Second Chances (43 page)

“I think the underground can keep for a while,” Gunny Hodges said. “This is more important now,” he said. “Getting it while it's still fresh and on their minds...”

“Right. What about me?” Sam asked.

“Go over the cartography information,” Mitch said. Sam nodded. Mitch felt something step on his foot then wrap around his ankle. He reached down to pet Achilles. The cat arched his shoulders, accepting the rub as his due. He looked up at the human but Mitch just shrugged. “Sorry bub, go find some other sucker to get a treat out of,” he said.

“He's fat enough already. No more table scraps,” Maggie called from two tables over. Mitch snorted. “I mean it!” she said, shaking a finger at him. He held up his hands in surrender.

He watched the cat bat a six-legged armadillo about for a moment, then go off to the kitchen. He snorted. Somehow he thought Janet would be an easier target. “I can show you where the programs are for cartography,” Mitch said.

“I remember,” Sam said, waving a dismissive hand. “I was using them to map the route to the Mountain Village the others were planning,” he said.

“Ah,” Mitch said, nodding. Travis, Hodges, and a few others of the refugees he'd taken in a few months ago still wanted to strike out on their own in the spring to a spot they'd found north of Copper Town. Base and the other communities were going to grubstake their start-up like Mitch had done with Iron Mike's Iron Village.

“Can you show me where the cross referencing tools are?” Travis asked. “We need to get the databases started then we can start compiling them.”

“Coming right up,” Mitch said as they headed to the offices.

------*------

Travis, Sam and the military group stayed up all night working on the intel dump and map. “You guys know we can do this all winter, right?” Mitch asked them wryly the next morning, saluting the SEAL with his cup of coffee. They had little coffee; the greenhouses were only producing so much. Anne had instituted rationing of the beverage since they'd taken on more mouths than planned. The same went for the various teas they had, including berry tea. It sucked, but he understood it.

Travis shrugged. “As the old saying goes, strike while the iron's hot. Or in this case, the intel,” he said, indicating the pile of interviews they had sifted through. Mitch nodded looking from the pile to an improvised board along the wall of Travis's office. He'd pinned up clusters of intel with maps, drawings of landmarks and other things. They'd printed different bits out. He frowned at that but then shrugged. The paper could always be recycled.

From the look of it, they had created a map from each of the descriptions and tried their best to add it to the map of the known area around base. By cross referencing the various interviews, they had identified some crossover and eliminated extras or added details missed in other interviews. A few landmarks seemed common between groups that too were also of note. They managed to get a rough number of who was in some of the groups as well.

Groups that had a language barrier had been a major issue. They had gotten precious little out of them. That was unfortunate but expected.

“We've got a long way to go,” Mitch sighed. “Northern hemisphere, Terran resettlement continent indeed.”

“What'd you say?” Gunny asked. Mitch turned to the Marine. “Northern...”

“Northern hemisphere, Terran resettlement continent. That's what the Memes call this continent.”

“Oh. So we're all on one continent, not on several?” The gunny asked. “Because from some of the interviews, at least two groups are on islands. Possibly more.”

“Or a peninsula,” Sam said, head back, eyes closed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Why don't you fellas take a break. Go eat breakfast. We've got plenty of eggs, an omelet or pancakes might go good right about now. Get your blood sugar up. Then catch some rest.”

“In other words we're chasing our own tails?” Travis asked, looking at Gunny and Akira. The Korean shrugged and tossed his tablet on the table in front of him. It tipped off so he caught it and then nudged it carefully back onto the table.

“Yeah, I'd say we're in need of some downtime. Let it percolate,” Gunny said with a nod. Travis wuffled a sigh then nodded as well.

------*------

If they expected a major shakeup, the aliens stepping in and helping out, things changing for the better overnight....they were sadly disappointed. The next morning as the furor died down they swung back into chores. Not without some chatter and over the shoulder looks, but things still needed to get done. Anne and Janet chased anyone caught looking about or gossiping too much back to work.

Janet had finally given in, if not gracefully, but at least given in to the inevitable as far as the kitchen duties were concerned. She still grumbled about it, but she did admit quietly to Anne and Sandra that having Jean Pier their resident French chef on hand as well as Jeana Chase their nutritionist helped with the cooking immensely.

“I thought I could handle it, but I got overwhelmed right off,” she said, shaking her head.

“Well, duh!” Cassie said, hip bumping her out of the way of the dishwasher so she could finish loading it. “There are almost two hundred people here! No one person can do all that cooking and cleaning!”

“Definitely,” Sandra said, nodding. She still preferred to eat her meals in the small kitchen nook, not in one of the great halls. “I'm glad I've got Cassie, Dora, and Tina. We've still got some injured recovering in the infirmary. A couple lost limbs and will be in rehab for a while,” she said, making a face.

“Oh that's awful,” Anne said, turning away. She'd seen a few of the people in passing, but hadn't realized they'd lost so much. “Can you do anything for them?”

“Well, Mitch has a ton of material on regrowing limbs and tissue. We're a ways away from that. I did try out the powdered ECM, that's extracellular matrix. It's the glue that holds our cells together,” she explained as Anne and Janet stared at her stupidly. “We've been doing trials in medicine for years now, mostly with burn victims or those who came back from the war with severe tissue loss. If you sprinkle some of it into an open wound and add some cultured stem cells from the patient you can accelerate healing and even reduce scaring.”

“Which is great,” Cassie said. “There is a lot in that database,” she said. “Did you see the stuff Professor Lane told us about? The ultrasonics?” Her mother nodded. “We should try that on our next bone injury patient,” she said.

“Going to volunteer?” Janet asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Not if I can help it,” Cassie muttered. She frowned thoughtfully. “Professor Lane pointed out the artificial limbs in the 3D library. I think we should look into that, Mom,” she said, looking at her mother.

“Good homework assignment for you,” her mother said with a half-smile.

“Gee, thanks,” Cassie muttered, finishing her task. She poured in a carefully measured scoop of dish soap and then closed and latched the door. A push of the start button and the machine was off and running. “Any idea on how long we'll have power for?” she asked, turning to help Janet load the next dishwasher.

“No clue,” Sandra said. Janet looked up in concern. Sandra shrugged. “We've got the wind turbines; the solar panels are all covered. The hydro will shut down once the river freezes up, but we have plenty of power stored in the super conductor batteries, plus the hydrogen generators. I'm not too worried about it, but I know the boys have some concern, what with all the factory work they want to do over the winter,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I think Mitch and Sam are going to go out after the storm breaks to try to dig some of the panels out. Maybe relocate a few to poles they had set up.”

“Good idea if they can handle the cold.”

“It's not too bad out now,” Janet said, looking out the window.

“Says the lady inside a warm kitchen,” Anne teased.

“True,” Janet laughed. “Come on, let's get this going or we'll be here all day,” she said. The others nodded and got back to work.

Anne went out to the great room and put her hands on her hips when she noticed people were still looking about and not getting to work.

“You know we're on a short timetable here folks! If they show they show! If they don't they don't. Either way, we've got to get this stuff done before we're neck deep in the lunch crowd! We'll let you know if they show up, so for now...get to work!” Anne said, waving a knot of people back to work. Slowly the group of onlookers dispersed to their chores.

------*------

The first series of storms a month prior had been a doozy, really socking it to them instead of the light dusting of snow they'd expected. A high front had moved in a few days ago followed by a low and another storm, this one a light one. Then another high front had pushed its way in warming things up again.

The sun wasn't quite warm enough to melt all the snow, but it had reduced a lot of the foot-deep snow to a couple of inches. They'd had a nice day or two of almost shirt sleeve weather outside, which had allowed Mitch, Lisa, Brian, Vance, and the rest of the crew to get busy with the last of the winterizing projects they'd put off.

But once more Mother Nature’s cheek was turning once again; it was getting bitterly cold out. They had finished the initial harvests weeks before and even run the food through the initial processing. Now with the warm spell waning Anne directed Brian and Sam to bring in truckloads of wheat for processing through the flour mill. “We're going to store this inside. There is no telling how we'll get to the silos when the storms hit, and I don't want to be caught without any bread or without power to run the mill,” Anne said to Mitch when he objected. He held up his hands and surrendered.

Hejira their botanist and greenhouse manager pulled another crew together to harvest her crops. Jeana and the other ladies organized groups of people to process the food and either freeze it, can it or bottle it for later.

Copper Town called in with a request for some of their canned goods. Mitch sent Angie with a plane load full, and the plane came back loaded with some copper ingots, bags of salt and a couple extra mouths to feed. Apparently, either Jack didn't think their services would be useful in the winter to come or they wanted out of the rustic Copper Town after hearing stories of Chamber's base as he called it. If they thought they'd just sit on their laurels and coast all winter they were sadly mistaken. Anne took them in arm and put them to work immediately as she quizzed them on their skill sets.

Mitch sent Paul with a truck convoy of canned food and other materials to Iron Mike before the winter closed the roads totally. He was fairly sure the trucks would be okay; they'd only had a couple dustings of snow so far. Most of it had only lingered in the shadowy pockets here and there. The mud was freezing over into a hard surface, so the trucks wouldn't get bogged down.

He sent Sam and his construction crew off to the salt flat to get what material he could. The salt was industrial grade, not really good for food, but it might come in handy if they needed to salt a road, path or airstrip. Of course, they'd have to redo the cement later if they did; the salt would eat into the cement tearing it up. It was still better than someone slipping and breaking their neck on the ice.

When Paul came back a day later he was bemused as he climbed out of the lead rig. “He's a stubborn SOB. He didn't want to take the load.”

“Mike? Are you serious?” Janet asked in disbelief. Paul nodded. “For heaven's sake, why?”

Paul shrugged. “Because we didn't negotiate first. Someone neglected to do that,” he said, giving Mitch and their communications leader Jolie a look. Jolie winced. Mitch shrugged. “He did insist on sending back some hides they hadn't fully cured and some raw iron,” Paul said.

“Good.”

“He also asked for his truck you promised him,” Paul said. Mitch frowned. He'd already sent one truck; Mike was pushing his luck. For a guy who had a hell of a time accepting charity, he was suddenly rather needy. Or at least about certain things he thought.

“Does he have the stones to pay for it?” Lisa demanded, as she rolled out from under the lead truck. She was careful to check the underside of all the vehicles after they went out. They'd torn up a couple times, and she didn't want or need something minor turning into something major. “I busted my knuckles and broke two nails. He's not getting the damn thing for free,” she growled. Mitch looked over to her as Brian pulled her to her feet. The girl shrugged not making eye contact. “I'm serious. We've only got so many you know,” she said defensively, “and so many parts.”

Brian hugged her as Paul smiled and looked away. She fended him off for a moment, so he eased up. She didn't push him totally away though. Brian smiled politely to the others. “She's right boss.” He said. Mitch noted Lisa's dirty hand slip into Brian's covertly. She squeezed his hand briefly. He squeezed back.

“They've got all winter to mine if it's underground,” Janet said thoughtfully. Mitch nodded.

“Once we have some supplies going, we'll set up trade. I know it's going to be barter for a long time.”

“Which is what I'm talking about,” the girl said doggedly. “We don't have the parts to spare to them. You can't just send them a truck. I know Mike; he'll...he'll beat it to death!” she said. “He'll be calling for parts all the time!”