Gateways by Aer-ki Jyr (i like reading TXT) 📗

Trevor echoed, having been their unofficial group leader ever since they’d reached adulthood. “We’re also going to need firewood…lots of it…to charge the machinery and keep us warm.”

“Let’s build cabins out of wood,” Saera suggested. “I don’t want to wait until we get synthetic materials.”

“Are there any woodcraft instructions in there?”

Kaen searched for woodcraft, pulling up a single entry that read ‘Figure it out.’

“No,” he said in an annoyed tone. “It’s deliberately omitted so we have to experiment.”

“Saera, you’re on cabin building,” Trevor decided. “Mikel, you’ve got scouting. Darren, we need rock for the sifter. Ores preferably.”

He cringed. “You mean we need to climb up to the mountaintops and collect loose fragments?”

“Unless you can find them down here, or want to hand dig down to the bedrock.”

“Mountains it is,” he said with a fake smile.

“We don’t have water for a year,” Ainie pointed out. “We need a filter, or to use the sifter.”

Trevor cringed. “What’s wrong with melting snow?”

“It tastes weirds,” she said pithily.

“Not pure then,” someone else mumbled.

“Never had to make our own water,” Trevor said out loud what everyone else was thinking. “Alright, we take these things as we find them. There’s no regenerator either, so if we get hurt we have to heal the slow way, so don’t take any extra risks. Charge the sifter in the fire, then run some snow through it and see what’s in it. If it’s harmless we drink snow. If not, we gotta find a way to get pure water. I don’t want us to be one of the ‘don’t dos’ future Furyans read about. Greg said the other groups made it, but they didn’t do all that well. Let’s see if we can do better, and that begins with a good start. Ainie, you’ve got water duty. Chad, we need restrooms of some sort.”

The green haired Furyan frowned. “It is going to pile up with 100 of us, isn’t it?”

“Yeah it is, but we’ve got a few days to figure it out. We can make due with a lot of stuff now, but we need plans and to start chipping away at them.”

“And better clothes,” Leon suggested. “Bigger backpacks, at least, if we’re going to be carrying rocks.”

“Add that to the list. Kaen, start making a list.”

On and on it went that night, with the Greonis getting a lot of preplanning done before finally going to their individual tents, with some pairing up to share body heat as their bonfires burnt out before morning. They restarted them, gathering up all the loose sticks they could find before figuring out how to topple the dead trees nearby. They established a separate burn pit, digging down into the dirt to help reflect some more heat back on the center where they put the three assembled pieces of equipment, getting some charge in the other two despite not having anything to use in them yet.

The first few weeks were rough, but they had a mission and worked at it in groups, eating their fill of the rations that they knew were not unlimited as they decided to work hard early to get ahead of the other test groups despite the urge to kick back and relax in a way they’d never had a chance to do before.

Very little training occurred, aside from some running to keep their fitness. They wanted to use most of their calories working, and by the end of two months they had enough crude cabins to hold everyone, with fireplaces in them a month after that and a 7-man team working on collecting firework every day to fill their growing needs.

They used the sifter mostly for water, because there was something in the air called a Ti’ko’ma that was absorbed into the snow. Apparently it came out of thermal vents from the warm planetary interior, so there was another way to get heat out there, though it might not be in their zone. Regardless, if they drank the Ti’ko’ma as well as breathed it in, it could become a long term problem, so they decided to spent the thermal energy to filter it out rather than counting on their natural healing abilities to deal with the light damage it could cause.

Better safe than sorry was the idea, though Furyan biology was far more resilient than other races. And in that regard, there were a few out there. Small ones that burrowed under the snow and into the ground, or flew through the air. Nothing big was found, and it took some time but eventually the avians were tracked to certain trees that were producing berries, some of which were collected and analyzed…but they weren’t worth the effort nutritionally, not for the mass of food they needed, and they didn’t want the avians to starve by taking them either, for it looked to be their only food source in the area.

But they could fly over the shield. The scouts found it, and found it to be opaque so they couldn’t see what was on the other side, but the avians were flying over it, so maybe there was different food sources elsewhere. No nests were found yet, and one Furyan was assigned to figuring out these mysteries every month as sort of a rest and free time, but the more they knew about their zone the better, and everyone else was constantly busy with manual labor.

Darren was in charge of the teams gathering rocks, and they were getting better at picking them by eye so they didn’t waste sifter energy on mostly useless ones. In the database was the chemical recipes of many building materials, but most had at least 20 different types of molecules in them, so Darren had a lot of hunting to do, and the more he could find the less would have to be atomically reassembled in the alchemy pod. So they