Chapter 440

The Prison Planet

An hour later, Morales shut the computer off and put it back on its shelf. Frustrated, he sat looking at the remnants of his cook fire as he realized the area was quickly cooling off with the night air.

Moments later, he used tinder to coax fire from the dying coals and added more wood. Standing with his back to the building blaze, he decided that now was as good a time as any to begin blocking off the cold that seeped through his log wall and door. He had a considerable pile of skins that he had accumulated over the last few months, but he wondered if he would have enough for the winter. Chances are I’ll need to double the skins across the wall and door when it gets really cold. If I have to block off the rest of the cave, I’ll need even more skins. Oh, well, time will tell.

Research, plus trial and error, had improved his tanning skills, but he knew he still had a long way to go to produce the truly soft skins the articles talked about. For now, he thought he would start with the buffalo hide for the wall, since it was thick and not nearly as supple as his later attempts at tanning. Supple wouldn’t make much difference while hanging on the wall.

He decided to start near the wall on the side opposite the door – which led to his first problem. Shit. I can’t cover the smoke hole up there by the ceiling, he thought, and my research didn’t turn up much about how to make a chimney with what I have to work with. Shit, what I really need is a giant rock fireplace, but the upper part would have to slope toward the smoke hole. I could probably do it with cement, but would mud and straw mixed have the strength I would need? It would take weeks to build, then just when I need it the most, it would probably come crashing down. Crap, I’ll worry about that for next winter – if I manage to live that long. For now, I’m going to work with what I have.

Since I’m just sticking with an open fire, what I would like to have is a hood like you have over a kitchen stove. With a bit of help from the fan, the hood would suck up the fire smoke and vent it outside. Back to that word that I hate so much – if. If I had some aluminum sheeting and a way to fasten it together, I could make an exhaust hood, well, minus the fan, of course, but ... I don’t have access to metal. All I have to make the hood with is wood, leather or rock, and there’s no way to support the rock above the fire. Same for wood without one hell of a lot of work. I could make it out of leather (he had experimented with a lye solution to remove the hair from some of the hides before tanning them), but I wonder how close to the fire I dare hang it. The fire will blaze up to a good height when I first put on big pieces of wood. But, somehow, I need to increase the airflow out that hole, he thought as he gazed at the smoke hole above the wall.

He could reach the ceiling in most of the area he lived in, but the section on the left side of the wall sloped up several feet higher. The box he had made wasn’t tall enough for him to do more than barely touch the hole, let alone allow him to reach partway through the channel as it worked its way beside the rock to come out above ground. The first project was the building of another strong box to sit on the box he already had. That took up the evening. Grumbling that he seemed to be spinning his wheels, he washed off a little and sacked out for the night.

The addition of the door certainly helped retain the warmth of the cave, but he still had to get up twice during the night to put more wood on the fire. Come morning, he slid the door back to realize quickly just how much adding the door had helped. As soon as the wolves hurried past, he closed the door to keep in the cave’s warmth. The day was clear and cold with an addition this morning – frost. The grass was white, and ice crystals from the frost sparkled in the early morning sunlight.

The wolves hurried to do their business, and Morales wasn’t far behind them. At least the wind isn’t blowing, he thought, but he certainly felt the cold on his bare ass.

The crisp air seemed to please Lobo and Lila, because they began playing as soon as they were done with their morning constitutional. Lila had learned to hop quite efficiently, and was having a ball chasing and tumbling around with Lobo, both of them mock growling ferociously – something Lobo seldom did for real, and only when something portended danger. Even then, the growls were barely more than rumbles deep within the huge animal.

While outside, Morales walked up the hill a little way to step onto the big, partially buried rock in order to check on the smoke hole. He didn’t want to make the hole any bigger up here for fear of animals attempting to come inside or increasing the amount of rain that went into it. None of that rain came inside because there was a small crack at the joining of the rock and the dirt wall. The water went down that crack and on out by the bottom of the rock, while the small tunnel turned back toward the cave. After lying on his belly, Morales cautiously worked a hand down the hole as it turned in the direction of the cave, quickly encountering a partial obstruction. Worried he would accidentally grab a snake, spider, scorpion or something else venomous, he, nevertheless, began to dig out several fist-sized rocks that had dammed up loose dirt and gravel he assumed had washed in during rains.

A few minutes later, he had the tunnel clear as far as he could reach. Maybe, I’ll be able to clean out the rest of the debris from below. If so, I should then have a better draft going to take the smoke away.

After picking up his weapons, he worked his way down from the giant rock before brushing loose dirt from his fatigues. Only then did it dawn on him that Lobo and Lila had stopped their play and were sitting near, obviously guarding him. “Thanks, Boy,” he said, leaning to hug the wolf. Lila whined and moved closer. “Well, now. Do you want a hug, too?” he asked, but she just looked at him. Without overthinking it, he hugged her. She was tense, but didn’t growl or otherwise show aggression, and he thought that she may have leaned a little into him.

Unconsciously smiling, he went back inside to feed the chickens and fix breakfast.

As he sat on a piece of firewood to watch the meat cook, his eyes drifted about the cave. Getting up, he took the light and walked farther into the cave. Away from the fire, the temperature quickly cooled down and the faint breeze from deeper within the cave was cooler still. Shit, I had hoped the cave would remain a constant temperature back here, but it looks like there is too much airflow for that. More firewood than I hoped I would need is on the agenda, and I might as well begin bringing in more of the small logs for a wall to cordon off the rest of the cave. Shit, more work. Oh, well, I knew with the draft coming through, there wasn’t much chance that the cave would remain warm throughout.

When he returned to his cooking, his eyes fell on the wolves as they lay side by side with the ballista another ten feet past them. “You know,” he said aloud to himself, “If I had a way to get that thing to the plains, I could probably take down one of the aurochs, not to mention a full-size buffalo. I have enough meat to get me through the winter – I think – but a couple of those giant hides would surely come in handy. Ah, shit. Wishful thinking,” he scolded himself, but went on anyway. “The ballista is heavy, and those wheels would just bog down in the mud, not to mention trying to push it over limbs, rocks, roots and all the other crap on the animal trail. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to make it happen,” but his mind went on worrying the subject.

Animals fed and breakfast over, he muscled the second box onto the first. After climbing up, he had room only to crouch, but this gave him the height he needed to reach deep into the smoke hole to clean it out the rest of the way. By the time he was done, he could feel much more air blowing from the cave and on out the smoke hole.

Back on the floor of the cave, he stood looking at the hole. “Dammit. I really need that hood to help direct the smoke. I can make something using small limbs and hide, but it would have to be so far above the fire that I wonder if it would even help. If I put it close, it would doubtlessly help take the smoke out, but it would catch fire. If I made a hood and positioned it well above the fire so there was no danger of it catching fire – say up near the top of the wall – it just might help direct the smoke toward the hole, though.”

He stood staring at the smoke hole for a while before making up his mind. “What the fuck? All I have is time.”

Throwing on his weapon belts again, he grabbed his hatchet. Lobo and Lila were both waiting at the door. When it was obvious that Morales was ready to go, Lobo pushed the door open and he and Lila trotted out the entrance passageway.

Morales chuckled. “Showing off for your girlfriend, huh?”

If Lobo heard, he gave no indication of it. A couple of hundred yards downstream, Morales found a stand of tall, supple bushes that were just the size he wanted. After cutting one of the reed-like bushes, he bent it to test its strength. This should do. Now to get some cut and the limbs stripped off, and we’ll see if I can construct something that looks a bit like a hood that will still connect with the smoke hole.

He had plenty of paracord, not to mention high-strength fishing line, but he had watched a video about cutting out rawhide strips – actually making one long one by starting at the outside of a piece of hide and cutting along the edge, continuing until the whole hide was one long rawhide strip. It had been tedious, but practice quickly improved his efficiency. From the final product, he could cut lengths to fit his needs. He knew that wet rawhide tended to get tighter as it dried. Always trying to save his irreplaceable supplies, he decided to use the rawhide to tie the framework together. If the “hood” failed, his only loss was a little time. Most of the smoke went out the hole without his help, anyway.

The thin reed-like poles were supple and easily bent. Starting with the longest one, he bent it in a big circle approximately six feet in diameter, overlapped the ends and tied them together with rawhide he had soaked in water. When he had six of the circles constructed, each succeeding loop smaller than the previous one, he laid them on the ground in descending order.

Standing the first loop up, he tied four thin poles ninety degrees to the ring, then added the other loops until he had the outline of something that favored a giant funnel. Using a leather punch, he made holes along the edge of the first hide, and with thin strips of rawhide, sewed/tied the hide to the first loop. That one done, he sewed the hides to the other loops as well. Eventually, he had hide attached to the wood loops to form an exhaust hood that gradually tapered to the approximate size of the vent opening that led outside. The end result was something that looked like a long, bent funnel.

With other thin poles lodged in holes he had bored into the log and cave walls, he braced the hood high above the fire area with the narrow end of the hood forced into the vent hole.

During the construction, and especially during the installation, Lobo and Lila had watched intently, both occasionally looking at him as if he had lost his mind. Now, he brought the heavy stones back to their original location and reformed his fire circle before restarting a fire.

“If this doesn’t work, I’ve just spent the morning doing nothing,” he told the wolves.

When the fire was burning well, he threw on more wood to get a roaring blaze going. “I might as well see if it’s going to catch the hood on fire,” he told Lobo.

Apparently, the hood was high enough to be clear of the fire, and things seemed to be working the way he anticipated. There was very little smoke in the cave, so he threw on some green wood to make more smoke. His smile widened into a grin when almost all the smoke went into the hood and on out of the vent hole. “Yes,” he said as he pumped his fist. “Now I won’t stifle myself every time I add wood to the fire.”

Ship’s Academy

The teams, along with Bill and Kathy, and Arlene and Ann, were all in the viewing area, most of the aviators with coffee or a soft drink in hand, the room now a lot more lively with positive comments than in previous days. The second team, White and Martin, had been, and continued to be, repeatedly congratulated on their accomplishment. Both tried to downplay their mission by saying that Arlene and Ann had gotten in two more glancing pulses than they had, but the other aviators just sluffed that off as modesty, saying they (White and Martin) had gone toe to toe with Arlene and Ann and lived through it.

After a time, the instructor stepped to the front of the class. When the silence was complete, he spoke, “Congratulations, aviators White and Martin. You have proven that you can, at least, approach the effectiveness of your instructors. But ... keep in mind that the Matthews team was ahead on points with two glancing strikes when I called the match. What would have happened as fatigue became part of the scenario remains to be seen. And ... when we go against the aliens, outnumbered at least three to one, there is an almost certainty that fatigue will become a factor – if you live long enough to experience it, that is.”

That put a damper on the festivities.

“However,” the instructor intoned after the groans had died down, “we will train for that, also.” After waiting for more groans to stop, he went on, “We now have one team that showed improvement, and a second team that showed much improvement. But now,” he said with a pause, “we’ll see if the second team was just a fluke – or not.” Then with his voice becoming authoritative, he ordered, “Third team. Prepare for combat.”

As the next team hurried for their interceptor, Ship spoke in Arlene’s mind, As I have mentioned previously, I have devoted considerable time in the last months to the study of human psychology. Admittedly, all I have is the knowledge I have gleaned from textbooks, case studies, videos and interactions with your family and associates, but with that in mind, I suggest that an invisible “barrier” has been breached. Now, the aviators know it is, at least, theoretically possible to best the two of you in combat.

And with a positive attitude and with what happened between us and team two, all will become a much greater threat when they go against us, Arlene finished for her.

From what I have learned, despite what you now think, you might not be pleased if one or more of the teams prove superior in mock combat. In addition, during the last six months – academy time – Worthington and Camp have put in many additional hours while the others slept, Ship warned.