The Styx Strikers

by Thor Zollinger

  Jake could see the large buffalo lying in the grass on the ground. Now that he was close to it, he realized the Bants were a lot like an earth-type water buffalo, only larger and with two stout horns. He’d only seen a head at the ranch on the wall, one of Sven or Bjorn’s mounts. Jake was grinning ear to ear now. “Nice!” Jake felt more like one of the crew now, he had been worried he wouldn’t pull it off and would have had to go home empty handed, the city kid without any survival skills. Instead he was going home a triumphant hunter.

  Bjorn pulled the Ripsaw up and backed it towards the buffalo, following Svens directions. Sven broke out the davit on the back corner of the Ripsaw, while Bjorn unbuckled and got out. “Nice going, old bean! Your first trophy!”

  “Do we get to eat it?” Jake asked.

  “Yup.” Bjorn said, “You get to eat it too. We have to soak the meat for a week or two first, though. He’s been eating Wayfarer grasses and has lots of nasty tasting chemicals in him. Once we get all of that out of the meat, we’ll have a barbeque and you can eat him.”

  “Nice.” Jake beamed from ear to ear.

  “We’ve got to get him home first.” Sven added in. He had the davit, a short lifting beam with a winch on it, swung out and was lowering the cable and hook down to the ground. Sven jumped down and wrapped the cable around the back legs, then used the control pendant to raise the back of the buffalo off the ground while Bjorn pulled a net under the animal. They repeated the process for the front legs and pulled the net all the way under. Hooking the corners of the net in the hook, the guys were able to lift the animal up in the air with the davit and swing it over up against the rear of the Ripsaw. Bjorn got a couple of long straps out of a rear gear locker and strapped their cargo securely to the back of the vehicle using the cleats.

  Sweating from the exertion and climbing around in the hot sun, the guys took a last look at their handiwork and climbed back into the vehicle. “Hey, I could use a drink.” Jake stated proudly. “What have we got left in the cooler?”

  “I think there’s some lemonade left, and a couple of bottles of water in under the ice.” Sven dug around in the cooler which was on the floor behind his seat and fished out a couple of plastic bottles with Aunt Glory’s lemonade in it. He handed one to Bjorn and let Jake find his own bottle. Jake grabbed a granola bar out of the tray in over the ice along with a bottle of lemonade.

  “Ah, good stuff.” Bjorn said smacking his lips as he scanned the horizon. “Clouds are starting to roll in, we’d better get rolling before it starts to rain.” Putting his drink in a drink holder in the center glove box, he started the Ripsaw back up and started heading back the way they’d came through the tall pampas grass towards the main road. After collecting the trailer, the guys headed back down the dusty road towards the ranch.

  It’s a good day to be on Wayfarer, Jake mused.

  It had started to sprinkle on the way back to the ranch, but it launched into a torrential downpour as Bjorn rolled down the lane and back through the gate back onto the ranch. “6:30 right on schedule. As soon as the sun starts to drop the air cools off and all the water falls out.” Sven explained. “The humidity is really high this time of year. It will quit in another fifteen minutes or so.” Steam was rising off the pavement in front of the vehicle garage as the rain continued to fall. Sven pressed a different remote to open the door to the building so the guys could drive inside out of the rain.

  Ben, the Langer’s pilot, was inside the garage working on something over on the mechanic’s bench. He smiled as the guys came pouring out the top of the Ripsaw, eager to show him Jake’s trophy. “So, what’d you get? I can see you’ve got something strapped on the back there.” He walked slowly towards the Ripsaw while cleaning off a metal part in his hands with an oily rag.

  “Jake got his first Bant!” Sven yelled a bit too enthusiastically. “Dropped it with one shot at 350 meters!”

  “Nice! Congratulations, Jake.” he said offering his very greasy hand to Jake. Jake hesitated, and looked at him like he was nuts. Ben laughed and walked over to take a look at the Bant strapped on the back of the vehicle. “Looking good. I’ll have one of the guys get the Bant down and butcher the meat. You guys can head in, I’ll take care of things out here.”

  “Thanks Ben.” Bjorn led the guys towards the door. It was still raining heavily, so the boys made a mad dash across the driveway and crashed into the mud room at full tilt. There were benches in the mud room to sit on to take off muddy shoes and boots, which came in really handy. After doffing their shoes, the guys headed into the kitchen. They all started talking at once to Aunt Glory, Petunia, and Christina who were cutting up vegetables for the next meal.

  “Slow down, I can’t listen to all of you at once!” Aunt Glory exclaimed.

  Jake took over the conversation, “I got a huge Bant at 350 meters! It’s so huge, it almost doesn’t fit behind the Ripsaw! I’ll bet it weighs a couple of tons, we almost couldn’t lift it with the winch!”

  “Yah it’s a big one.” Sven added scratching his ear vigorously. “If he hangs it in his room, there won’t be any way to get in there and move around, he’ll have to crawl in.”

  “Very good Jake. It’s nice to see we have another hunter in the family. ”

  “I’ve been hunting tooooo…” Christina piped in. “I got fifteen flies this morning while you were gone. Frick was helping me.” Frick is the female serval, the one that doesn’t bite.

  “Yes, you’re such a big help.” Petunia patted her on the head softly. She winked at Jake, who added “Yup, you’re better than me. You got fifteen and I only got one.” Everyone knew except for Aunt Glory that Christina held the mud room door open and LET the flies in first. If Aunt Glory knew that she wouldn’t be so eager to pay her for swatting them. Christina had ran around the entire house all morning yelling out how many credits she had accumulated as she swatted the flies one at a time in the windows.

  Jake was happy. He’d bagged his first trophy and really liked living with his cousins. His smile sagged a bit as he recalled the mess his parents were in back home. He hoped they were all right, he needed to send a v-mail back home to tell them how he was doing. He needed to get some pictures of the Bant first. Jake headed off downstairs to get his zip phone so he could take a few pictures and send them along with his video mail message to Lahti. His Dad would be amazed at the size of the Bant he’d bagged!

  Chapter 5 “Fabrication and Mech-anization” –––––––––

  The next day Uncle Helmut took Jake with him on his way out to one of the out buildings, the one attached to the machinery garage where the mechs and farm equipment were housed. Unlike the garage next to it, this building was sealed up tight and air conditioned. Jake could hear the whir of lots of fans cooling sensitive electronics as they walked in. The door whumped solidly as it closed, and Jake could feel the pressure difference inside the building from the circulation fans and air filtration. It was actually cold inside, with absolutely no humidity at all. Outside was the opposite, hot and so humid his clothes almost stuck to him after a while. Everything inside was white. Uncle Helmut led him deeper into the building, into a control room full of rack mounted electronics. One wall was almost entirely large windows looking into a set of fabrication cells.

  “The first small cell is where electronic assemblies are fabricated. The machine takes a lot of exotic material feeds so it can fabricate all kinds of electronic parts right onto the circuit boards as they are printed. We get most of those feed materials and microchips from Lahti since the elements required are so hard to refine out of common sources. We have to import microchips too. As a result, we tend to use more analog circuits than digital ones to control all of our machinery. That also makes them more robust and more tolerant to vibration, damage, and emp attacks.”

  “The second cell is a bit larger, that cell handles fabrication of plastic and composite parts. We can handle up to a cubic meter in volume for each part. Items bigger than the
cell are constructed in sections and assembled from the smaller subsections.”

  “Yah, I’ve operated one of those before in my Dad’s shop” Jake chimed in. His eyes were pretty wide and his mouth was open as he gazed into the work cells from the control room.

  “The third cell is about the same size, but it handles fabrication of metal parts with fairly high precision. It won’t create a polished surface, but it comes close. We have to hand finish parts with smooth surfaces after the fact, which is what the technicians were doing on the work benches in the room we passed through to get in here. You may have noticed our two milling machines, the lathes, and finishing equipment along with sanders, grinders, and hand tools.”

  “The fourth cell handles the big stuff, metal parts for the farm machinery, repair parts for the mechs, that sort of thing. We have forklift access into that cell from the back for parts that are too heavy to lift. That’s the machine I want you to use to make mounts for the weapons I have on order for the farm mechs. The mounts won’t need to be high precision. If you need a more precise part, fabricate the piece you need on the other machine and press it into the larger part. Ask one of the technicians for help and he’ll help you with the tolerances so the pieces can be press fitted together. Bolt threads can be roughed in, but not shaft bearing surfaces, seals and the like. Those have to be handled with precision inserts.”

  Jake nodded in awe looking at the equipment he was going to get to operate, this stuff was way beyond anything he’d ever used before. The biggest thing he’d ever made was a rock hammer with his Dad and a few kitchen utensils. “What about electric motors and stuff like that?”

  “We get those from a manufacturer in Port Canaveral in town. He has an online catalog of sizes along with the engineering drawings so you can incorporate them into your designs. It takes a few weeks to get a motor from him, but it’s not like we have to order parts months in advance from Lahti and pay the shipping all the way out to Wayfarer. We try not to do that, but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. He carries wire too, all different sizes, since he has to stock it for his motors anyway. We have a selection of motors, parts and more complex assemblies in the warehouse.”

  Uncle Helmut stuck his head into the finishing shop and hollered “Jackson, come in here and show Jake how to get things started. Jake, I’m going to leave you here with Jackson. I’ve got to check on the boys up at the north end of the ranch, they’re clearing a section of brush and trees out, we’ve got an infestation of Rockers that keep invading our fields from there. Work with Jackson until lunch.”

  “Oh. Ok, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  Jake spent the rest of the morning learning how to operate the fabricators with Jackson, and even managed to print out a few parts before he was done. He made an odd plastic bracket for one of the harvesting machines, a precision fitting out of steel for the end of a hydraulic piston somebody needed, and spent some time digging around in the colonist machine database just to see what was in there. The collection of machines was mind boggling, he didn’t understand what most of the things in there were even for. Reading the machine description didn’t help either most of the time, there were just too many obscure items in the data base. Jake found if he started from the index and looked up something more understandable like mountain climbing gear he had better luck at finding something recognizable.

  Uncle Helmut had left the weapon ID numbers he had on order for the farm mechs on a slip of paper before he left. Jake managed to find those items pretty quickly. The database auto updated and inserted new items about once a month from data files sent from Lahti. It took Jake an hour to figure out how to pull up the farm construction mech on the computer and remove the generic tool attached to the 3D model. Once he got that figured out, he imported the new weapons into the model and spent some time learning how to move the darn things around and get them into position on the mech’s arm mount. After some coaching from Jackson, Jake also managed to figure out how to pull up a generic mount he could use as a base for a new weapon mount. This was going to be a lot harder than he expected. Luckily Jake was saved by the bell – Lunch time! Jake saved his work on the farm mech and headed out for lunch.

  After lunch with the family Jake headed out across the fields on foot with Bjorn and Sven. After about a hundred meters Jake realized his athletic shoes were NOT what he wanted on his feet, but it was too late. His shoes had picked up five centimeters of mud on the bottom and soft dry dirt had invaded the tongue of his shoes and was working it’s way down around his socks. Next time he’d wear boots like the other guys had on. He hadn’t even thought about it on the way out the door. At least he had long pants on so his legs weren’t getting beaten up by the plants he was trudging through. It took a while to walk all the way out to where the guys were clearing out the brush on the north end of the ranch. Jake could see the construction mech with big gripper attachments on the wrist mounts standing in the middle of the brush. They had removed the chainsaw and attached a second gripper in it’s place for this job.

  Picture Pack: Construction Mech

  “We’ve got about half of the trees and brush cleared, but it’ll take us a few more days to get all the big boulders out of the way and moved over onto the rock barrier over there.” Sven pointed at the Boulder wall on the north side of the ranch about forty meters away. The mech had really tore up the landscape, raw earth surrounded the work site and roots were sticking up out of the ground like dirty vines. “The scrub brush has a really nasty root system to get down deep to the water in the ground.”

  Bjorn was already climbing the ladder up into the open cockpit of the construction mech. Sven pointed up at Bjorn who was standing and donning a light jacket with embedded wires in the fabric, slipping on the gloves and attaching the cables from the gloves to the jack on the wrist of the jacket. “This mech isn’t a very advanced one, it doesn’t have a neuro-helmet for controlling it, it has a jacket and gloves instead. The sensors in the jacket can tell how you’re moving and the mech mimics your motions. A button on the floor has to be pressed to enable the body tracking to move the waist and arms. You lean forwards and backwards to move the mech body around, the legs are moved by the controller to keep the mech balanced at all times. You walk it forwards and backwards using the foot pedals just like the cockpit back at the house. It works great most of the time, but you do have to get used to it.”

  “That’s cool! Can I drive it?”

  “I suppose so, you did OK in the simulator the other night. Ask Bjorn after a while when he takes a break.”

  Jake noticed Frick and Frack were a short distance away, lounging in the grass watching the guys casually and cleaning their paws. Bjorn started up the mech, which made a low whine as the turbines spun up and the generator came up to full power. Bjorn enabled the motion tracking, flexed the arms and grippers like a boxer getting ready for a bout, then leaned forwards to crouch the mech and get a grip on the nearest scrub brush. Jake could hear the generator whine louder as the mech settled into a wide stance and began pulling, ripping the bush right out of the ground roots and all as it stood up. Bjorn tossed the bush onto the pile off to the side, stepped the mech forwards and leaned in to rip out another one.

  Jake and Sven took turns running the much smaller skid steer loader with a jaw bucket attached to grab and haul the bushes and roots over to a trailer similar to the one the Ripsaw had used a few days ago on their trip to the mine. The other guy stood by with a pistol, ready to pop whatever critters the mech unearthed. The work was hot and sweaty, but they were making a dent in the thick scraggly brush.

  “Holy cow! Look at that!” Jake yelled as about six big fat Rockers came bolting out from the dirt under the bush Bjorn had just pulled out of the ground. “I’ll bet those suckers weight 10 kilos a piece!” He managed to shoot one before the others disappeared into the big rocks. A few seconds later Frack bolted across the landscape through the grass, zigging and zagging crazily with his tail whipping left and r
ight. Every now and then he would stop cold, reverse direction and take off again in another wild sprint in the opposite direction. It took a minute or so of wild antics before he caught the large furry ball of a Rocker that had ran for it. When he finally caught the thing he went rolling across the ground in a cloud of dust. “He got one! Nice!”

  Frick had gotten up and trotted over to see what he’d caught, but Frack wasn’t sharing, at least not yet. Frack growled at her and carried the Rocker a bit further away to make his point. A few minutes later Frick bolted after her own Rocker and the wild scene was repeated. The cats knew just where to wait, out of the big rocks where the ground was flat and grassy between the worksite and the boulders of the ranch’s barrier wall. Sometimes the Rockers would stop and hiss at the cats, threatening with an open mouth and long root-crunching front teeth. Frick and Frack would stop a few feet away and tense, waiting for the Rocker to bolt again. They were having more fun chasing them down than anything else.

  Picture Pack: Frack chasing Rockers

  All heck would break loose every time Bjorn hit another nest with the mech. “That is so cool!” Jake exclaimed as he watched the cats running down the varmints. Work would stop momentarily as the guys watched the cats do their work, lining up their kills off to the side of the worksite. Jake was having a hard time hitting the running Rockers with the pistol Sven had handed him, but the cats were making up for it. “No more vegetables for you, you little monster!” Jake yelled after connecting with another Rocker. The Rockers had been doing quite a bit of damage to the vegetable field next to the scrub brush. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if the varmints would eat one cabbage all the way. They had a bad habit of taking a few bites from one, then moving on to another one, and so on. One Rocker could damage a lot of produce in one afternoon. A colony of them could destroy an entire field if you let them go for a month or two.