Bootstrap Colony by Chris Hechtl Read Free Book Online

ounce of light. He trudged to the motor home, sighing in
contentment as the lights came on automatically. He could hear the turbines
chuffing slightly in the light breeze, he now had more power, and better yet,
more power at night and during cloudy days, things were looking up.
     
    The next day he impatiently sent
the UAV out before he turned to his morning chores. The Rex family was still
stubbornly parked at the carcass, but the carcass was much smaller. He might
luck out with them abandoning it later in the day as the sun rose over the
horizon. If the Rex family waited too long the main herd would get too far away
from them after all.
    He had directed the robots to
clean the pens, now he replaced the gate with a more secure one, this one with
vertical slats only twelve centimeters apart. He had the robots refresh the
water and place empty crates inside on their sides, and then turned the dogs
out into the first pen. They sniffed around for a bit, wrinkling their noses at
the smell of the other animals. Tails were wagging and it didn't look like they
could get out so he fed them then quickly and then left the pen and went on to
the next chore.
    The sows grunted as he checked
things over, the water was topped off, and feed was okay. The robot assigned to
feeding and watering was only one pen ahead of him so he paused to check the
stats from the windmills, then the water turbines and solar efficiency logged.
He really needed to relocate many of the panels that were catching too much
shade soon. One hundred thirty nine cargo pods were arranged as he had planned,
and the spaces for the greenhouses had been plowed and leveled. The materials
for each of the greenhouses were stacked beside each plot. The habitat domes
were still packed, with the caves he decided he could do without them.
    He spent the day removing solar
panels from the roofs of the cargo pods, a tedious task that the robots could
not do without damaging them. They did transport them out to the solar field,
propping them up with rocks and running a cable out to them. Having the robots
run the lines made it much easier to make the connections. The afternoon check
with the UAV showed the Rex family up, but not far away from the kill. The
juvenile was rather impatient, being herded back to the pack by the rest of the
adults. Birds and more scavengers had settled on the remains of the kill, the
Rex’s were ignoring them, a clear sign they were about ready to move on.
     
    The next day he rushed through
the chores as the UAV flew to the Rex kill site. Seeing that they were finally
gone he grabbed a Bushmaster and headed out with the vehicles. He was cautious
near the kill site; there were a few scavengers roaming about, but no sign of
the Rex family. Moving on he arrived at the park. He had been worried about the
park, he had only three robots on security, and they had limited access to
power with only the thirty four cargo pods left. Most of what remained were on
flatbeds, which lacked the large solar panel roofs of the cargo pods. He was
pretty impatient hitching things up, accelerating a bit to get back to the base
and turned around.
    An hour later he had arrived at
the base, and set to work on a few chores while waiting on the arrival of the
tractors. The automated dairy machine was almost full; he would need to do
something with all that milk soon. He had the machinery to make dairy products,
butter, cream, yogurt, cheese, etc, but lacked the time to set them up and
figure out how to use them properly. He tapped the tank, filling a couple
plastic containers and then draining them into the troughs for the hogs.
    The spider silk milk was a
different story, that protein was not something he wanted to feed to animals.
Fortunately it had a way to go before the tanks were full, maybe another day or
two at the current rate of milking. He had to bump the priority up on setting
up the protein straining module, that protein was just too valuable to dump.
    The tractors