Chapter 15: Futura's Growing Pains

~~ June - Weeks 22 & 23 ~~

By the start of the sixth week on the planet, the two main habitat domes were complete.

They had all of the necessary infrastructure installed. The construction crews had headed off to work on other projects. The scientists either had or were still moving in and were busy setting up their labs. Forty-six people now called Utopia home.

The western dome, which they had built first, had twenty-four dedicated double bedrooms with unsuits downstairs. In the central double story area, a large rec-meeting room split off into smaller personal lounging spaces, a smaller beverage lounge, and some storage areas. Several storage areas and labs were also located on the second floor.

The rest of the labs and offices with a hydroponics lab area were upstairs around the edges of the Dome. An open area gym was also included. You could look over the rail into the rec-room below. Storage, the replicator and recycler units and utility rooms were on both floors.

The front dome had twelve dedicated rooms. Half of which had been turned in four-man bunk rooms for over-nighters. The eastern dome contained an entertainment area, a huge kitchen and dining area, as well as many of the storerooms and system rooms.

The upstairs contained more offices, labs and storage. The original plan was for the whole floor to be hydroponics. The two outer quarters on the northern side of the downstairs had been walled off for later use. It was supposed to be an animal area.

There had been some arguments about not setting up the full hydroponics and animal areas in the dome. However, Robby, Tina, Magda and Dave had argued that if they couldn’t grow and/or breed, enough plants and animals in this valley, to feed a hundred people, they shouldn’t be called pioneers.

All the experiments they had conducted in the previous eight weeks had so far indicated that there was little in the environment, they couldn’t deal with. They also intended to keep the hydroponics dome on the ship fully stocked just in case.

They now had sixty to seventy people on the planet at any one time. The bunk rooms often had stayovers in them, and the different sexes didn’t argue about who slept where. A bed was a bed. If they had an issue, they didn’t stay.

The work crews were still healthy, if not more healthy from the sunlight and exercise. So, the new residents also elected to wear regular clothes or their ship jumpsuits. Sean, Philip and the Captain, however, still insisted on the decon-unit entrances to be active.

They didn’t wish to push their luck. Everyone had to complete the medical scan every night if they had left the domes during the day. Full suits were still worn to get on or off the transports, and they had to be fresh from the recycler before they left either the ship or the habitats.

Dr Von West and Nurse Grace Night were now in residence in Futura. They made sure everyone complied with quarantine rules as an out-break from unknown organisms on the surface would be their problem.

Gary, James and Jim and many other willing slaves, dug a foundation on the west side of the entrance to Pig Valley. Using a cement mixer that Anita, Little Bear and Isha made for them, they poured a cement floor. They then put the growing pile of Bear bricks to good use. They built Dave and Sandra a building to house their dairy, Vet surgery and living quarters.

The bottom floor was the dairy for the goats, and on the west side was the surgery and offices. A separate feed-storage shed attached the building to the volcanic wall. The second floor was split into two, three-room apartments. Sandra and Dave moved into one, and Sale White who helped with the animals and was the butcher moved into the other apartment.

They had built the structure between the two open lava tunnels. They cut better accesses into the caves in the second tunnel, from both ends. Inside an Abattoir and tannery were built. The cave had natural vents, and the rock pools made excellent baths for the Tannery.

A side tunnel led to a large pool that always stayed full. So, there was plenty of water for the Abattoir and the house. Mathew Merritt, one of the other plumbers and Minnie, set up a small recycler and replicator unit from spare and replicated parts after the parts were scanned into memory by the molecular scanner.

This unit was for the collection of solid wastes and effluents from the two establishments, so they could be kept clean and hygienic. They even set up a boiler that was used as sterilisation water for washing down. It also doubled as the hot water supply for the dairy and the apartments.

Bear’s pipes came in handy for making oil and gas casings for the well. Merritt, DT and Minnie had tapped the hydrocarbon gases. They ran the gasses through a special filter to separate them and stored them in pressurised storage tanks. They used the butane for the boiler and many other uses like a flame grill and gas torches.

They also tapped and plugged the oil seep. It could be pumped out at regular intervals to add to the recycler. Nothing was wasted as what wasn’t required was recycled and provided a lot of trace elements that boosted their recyclers ability to produce a wide range of goods.

Sandra had her weather station on top of the inner 80m high wall of Pig Valley that ran along the back to the plateau. The boys soon had a path cut and bricked up to the top with a rail, and they had cleared off an area for her. Sandra’s Lookout soon became popular with many other people.

The boys had to come back, and they ended up building a 20m square observation platform with rails and a rain shelter. To supply their other energy requirements, Sean and Abe had to install a heap of solar cells on her hill too. The wind generators they found in a container on the ship also found their way up onto Sandra’s Lookout.

Other people were busy building Roof-it-clad sheds on the more southern end of the plateau to store the machinery and equipment they had bought down for the construction, farming, and mining operations.

They’d had frequent rain, and the sea air would rust the machinery if it were left out. The engineers were building a large multi-functional workshop to keep everything fixed and for manufacturing and assembly of new machines. These buildings took priority off the apartment complex at this stage.

Over the weeks it took to build the domes, Kyle had been busy going back and forth to the ship. He, Bear, Ian, Isha, June and Anita had been working out how to build a bigger Replicator and Recycler for the planet while also working on their other projects. The crew had been busy making the parts using many of the smaller replication units on the ship as well.

They had Gary’s crew building a special building to their specs once they had completed Dave’s new house, so they could get the new big replicator installed on the planet. This would save a lot of trips for the transporters and the poor pilots who were booking up some serious Frequent-Flyer points.

Tony, Debora, Mark, Ram, Bindy, Ben and Magda had eight, 50-acre plots under cultivation. They had planted wheat, oats, sorghum, barley, soya beans, canola and maize. The eighth plot was split between some local variations of wheat and sweet corn.

The farm crew wanted to plant rice, but the valley was not partially suited for its growth unless they created paddies for them. It was easier to leave it as one of the main products still grown on the ship. The farm crew also had smaller plots of onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and beans and a ten-acre plot of Lucerne for the animals.

Other members of the horticultural team helped plant the orchard. It included varieties of oranges, lemons, apples, cherries, olives, different nut trees and table-grapes that Magda thought would grow well here on one of the slopes that drained well.

They had used the most mature trees from the ship. They were grafting new trees to replace them and increase the orchards. Their hybrid versions would fruit more often. They would plant more to replace them, which should be ready to produce once they headed back. Magda thought they would settle in fast and produce even better here in the rich volcanic soils.

They also had a general-purpose vegetable garden built in a greenhouse. It was a small oznglass dome building without all the infrastructure of a residential dome. They used it to grow tomatoes, lettuces, peas, capsicums, etcetera.

Some of the native critters had been in the paddocks, and the boys thought that fencing might become necessary to some extent, particularly on the forested sides. It was why they had decided on a greenhouse for the vegetables. It also stopped them seeding in the wild and kept the unwanted insects out.

Ian had found plans for constructing of a small, electric, combine-harvester, a baler and a hay-cutter in the survival archives. The mechanical crew on board the ship under Ed Smiths instructions had been manufacturing the parts not already in the system and building the machines, in between the other jobs they were involved in.

Now Ian’s Scanner on the ship was working, as the crew perfected one of each part or set of parts, they were scanning them in and the multiples required could be simply replicated, greatly reducing the workload.

They had laid a road to the Transporter Depot as the called it. The road also ran along the main valley on the dome side, then to the areas being mined in the western hills. The road cut across and out to the scrub and grasslands out through the Southern entrance into the valley for the scientists.

DT had to help with the access to the plains from the valley. Even though the lingers had small wheels for manual manipulation, they didn’t rely on them except for parking. A smooth road was desirable, as the lingers couldn’t maintain the heights required to get through the pass over the rougher terrain and steep inclines.

Roads were just as important they ever were.

One day, Aishah Dewa, Professor Ram Dindi and Mark Gutten as their assistant, had been on a little jaunt.

Aishah and Ram wanted to set up bug traps out to the little desert to examine the variation of bugs in the ecosystems in between. Ram had run Aishah’s bugs through his genetic scanner, and they had found some interesting anomalies, so they wanted to collect more. Thus, they planned to drop a trap approximately every 5 klicks.

They had taken a couple of small tents and equipment if it took more than a day to get to the desert and back. Things went fine for the first 40 klicks, while they traversed the valley, until they got to section where Gavin had indicated, was the best place to cross over to get out of the valley to the south-west.

The mountain range on the south to the eastern end of the valley climbed up several thousand metres and wasn’t an easy country to traverse. The lower mountain range on the western side was. The pass on Gavin’s map was near his second mine site.

The team followed the map and started climbing up through the pass. The hills rose up either side of them to 200m above the wide gully they were traversing. They soon found out that, while it was probably the best way to get out of the valley, Gavin hadn’t mentioned that, anything wider than one foot after the other, was a problem.

The twisting creek bed got them 5 klicks into the pass, up and over the smaller foothills and up to about a klick above sea level. However, when they attempted the last part of the rise, the serious of small cliffs and large boulders ended up being too much for the poor linger.

If they hadn’t been towing a platform, they might have made it over the pass, but the linger was seriously hampered. A loaded down platform wasn’t designed to be lifted any more than 2m off the ground with the local gravity.

The fact that Kyle still hadn’t fixed the network interference issues that plagued the minders, also worked against them. The small detail that the hills were full of iron also created reception problems. They couldn’t call for help, all they got was static.

Mark had gotten the platform stuck. He had tried to go around a series of boulders and jammed the platform between them. Then they couldn’t get the platform unhitched from the linger. Because they couldn’t get the lingers nose low enough, and the platform was jammed at a bad angle, and the hook couldn’t release properly. They were in a right pickle.