Castaway Planet (26 page)

Chapter 41

Sakura pulled gingerly on the wooden frame.
Please,
please
let the oil have worked . . .

“Careful!” Melody said nervously. “If it’s stuck, you’ll pull the clay apart!”

“I
know
, Mel,” Sakura snapped back. Then she paused, took a breath. “I know. Sorry.”

“Both of you relax,” their father said sternly. “Melody, you can watch, but don’t critique people while they’re working. I’ve told you about that before.”

“But—” Sakura saw her father’s eyebrow rise, a warning sign that Melody obviously caught because she immediately stopped whatever protest she’d started. “Yes, Dad.”

“Good. And Sakura, I’m glad you caught yourself and apologized. But if you’re that tense, maybe I should do it.”

Sakura looked at the furnace—or the furnace-to-be, anyway, a semi-conical structure of clay formed around a greased wooden mold, and thought to herself just how much work had gone into it. Dragging the clay here, purifying it, working the right proportions of the different clays together to make the right kind for this furnace, then making the mold . . . “Let you do it? Dad, I’m kinda tempted, you know?”

“I know exactly what you mean; if
I
do it and something goes wrong, I get to take the blame, not you.”

“Yeah. All that clay, plus all the work on the forms, and the days waiting for it to dry . . .” She looked again, then shook her head. “Nope. I’m going to do it. This will work.”

That was a little more confidence than she really felt. She carefully avoided looking to the left, where the ruins of the first attempt lay collapsed. Instead, she glanced to the right, seeing Hitomi sitting on a rock a ways away, playing with her omni. Caroline, Mom, and Whips were away—hopefully almost back—getting as much of the bog iron as they could drag home. There was already a huge stack of charcoal under one of the shelter tarps. If they could finish the smelting furnace . . .

Okay, Try again. Stop being so hesitant!
She remembered advice like that in some of the books. On things like this, hesitating or going too slow could be about as bad as going too fast. She had to assume the mold pieces would come off, and pull as if they would.

Sakura lay back down on the ground, looking into the lower opening of the furnace. The key pieces were at the bottom; if she could remove those, the higher ones would be able to drop and separate, and they could be removed by reaching in—carefully—from the top. Once that was done, they’d build a small fire in it, keep it burning for a while, and slowly increase it until the whole furnace was completely dry. It wouldn’t
quite
be like firing the whole thing, but it would make it hard and strong enough for this purpose, especially at the base.

She reached in suddenly, decisively, and grasped the small handle that had been designed into the mold. Offering a small prayer to anything that might be listening, she gave a quick, authoritative pull.

The mold section resisted for a moment, then popped loose, so suddenly she almost banged her arm into the side of the furnace—which could have been disastrous; any impact with the not-yet-dry clay could easily break it. “Got it!”

“Excellent, honey! Can you get the one on the other side?”

“I hope so.” The second one was actually easier. She found that with the handle’s leverage she could do just a tiny bit of a twisting motion that broke the seal between the wooden mold and the clay packed around it. Now, if she could just dislodge the bottoms of the chimney mold pieces . . .

One dropped so suddenly it landed on her pinky. “
OW!
” she said, and rolled away, cradling the injured digit. “Ow, ow, ow,
OW!
”

“Are you okay?” Her father and Mel were instantly there, and Hitomi was watching from her rock with worried eyes.

“Think so . . .” she said, forcing herself to ignore the pain.

She could see her father studying his omni display, staring into apparently empty air.
That’s right, Mom gave him the codes so he could check our medical nanos.
After a moment, Akira relaxed. “Says it’s just a bruise. Nothing to worry about, Saki.”

“Okay.” She gritted her teeth and got up. “Well, they came loose easy enough. If I can get them out . . .”

It turned out to be pretty easy. The trickiest part was the bottom section of each mold piece, since that was the widest, but the design that Whips had finalized had taken that into account and there was enough room to remove them safely, if you were careful. Sakura was
very
careful.

“All out, Dad!”

“Fantastic!” They stood and admired the now-all-clay (with some of the grasslike, carbon-silicon hydroid-grasses woven in for support) furnace for a few moments.

Then Melody clapped her hands briskly, a gesture she had gotten from some book she’d read. “Right! Let’s get a fire started, then!”

Within a few minutes, a thread of smoke started to come from the chimney of the little furnace. “If this works—if it really works . . . we’ll have to make something bigger, something where we can get a lot of iron out,” Melody said. “This little thing won’t make much.”

“Several kilos, if what Caroline and Whips say is correct,” Akira said. “And that’s enough for a number of knives or other relatively small things. But you’re right, we’ll want to figure out a way to do more. There are other processes to make iron and steel, but a lot of them take more advanced technology.” He glanced down at his omni. “We’re lucky we have these, but unfortunately they don’t help much with the heavy work.”

“You can say that again!”

The familiar voice from above startled Sakura. Looking up, she saw her mother looking down, breathing heavily, with Caroline looking equally winded next to her. Whips hove into view slowly. “We have to . . . do all the heavy work,” Laura said with a smile.

“Mommy!” Hitomi bounced up, then realized that she couldn’t run straight to her mother because she was still up on the edge of the landing scar. That only delayed her a second, and then she started jogging towards the path that led to the top. Sakura followed her closely.

“Hello, honey. Akira, we’ve got as much of this as we could bring.”

“Any problems?”

“I’m dragging part of a problem,” Whips said, “but it’s a tasty part, I hope.”

By then, Sakura and Hitomi had reached the top. The draggable sleds were bent under the weight of the bog iron, and on Whips’ was a large piece of . . .

“A hillmouth?” Sakura said in surprise. That was the name they’d eventually given to the giant four-jawed creature that had nearly killed Whips. “One attacked you?”

“Tried to,” Whips said. “But I had plenty of warning this time, and tough as it is, your mom’s a crack shot with that pistol, and Caroline’s mean with that bow. It got about fifteen meters out of the water and dropped dead. Turns out it’s perfectly edible meat for humans or Bemmies, so we figured we could bring some back.”

Closer up, she could see it was actually several pieces, already partly seared from fire. “Started cooking it, I see.”

“Well, we killed it yesterday. It takes a while for things to go bad around here for some reason,” her mother said, “but no point in taking chances. We cut it up and did some cooking last night.”

“So how is it?” Akira asked, looking at the large meaty chunks with interest.

“Not bad at all. A bit tough, but I figure we could do roasts or something of that nature. Maybe a pot roast.”

“Mmm. Sounds great. And you managed to bring back a lot of ore.”

“Well, at roughly one-quarter iron, and with that furnace’s efficiency—or, to be accurate, lack thereof,” Caroline said, “we’ll want quite a lot of it to be sure we get a good deal of usable iron out of this operation.”

“True. Well, let’s get this down to the smelting area. You can see that we’ve started to harden the furnace.”

“So it stayed together this time?” Whips’ color pattern was relieved. “Wonderful. Just remember to keep the fire going.”

“Oh, I will,” Sakura said firmly.

“All right, you keep tending the fire while we get the cargo down,” her father said.

Hitomi, having given and received the much-needed hugs from her mother, skipped back down and sat on her chosen rock, her omni back on.

Sakura tended the fire carefully, making sure that it burned steadily, and slowly expanded it as time went on. That didn’t take all her attention, of course. She could take frequent breaks to check that Hitomi was still in sight and see if she was needed for anything else.

Lunch was rolled sandwiches Dad and Melody had put together before they’d left that morning; Hitomi was clearly engrossed in her game and concentrated on the empty-air display in between bites.
Wonder what’s got her so focused? I thought she’d finished the last adventure.
On the other hand, she might have missed some of the side adventures, or be playing something other than Jewelbug. Obsessive focusing was, of course, Hitomi’s main characteristic.

Another smell wafted through the landing scar valley: the smell of something cooking. She saw the others working on breaking the ore into smaller pieces, with either Mom or Dad occasionally breaking away to check on one of their pots, sitting over another fire. That must be the pot roast they mentioned. It smelled good.

Just watching the fire was kind of boring, but she could play some games of her own in the intervals. But she did still keep an eye on Hitomi, and finally she noticed that there were frown lines on the little girl’s forehead.

“Got a problem, Hitomi?” she asked, coming up to her smallest sister.

“Puzzle,” Hitomi answered shortly. “Gotta solve it.”

“Have you been working on one puzzle all this time?” She was surprised. Hitomi was good at solving the logical puzzles common in Jewelbug—figuring out sequences of switches to activate to open doors, color patterns for solving riddles, that sort of thing.

“Yes! I
have
to solve it! Rubine’s gonna
die
if I don’t!”

“Die?” That made no sense. She hadn’t designed any adventures that would kill any of the major characters, and she was astonished that Whips or Melody had.
Maybe one of the side adventures we discussed, for when she’s older?

“Can I see? Maybe I can help.”

Hitomi relinquished control of her omni reluctantly; she didn’t like being interrupted or failing to finish something on her own. The fact she was letting it go at all told Sakura how hard this challenge must be.

As soon as she saw the Jewelbug world come up, she was even more perplexed.
Where the heck did
this
cavern come from? That doesn’t look like any design that we . . .

She froze.

Then she paused the game, checked status.

Last update: 22 hours 57 minutes.

But they hadn’t done an update since Hitomi’s birthday, two months ago!

And then she understood, and was up, sprinting towards her parents, screaming as loudly as she could.

“Mom! Dad! We’re not alone!” She waved the omni as she came, and seeing their confusion, finished, “Hitomi got a satellite update from a Jewelbug server! A day ago!

“
Someone else is here!”