Bootstrap Colony (11 page)

Mitch ordered the robots to begin
laying out the forms to pour the back rooms, then work their way forward to the
door. He started them in the infirmary, having them do those areas then work
out to the garage. Tomorrow he would have them pour the bedroom areas, and then
work back to the kitchen and hall.

He checked periodically, but when
he realized he and Max were underfoot he called the dog to him and took off for
the truck. Max was reluctant to give up his playmate, but followed after the
second whistle with a woof. Max needed no prompting to jump into the truck.
Mitch sat on the seat, and then looked over to Max. “Ready I see?” Max was
pawing at the window, wanting to get his head out. He looked at the big paws
and sighed, noting the clods of mud dripping off. “I can’t take you anywhere
you dumb mutt,” Mitch sighed as he closed his door and lowered the windows.

A check of the perimeter found
three sections of fencing down. He would need to repair them, and soon. A
splatter covered CAT walked by, stepping with squishing sounds into the drying
muck. Max wasn’t happy about the robot, growling softly and jerking his head
back and forth. “Come on, it is just a robot,” Mitch said as he got out of the
truck.

“Danger! Hostile animal life form
detected!” the CAT said suddenly, making him turn.

“Max stay!” Mitch barked. He
turned to the CAT to correct it, but it wasn’t facing the truck any more, it
was facing the wood line beyond the fallen fence. He took a look, didn’t see
anything, but reached in and grabbed the Bushmaster rifle.

A raptor came out of the wood
line, doing a slight dance then stopping to caw at the robot. Instinctively he
shouldered the rifle and flicked the safety off. The Raptor cawed again, and
out of the wood line a second and then third animal joined it. He flipped the
safety on, then reached into the truck and pulled out a grenade. Pulling the
pin, he waited a second then tossed it at the raptors. “Wanna play?” He got
into the truck hastily as they moved. One nudged the grenade, and then picked
it up. He ducked his head pushed Max's head down as he tried to cover his ears
with his arms just as the flash bang went off.

Max’s snarls turned to a yipe and
squeal of dismay. The Raptors were snarling and coughing. He took a peek,
seeing Max on the floor boards. Out over the dash and hood the raptors were
gone. He snorted. The CAT lingered for a moment, and then returned to patrol.
He noted the incident in the log, and then ordered a GP team to come out and
repair the fence.

Back at base, he had the donks
begin assembling the loads for the crane to lift to the second level. He took a
look after lunch, checking the area he kept thinking of as a courtyard, and
then he went up to the cave openings and looked them over once again. There was
one on the third level, it was over twenty meters wide, but had a low ceiling.

The second was the opening for the
waterfall. Water cascaded down the cliffs, forming three waterfalls along the
way. One was high up, above the flat top of the base. It meanders a bit around
some of the rocks in a channel it had been digging out for eons, and then fell
into the second floor cavern. Erosion he thought. The water pooled there a bit,
but it had two channels of escape, one leading out the face in the spectacular
display, the other a small slit like channel that led to the open chamber he
called the Great Hall. This poured through the floor into the subbasement
levels.

By adding the hydro electric
turbines, he could quadruple his power budget, allowing him to expand, and more
importantly to power the electric fence. Based on the robotic survey, he pulled
up the waterfall plans and played with them to refine them. By adding the
intakes and channeling them properly, he could house all four of the turbines
right in the pool room.

The problem was he would need to
somehow get to the roof and redirect the waterfall flow for a couple weeks. He
surveyed the ceiling, pursing his lips in thought. Rock climbing was one of his
least favorite things to do, right up there with bungee jumping and
parachuting. A fear of heights would do that to you the thought wryly.

Within the cave there were three
ways to access the ceiling above. The first was the giant opening chamber for
the waterfalls. Second was the giant opening for the Great Hall. The last was a
tight chimney shaft going from an isolated cell in the second level up through
the third and daylight. Each of these openings was going to have to be covered,
or at least the openings leading to the chambers will have to be. For now he
was stuck.

The waterfall was moving too fast
to chance standing on the edge and pulling equipment in. The lips around were
slick, he eyed it warily. “No, definitely had to redirect the water," he
sighed.

A security alert had him running
down the chambers to the ladder. “I hope this is a false alarm.” He muttered as
he slides down the ladder, not even pausing to look down. His fear of heights
forgotten.

Fumbling he pulled out his Bluetooth
and flipped it on. “Report,” he called.

“Hostile red class predators
designated raptors detected near pasture two,” the robot intoned mechanically.

“SHIT!” He hollered, running through
the chambers, jumping over piping then into the waiting truck.

“KITT take me there,” he ordered,
and then reached for the Bushmaster and a grenade. He pocketed two of the
grenades, checked the clip then checked the safety. He flipped up the laptop
then asked for a feed.

The jerky feed of a running CAT
came up, then the screen splits into three panels. One had the view of the
first CAT, running to the scene, while the second had an aerial view of the
area from a UAV, and the third had an ED. The ED jerked as it fired, attacking
the raptors from long range.

“Flash bang. One hundred meters,”
Mitch immediately ordered.

“Error, enemy out of range,” the
robot replied.

“Damn, fire anyway, one hundred
meters,” he ordered.

“Affirmative,” the robot replied.
The robot's mortar chuffed a grenade which flashed momentarily blinding the
camera. The cattle were bawling in distress, running away from the predators
and sudden burst of light and sound.

“Stampede,” he muttered.
“Wonderfuckingful.” He checked the drone shot. The predators had scattered, two
were down, and a few were pulling back. The CAT arrived; its guns began to
puff, splattering one of the raptors, tearing it apart to dance in jerky
movements before falling. The other animals turn and break.

He arrived just as they retreat,
then warily he picked up the ED and followed. The raptors jumped through a
break in the fence, and then ran up the other side of the hillside gully to
disappear into the wood line. “Damn, definitely gotta fix that,” Mitch sighed.
“Report on animals.” He looked out at the tree line bail fully.

“Report error, please specify
particular designated species,” the AI responded. He sighed; patience was
something you needed in abundance when working with machines.

“Report cattle condition.”

“Accessing,” the AI replied.

He knew that the robots were
working, but with only the distributed net and skeleton Base AI it was going to
take a moment to access the radio tags on each of the animals and process the
data. “All animals accounted for. One moment. All are alive but in severe
distress. No animals outside of designated pasture.” Well that was a blessing
he mused, wondering how he had gotten so lucky.

Two GP robots arrived on the
scene; he deployed the ED to cover them. “A bit late fellas,” he muttered, and
then pitched in to get the fence back up.

“Animal distress reducing to
baseline levels,” the AI reported a half hour later. He nodded, huffing an
affirmative response as he moved the pole back up.

He checked anyway, noting some of
the cows still rolling their eyes in distress. They were pregnant, sides
bulging. He hoped this incident wouldn’t cause a miscarriage. They were the
meat cattle, he needed all of them.

On the way back he checked the
greenhouses, finding the first plants ready to go into the ground. “Great,
another thing to do,” he sighed, and then looked to the sky. “General order to
tractor two, plow..” He paused to check the map. “Farm vegetable plots 1a to
2d, and tree plots...” He checked the map, zoomed in and over to the right.
“Tree plots 1A and 1B.” The robotic tractor started with a mechanical grunt,
then pulled itself out of its mired parking spot and went to work.

“Report, two perimeter fence
breaches repaired,” he intoned for the log and then nodded. “Send assets to
third breach, and then check for additional breaches.”

“Affirmative,” the AI responded
as it digested that order. Mitch sighed, and then flipped the Bluetooth off.

His right calf was cramping up,
he could feel the growing pain as he tried to massage it. He had run a bit
quicker than he was used to there, obviously he was spending too much time with
his hands, and not enough exercising. He sighed, massaging the lump as KITT
pulled the truck into up to the mobile home.

During dinner he pulled up the
aerial map of the area, and then zoomed into the cliff side. There was the
openings, he pulled up a cartography program, then dumped the aerial data into
it. It spat out a 3D map of the area. He noted the narrow gully, it might suit
his needed. If he redirected the water flow with some metal plates and rocks,
he could buy time to get into the pool chamber and get his turbines up.

The next morning he managed to
breeze through the chores, taking the time to check over each of the cattle for
injuries, before he checked the perimeter. KITT bounced him around the
perimeter, he checked for breaches, but found none. Satisfied, he marked the
areas that had been breached for further reinforcing. The robots reported the
second set of chambers ready for the pour, surprising him. With everything
going on yesterday and his preoccupation with the cliff climb he had forgotten
them.

He checked, the floors looked
good, at least the ones he could see from the garage mouth. It would take a
week to fully set up, so he had to go around to get to the Great Hall chamber.
He looked up, not thrilled about scaling it, but knowing it was going to be
necessary.

The plan was to survey the top
today, and see if he could maybe hoist some gear up with the portable winch. He
grumbled a bit, getting to the second floor area was easy, he had the ladder up
to the mouth, but from there he would have to rock climb the face up twenty
meters to the opening, and then run lines down so he could get down, or draw
gear up.

It was really too bad he couldn’t
get the cherry picker in here, if he could get it high enough then getting to
the roof would be as simple as flipping the up switch. He sighed, and then
checked the gear over once more.

Once he climbed the ladder he
felt the fear recede. As long as he didn’t
dwell
on it, and most
importantly, didn’t
look down
, he should be okay. There was a narrow lip
out from the edge, he attached a safety pin into a crevice, then linked his
harness in and scooted out, facing the rock face. “Here went nothing,” he
muttered, then attached a second pin.

It took him two hours, but he
managed to get up the twenty meters. Down would be one scary ride though. He
looked down from the lip, and then felt an urgent need to pee and stepped back.
Vertigo made him a bit dizzy. Did he really climb that? He kept thinking to
himself. He turned to look out east, noted the distant field of robots, cargo
containers and vehicles. “Yup,” he sighed, then pulled out the Bluetooth and
unwraps the line. “ANDY two get me the first package.” The robot standing by in
the chamber moved to the rope as he dropped one end down. He attached his end
with rock clips in a zig zag, and then looped it around a nearby boulder.

He instructed the robot to attach
the winch, and then pulled it up. He pinned this to the ground with rock pins,
then lowered the winch. It had a limited battery, so he supplemented it by
using the line to pull up other loads.

In an hour he had several
packages up. He looked over the rocks. Just above the channel behind him there
was a cell of rocks, obviously cut out with erosion. A hose was dropped into
the rushing river, and then he turned the pump on. He took the drill and
thumbed it on. Water gushed around the bit.

It took a while, but he managed
to drill a half a dozen strategic holes into the cells. From the engineering
program he had run, these should hopefully be enough to blast the rocks down
into the river, redirecting it into the Great hall temporarily. Six more holes
were required to open the passage to the gully leading to the hall. He wired
both to go off simultaneously.

He tamped down the last hole with
clay the robot had sent up just as the sun began to wane. “Damn, no kaboom
today I guess,” he sighed wearily, wiping his sweaty brow. The temperature
outside had been climbing over the past several months; a sure sign summer was
rapidly approaching. He finished wiring the explosives with a radio detonator,
checked the circuits, then lowered his gear and zipped down the line. He
ordered the robots to clear the chamber of gear, and then went off to clean up.