” she said. “Let me show you. Anna, you’re listening, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Prissy,” Anna said to both Prissy and Lux.
“Would you make a summary of the skills for all the newcomers and their children? Suggest placement and mentors for the adults and children and display it on this slate,” Prissy said. Lux started to say something, but she held a hand up to stop him. “Would you do Lux a favor, Anna? Whenever someone walks up to Lux that he hasn’t met or interacted with much – would you remind him in a brief summary with their title and name. Also, remind him what project they are working on or if they’ve had any difficulty. Suggestions and options should be available if he asks. Would you do that?”
“I would be pleased to do that. I wondered why he didn’t ask me in the first place, but I figured it was a human thing,” Anna said.
Lux started to talk again but Prissy held up her hand. “You have designs for a water treatment plant and waste management. Correct? Have you considered the new breakthrough Lux and Igor Nobolick have made and how it would affect construction?”
“I have designs, but they are rudimentary for this location,” Anna said.
“Are there more advantageous places near here and what size population are they designed for?” Prissy asked.
“There is an adjacent location within ten kilometers next to a moderately sized lake and river with excellent drainage and more land suitable for farming near it. Currently the designs are intended for a maximum of 20,000 people,” Anna said.
“How soon will this design be outdated if immigration increases as you predict?” Prissy said.
“It will be outdated within six months of being completed. Housing, sanitation, food storage, administration – everything will need to be upgraded,” Anna said.
Lux put his hand over Prissy’s mouth. “I get it. Don’t know why I didn’t see it. I was planning too small and not thinking about the effects of Igor and my discovery. It will change timelines and possibilities we’ve never dreamed of…” He reached over and put his hands behind Prissy’s head and pulled her in for a long passionate kiss. “Anna. Make proposed outlines for a city of two million for the next ten years on that better site. We’ll update as we develop our tech.”
Prissy stood up and grabbed his arm.
“Where are you taking me?” Lux asked.
“I solved all your problems so you’re following me to my room. I figure you haven’t the wherewithal to ask me first and it’s high time we do what we’ve thought about for years,” Prissy said. “Were you planning to get around to asking me?”
Lux stammered. “I…was…but I was going to wait ‘til I was eighteen.”
“Oh, please. You were going to wait three more months ‘til your birthday? Really?” Prissy said. “Follow your captain. That’s an order.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lux said and followed her.
◆◆◆
The Tech Leap of the Damaged Emitter
Lux came into the new laboratory for Igor and his experiments at the colony outskirts. Igor was having one of the robots move a slab of material that looked like a Highland Stewart Tartan with the reds and all the different colors.
“What have you done? That is very colorful,” Lux asked Igor with a large grin.
“I have no Scottish ancestry. I was playing with changing the frequency and can produce the material in almost any color you want, and it is through and through the material – not just on the surface. The bane of this is if you want to change the color, it’s just like primary, secondary and tertiary colors. It works the same way. Why are you grinning like that? You look like the cat that ate the canary.”
Lux chortled, “I had a good night,” he paused. “…and a good breakfast,” he said with a grin. “What about making the material in thinner sheets? Is it still as strong?”
“This stuff acts weird with some of the emitter shapes. We can make it pretty flexible when it is two centimeters thick. It is like flexible sheetrock or drywall that can be drilled or machined. It is still strong as hell. I’ve made it as thick as a meter but that is not flexible. What’s really interesting is that I can take soil and expose it to a field that makes the material like granules of sand but made out of soil. I haven’t tried adding other chemicals in it, but we could make beams out of this stuff. I can make foamed concrete that is much lighter but still strong,” Igor wound down a little to catch his breath.
“You’ve tested the compressive strength but what about its tensile strength?” Lux asked.
“Certain emitter shapes produce strings of crystalline structures, I’ll call them, that let it bend without cracking,” Igor said.
“How in the world have you done so much in only three days?” Lux said. “You’re much further along than I thought you’d be. Wait. How did you get the flat finishes on both sides of a sheet of this material?” Lux asked.
“Oh, that,” Igor explained. “I’ve been getting a lot of help from Annette and the other A.I.s plus they assigned me twenty robots and some of the Russian vehicles to collect, move, and test the different materials. They even powdered some rock to try different materials than soil. Powdered limestone works great and there’s a lot around here. I think the robot started a quarry near here.”
“Really, a quarry. How did you get the surface of those test sheets so flat and even?’” Lux asked again.
“Annette fabricated some gravity emitters that can compress the surface as it’s being formed so it is level, molten, and poured over molten tin to smooth the other side. I come up with ideas and Annette and the others try out what I ask them to do and report their findings,” Igor explained.
“I want you to send the robots out to see if they can find sand and try to make some glass,” Lux suggested strongly. “We have the limestone to make calcium chloride to stabilize the glass and make it more durable. Then sodium carbonate would help the sand melt easier, and he could add some boron to make the glass able to handle thermal expansion better. I want Anna and you to see what the emitters would do to different metals also.”
“A good idea. I was stuck just thinking about concrete and ceramics,” Igor said. “Let me show you how large slabs have been shaped for construction. The robots work better than humans since they don’t lose focus and get tired even though they might run low of power.”
Lux was directing the robots, through Annette, to build a storage building with a concrete floor, concrete walls and beams and a slanted concrete roof. The building only took the bots two hours to complete, if you took into account, it had no windows, and the door openings were just openings in the shell. It was a good test case and the shell seemed very sturdy.
Lux was walking back to the lab with Igor. “What would we need to do to make housing with a similar technique?” Igor asked.
“We’d have to do a lot before we did something like that,” Lux said. Off the top of my head - we’d need a site prep to make sure there were no sink holes or issues under the foundation or being in a floodplain. We’d have to add water and sewer rough in under the foundation and make sure there was good drainage. We’d need to then form our foundation. We’d use localized power supplies and have ventilation, moisture control, and electrical grounding in this area from what Prissy told me of the fierce lightning storms. People don’t want huts, they’d want windows, a view, a patio or balcony on multistory dwellings. They probably want real doors that beasts can’t knock down.”
Lux got the warning and saw drones positioning themselves and he saw the Courier take to the air. “We have two incoming assault vessels coming from the other American ship. They are flying erratically and are not coming directly toward us. They will be near us in six minutes.”
Lux turned to Igor. “Go back to your lab. I’m heading for Ore-1. Don’t fire unless they look like they are going to strike us with their ships or if they fire at us,” he ordered. He didn’t feel like this was an attack as much as a desperate act. He put a lot of lives at risk on a hunch, but he was usually right. “Anna. Warn everyone to go inside. I don’t want any of the kids hurt if I’m wrong.”
Major Felts contacted him. “Do you think this is the right move? I can take them right out of the air with the Hound.”
“Cover us, Major. I imagine our Americans just got a taste of Green’s biodiversity. They expected to fight and report back home if what their compatriots said is true,” Lux said. “The wildlife would have whittled them down quite a bit without our weapons. Animals here are not accustomed to fear man – yet. They will, but not yet.”
“Prissy. What do you think? You have them in sight yet?” Lux called knowing Prissy would be piloting the Courier.
“I’ve got them now. They are very erratic,” Prissy responded. “I’d say get a medical crew ready to take care of them. I hope it’s not a contagion but there’s something definitely not right about them. I’m paralleling one and the other is going off to the side a bit. I’m staying with this one.”
“Ore-IV in the air too,” Major Felts reported. “Which one you want me on?”
“Take the one to the west,” Lux said. “I’ll head back to pick up some medical personnel. We have a good surgical bay if needed. Courier, do you confirm.”
“Got it, Ore-I. I have ten Marines with Courier, one a combat medic,” Prissy said.
Lux took the Ore-1 back to the colony and put out a call for medical personnel and alerted remaining soldiers to threats from previously captured military. All the military and robots on base were put on alert. The medical personnel and extra soldiers were added to his bodyguards and soldiers already aboard. Jack Chen was piloting this time for him.
The first assault craft landed just shy of the building he and Igor had built on the outskirts. The Courier unloaded its Marines and returned to hover almost directly above the vessel at 100 meters.
The ramp came down and pairs of bedraggled soldiers came off the assault craft. They had bandaged men on stretchers between them. Hunnicutt had her soldiers examine the men and go into the assault craft to make sure this wasn’t some type of trick. The Ore-I landed nearby, and medical staff went out to triage the soldiers. Two of the arriving soldiers assumed positions with 6.8 mm M-5s, but they were near the edge of the cleared land and the colony Marines thought that wasn’t a bad idea on this planet.
One of the soldiers with the chest insignia of a lieutenant approached the Captain of the Mars Marines. “Sir. My name is Nathan Ross out of US Space Forces out of Peterson SFB. I am surrendering my forces to you as well as our sister ship that should be around here. We’re pretty torn up sir. Our commanding officers are dead, and our other ship has even more wounded.”
“We’ll take care of your people. You can have your two people stand down as we have drones overhead to protect us. You understand I can’t have your people armed even though your kinetic rifles wouldn’t affect us much. I’m Captain Xi of the Mars Marines,” replied the soldier.
Lieutenant Ross gave a short whistle and hand signs to the two American soldiers with M-5s. They looked up in the air and all around before reluctantly handing the rifles to the nearest Marine. “Where do you want us?” the lieutenant said. “We haven’t had a hot meal in a while.”
Lux got word that the other craft had roughly landed on the far side of the camp and took the Ore-I over to transport any wounded. He saw the Ore-IV next to the assault craft and wounded being transported off and searched. There was a second lieutenant in charge of this group – Lieutenant Mullins. They were all walking wounded though one appeared to have lost an arm, one a leg below the knee, and one lost his foot from his ankle down. Lux doubted this was a subterfuge to fight them. Lux directed them all to be put aboard the Ore-1 to transport to the colony hospital and cafeteria which was 800 meters away. The motley crew didn’t look like they’d make it that far.
◆◆◆
The Story of Ship Three
The surrendered soldiers were kept apart from the captured Space Force soldiers until they gathered requisite information from them, and they had been treated and debriefed.
Lieutenant Ross gave his debriefing, and it was videoed so he wouldn’t have to repeat it a zillion times. “We had orders to take over the northern half of this planet with the other two ships. I don’t know more than that, so we were surprised when we faced any resistance. We were told this was a vacant system we were going to share with the Russians. Anyway, we lost about fifty soldiers to explosive decompression and lost some of our maneuvering capability. We landed in what looked like a cleared plain in a shallow valley full of neck high grass. It looked beautiful, like you’d expect the western US must have looked like.”
He continued. “We were fine at first but didn’t have the skills or materials to repair the ship. We had lost anyone that would have known how to do that. We cut back the grass about fifty meters around the ship and had fires, but it was hard to keep that up because the trees were a good distance away and we sent patrols to gather firewood. That’s where we lost our first people. Two made it back from the first patrol of seven people. He had some small creature that latched on the to the back of his calf on his way back to the ship. We had to break its jaw to get it off, but his heart stopped way before that. We figured there was some neurotoxin in its saliva.”
“We kept getting attacked and we had to shoot these creatures multiple times before they stopped attacking. There were packs of wolf things. If we left any of the carcasses out there, it would draw ten times more predators. We couldn’t get out of the ship for a while. I’ll say this – our leaders were picked for their skills in space battles and strategy. We hadn’t had a death in a couple of weeks, and we got better at hunting. We had put metal stakes facing outward around the ship. We found a local bison/deer type creature and we killed a couple of them and had a big barbeque. Everyone was tired of MREs and freeze-dried foods we had with us. The leaders were sitting outside, and we had eaten our fill when a storm looked to be coming our way.”
“It was really cloudy all day, but it got dark real fast. Suddenly there were bolts of lightning that didn’t stop. It was fierce. One bolt killed the general and the other command officers. Several were just unconscious, so we tried to drag them in and more got struck. We lost about twenty. We were rescuing those injured when the stampede hit us. There was a stampede of those bison things and tiger things and wolf creatures and those nasty little weasel things. A few of us made it into the ship – it happened so fast. We only had about one hundred that weren’t killed. We had a surviving captain, but he was space force and definitely not an infantry officer. He wasn’t around long.”
“We got whittled down burying the dead. We couldn’t bury them deep enough. They’d be dug up the next night and draw more of those damn animals. We decided to leave the damaged ship and head this way once the captain was killed. We didn’t think we’d last much longer where we were and knew pretty much where you were located. We realized you’d treat us better than the environment. That’s pretty much where we’re at. We do have the surveillance camera video of some of the incidents,” Ross finished his statement.
“You’re safe now, Ross. We’re close to sending all the USSF soldiers back home...everybody that wants to go that is,” Lux said.
“What do you mean by that?” Ross asked.
“A few soldiers here want us to bring their families here to live. Immigrants are welcome. We just added 250 people – one hundred couples and their kids. Each one will be getting 500-acre plots of land and/or startup money for businesses. We have housing and food for you,” Lux said. “We’ll have to figure out our constitution and government, but everyone here will have a say in that – just like on Mars.”
