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CHAPTER 9

Jason leaned back in his camp chair and pulled his hat down to shade his eyes. He’d had the conex extrude a cover against the sun but the light was bright off the sand. He was definitely not taking a nap. Too much to do. But sleep called. It had been a long morning, eight hours already given the time zone change. He was . . . ship-lagged? Whatever.

So, he considered the problem of the crocs versus collecting the shrimp that were starting to run. The run should continue for at least a few weeks. The best time to collect tended to be at night on a full moon anyway. He had time to set the conditions to harvest.

There was no simple answer to the problem of the crocs. Crocodilians were a feature of any tropical or subtropical freshwater or brackish zone. They’d need to be slowly weeded out. But the catch had to happen at the same time.

His original plan was to make a boat using one of the tractors as a motor then use a small net catch system common in inshore areas in the Gulf of Mexico to collect the shrimp. It was simple, effective and with a strong shrimp run he’d planned on filling the conexes in no more than a week.

But crocs tended to attack boats.

He could have the tractors fly over the water. Collect the shrimp in the net and bring it back to land one net at a time for loading. They’d have to be low so the crocs might just chomp them to see if they were edible. Not. They’d probably survive a croc attack. They were much more robust than the drones.

He abruptly got to his feet, walked through the camp conex to the riverside, tossed a length of flexmet up and climbed the conex closest to the main river. Then he stood contemplating the river with his hands on his hips.

He couldn’t deny the area to crocs with the flexmet. He didn’t have enough.

“Jewel, note: Need lots more flexmet next time,” Jason said. “Two metric tons would be about right. Also, thirty or forty drones. And another Alfred.”

“Noted,” Jewel said.

“How’s Herman doing with fuel?” Jason asked.

“Less than five percent used,” Jewel replied.

He functionally had part of the area denied to the crocs. The protective fence stopped them well enough. Stopped them by collecting them, admittedly.

“How many coffins do we have loaded already?” Jason asked.

“Fifty-two,” Jewel said.

“Jesus,” Jason replied. “Those crocs just keep coming, don’t they?”

Fifty-two coffins, a container and a bit, a container and a third more or less, was not enough to call for pickup. They had loans on the equipment, but it took cash money, capital from investors, to pay for the ship sorties. And while it was a fixed rate for colony drops, the rest of it was “what the market would bear.” The ship market was hot. This drop had cost three thousand credits plus two cases of fresh food. Three thousand credits, with everyone only starting with two thousand, had taken quite a few small investors. They had another four thousand in capital and that was it.

There were enough shrimp in the water already that they were jumping. He didn’t recognize the species but shrimp was shrimp. People would eat it.

The fish in the area would rapidly get gorged on shrimp. That was the point of schools and runs. By concentrating in groups, schools, herds, flocks, whatever, the predators gorged to the point they couldn’t eat anymore. Individuals might be eaten, but the species as a whole survived. Salmon were another great example.

Salmon . . . 

He looked over at the slaughter area. The latest of the crocs was just being loaded into more containers. There were more shrimp jumping in the embayment. Shrimp were attracted to dead things, too.

He turned and looked at the markers for the warning net and an idea started to form.

“Okay,” he said, pulling out his phone and opening it up into a pad. The sunlight made it hard to see so he extended a sunshade. “We’re going to start by adjusting the warning net. Have Alfred grab fifty kilos of flex, move the downstream landside anchor fifty more meters downstream. Then move the downstream anchor in the river out to a hundred . . . ”

He sketched out a wide shallow V on the warning net, expanding it all along the riverside.

“Then bring back a tube of netting towards the bar,” he continued, sketching it in. “Keep it the current wide mesh. But. At three points on the tube, put in one-way trap points similar to a lobster trap. They should be able to open out and flex. But make them so they contract to thirty percent of the width of the tube absent pressure.”

“How wide of a tube?” Jewel asked. “Are you talking about something like a fish trap?”

“Yes,” Jason said. “Exactly. We want the shrimp to be concentrated into a small containment area near the shore. Then we’ll use the flexmet to bring them in and load them into cases. For right now make the tube vertical from bottom of the river to the surface and about a meter and a half wide. Circular pool at the end that’s covered. Do that at current mesh then we’ll see if we have enough flexmet to do a shrimp-proof mesh. If not, we’ll reduce to what we have. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

* * *

There was enough flex to make the large trap, with fine mesh netting, and about fifty kilos left over.

He’d added having Herman dig out a small bay for the final catch area along with a few more refinements. After too many of the shrimp were getting loose, he’d put in a constriction before the catch point. And it was working. Shrimp, and fish, were starting to concentrate in the trap. With the fine mesh cover they weren’t escaping.

While the trap was being set, he’d had Herman rearrange all of the coffins and cases. All the coffins were now stacked on the landside, ready to be filled with large cargo. The conexes contained only cases and the conex closest to the trap was open on the riverside. The flexmet from the sides extended out into the water and under the trap.

He’d taken the chance of wading into the water, crocs and all, to examine the trap close up. By reposting the drone controlling the warning net, he’d figured out that it could open or constrict the throats on the trap. When there was pressure coming into the trap it would open it up and let shrimp through. When the flow reduced, it would constrict the throat to keep them in the trap.

“That’s beautiful,” Jason said, standing in the water by the bulging net. He pushed on the net and there were enough shrimp in it that it took force to make a dent. “Okay, now to get it loaded into cases.”

He connected to the spare flexmet and had it form into a conveyor belt of open compartments half the size of a case. He then opened up the shore end of the trap and had it dump a load of shrimp into the conveyor. From there it was taken up to an open case on the ground by the nearest conex.

Shrimp were dumped into the case. There was a small catfish in the case as well. Jason picked it out, tossed it on the sand and closed the case.

The shrimp, still alive, were now in stasis. The case wasn’t full but it would be.

“That works well,” Jewel said.

“Yes,” Jason said. “It will work. The problem is . . . ”

He looked around at the conexes. They were full of only cases now, but . . . 

“We need a continuous flow,” Jason said. “The shrimp need to flow into the cases then the cases into the conexes. But. We need to do that without moving the conexes if possible. And I’m missing how to do that.”

“Not a problem,” Jewel said. “Like how to move the conexes around, that’s a straightforward problem for an AI. Like this.”

The two conexes on the riverside opened up and moved all of their cases into the perimeter in stacks.

“Now,” Jewel said, sliding a set of three cases over from the conex on the downstream side. “We load these and slide them into conex seven through conex eight. When seven is full, nine will be empty. We then shift all the containers by one.” A brief pause. “Eventually we’ll have eleven conexes full. That’s called balling the jack, right?”

“That . . . should work,” Jason said.

“Do we sort for the fish?” Jewel asked.

“No,” Jason said. “There doesn’t look to be much bycatch. It’s going to be mostly shrimp. We’ll worry about bycatch later if it’s a big issue. People pretty much want any fresh food.”

“Then if you’ll step out of the way . . . ” Jewel said tactfully.

“Make it so,” Jason said, stepping back. Back was in the direction of the river, which was still nervous making, so he climbed up on the conex designated eight.

The shrimp, with some fish, flowed up and into the cases, the cases then disappearing under his feet, until the final catch net was empty.

“What now?” Jewel asked.

“Load when the net is seventy percent full or more,” Jason said. “We’ll have times when lots come in, times when not many come in. If the run gets ahead of the loading, use the remaining spare flexmet to expand the final net. Feel free to constrict the net to concentrate the shrimp but don’t crush them. And on the subject of bycatch. Set a case aside for fish. Pull out a few bala a day if you spot any. They’ll be hard to catch with the run on and they were tasty.”

“I’ll need to post a drone to do that,” Jewel said.

“Make it so,” Jason said. “And pull out anything else that is reputed to have good taste. Not catfish. Never gotten a taste for it. No carp, either. Too many bones. Not too many per day. Occasionally post the drone rather than full time. Just enough to eat, not keep.”

“No catfish or carp, aye,” Jewel said. “Enough to eat, not keep, aye.”

“And I once again have nothing to do,” Jason said.

“Go take a nap,” Jewel replied. “We’ve got this.”

“That . . . is not a bad idea,” Jason said.

* * *

Instead, he’d pulled his camp chair, the flora samples and some guns up onto the conex, set up a sunshade and settled in to watch. Occasionally he’d take a shot at the vultures just to keep them on their toes and to scare away the various critters that didn’t like gunshots.

After a while he started going through his contacts list and after a bit of thought called Sheila, his nearly unknown niece and the only family he had on the station.

“Hello?”

He’d met his niece exactly twice. Once when she was two at the funeral for his father and the second time when she was six at the funeral for his mother. They weren’t exactly close.

“Hi,” Jason said awkwardly. “I’m . . . your uncle Jason . . . ?”

“Carter said,” Sheila replied, looking puzzled. Whatever her current age, she looked twenty, meaning she was older. Brown hair and Steve’s blue eyes.

“Since . . . ” Jason said and paused again. “This is awkward. Families broke up over . . . stuff back on Earth. We’ve never really known each other. Just contacting you to say if you or your family need any help, you’ve got an uncle. Just saying.”

“That’s . . . thank you?” Sheila said, smiling quizzically. “I appreciate that. It’s . . . Dad and I had sort of gotten estranged. Same with Mom. Just . . . that stuff. I thought about contacting you on Earth ’cause Dad said one time you were . . . ”

“Gay?” Jason asked. “Oh, no, that would have been great! Steve would have been so proud,” he added, affecting a lisp and wiggling his wrist.

“Oh, my God,” Sheila said, chuckling. “No wonder you two didn’t get along. I sort of went . . . a bit bi when I was in college . . . ”

“One semester lesbian?” Jason asked.

“Yeah . . . ?” Sheila said, quirking an eyebrow.

“You’ve never heard the song,” Jason said.

“Song?”

“There’s a satirical song, ‘She’s a One Semester Lesbian.’ Look it up.”

“Yeah,” Sheila said, grinning. “That was pretty much the deal.”

“And your mom and dad were ecstatic, weren’t they?”

“So thrilled,” Sheila said. “I think it was the only time that I met expectations.”

“Steve was never the most . . . accepting type,” Jason said. “He swore up and down he was very open and understanding . . . ”

“As long as you did exactly what he expected you to do and nothing else?” Sheila finished.

“That, yeah,” Jason said, nodding. “Your grandfather was the same way, if it helps. The difference was that Dad, your granddad, made Archie Bunker seem politically correct . . . ”

“Who?” Sheila asked.

“Generation gap,” Jason said. “He made Donald Spade seem politically correct.”

“There is nothing wrong with Donald Spade,” Sheila said, frowning. “He’s just a straight talker!”

“I wasn’t saying there was,” Jason said calmly. “We’re on the same side, there. It’s just your grandfather was an unrepentant John Bircher. You’ll need to look that one up, too. Your dad, believe it or not, was a rebel. He was rebelling against the old man. Steve and Kevin both. They just swung waaay left in reaction to your grandfather who was waaay right. More to the right than anyone you’ve met or even read about today.”

“So, what about you?” Sheila asked.

“Me?” Jason said, shrugging. “I think I was just trying to live up to Dad’s standards and never came close. Don’t go to church enough. Don’t work hard enough. Never succeeded financially like Kevin and Steve. The last time I met your grandfather, when he was in hospice, he called me a Two Dollar Man. That’s like a day laborer. He knew he was dying and he still couldn’t bring himself to say something nice. Think Steve is rigid in his thinking and critical? He learned it from our old man.”

“That explains some things,” Sheila said, frowning again. “I mean you’re in this system but I was sort of wondering about the Spade comment. We’re total MUSA.”

“The last President I actually liked was Reagan,” Jason said, shrugging. “If we’ve got to get into politics. I liked Spade, voted for him, would vote for him again. Was surprised at his policies. He’d been a Democrat for forever. But I actually prefer Dewalt. He’s still a fighter but he’s not as off-the-cuff. He’s smoother and there’s a value to that. The difference is minor.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Sheila said cautiously.

“Niece,” Jason said carefully, “I was fighting these fights before you were born. Fighting them with your dad and your other uncle before you were born. I’ve been fighting them the whole time. The MUSA movement isn’t anything new. It’s the same basic philosophies and many of the same people as the Goldwater-Reagan Movement and the Contract For America movement and the Tea Party. Those were when I was the most involved. By the time MUSA came along, I figured it was up to, well, people like you. The next generation. So don’t judge someone who’s been in the trenches for years when you just arrived. Okay? You’re replacements for the wounded and dead.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “I was part of the Tea Party movement. That’s when Dad . . . ”

“Yeah,” Jason said, nodding sadly. “Just a tip from someone who looks your age and isn’t? Say ‘I love you’ to anyone you’ll regret not saying it to if something goes wrong. No matter how angry you are with them. Even without the Transfer . . . You never know when something’s going to happen. Back on Earth you could get hit by a bus. Your dad is not nearly as hard, cold and bitter as your grandfather. He’s somewhere out there in the galaxy and at some point, if he hasn’t hit that point already, he’s going to regret not saying ‘I love you’ to his daughter.”

“You don’t know him very well, then,” Sheila said. “I doubt he’s ever going to regret cutting me out.”

“We ever make contact, bet you a credit,” Jason said. “Of course, that assumes . . . he’s willing to admit he was . . . potentially slightly . . . innn error?”

Jason changed his voice ever so slightly to become more staccato.

“Heh,” Sheila said, grinning. “You have met my father.”

“Watch The Great Santini,” Jason said. “It’s available from the AIs. Take that guy, wind him even tighter and you’ve met your grandfather. He never made an error in his life. Ever. Just ask him.”

“Sounds familiar,” Sheila said. “So, complete change of subject. Are you on the planet?”

“I am,” Jason said, swinging the phone around for a view. “Doing some commercial fishing.”

“Oh, my God,” Sheila said, shaking her head. “Are you insane? Have you seen any of the bears?”

“Better,” Jason said. “Jewel, bring up the video of my first kill down here.”

“Aaaah!” Sheila screamed. “Is that for real? Wait, I gotta put this up on the main screen! Reg! Look at this!”

The view changed to the interior of a compartment with Sheila on a colorful couch. The general look was “country comfortable.”

Reg also looked twentyish, brown hair and eyes with a rugged build that indicated either weightlifting or some sort of physical job. Jason had no recollection of exactly when Sheila had been married, he hadn’t been invited to the wedding and was unsure of how old her husband was. Or even if “Reg” was her first husband. Or if they were married.

There were minefields here besides Steve.

“Hi . . . ” Reg said, quirking an eyebrow.

“Uh . . . Jason, this is Reg, Reg, Jason. Jason’s my uncle. Dad’s brother.”

“Oh?” Reg said, carefully.

“I’m the evil blackhearted conservative of the generation,” Jason said. “Baby-killing soldier, murderer of children through my support of the right to keep and bear arms. Homophobe, racist . . . we never got around to transphobe, Steve and I had stopped talking long before then.”

“Okay,” Reg said, sticking two thumbs up. “One of us, then.”

“Been there, done that,” Jason said. “Got multiple T-shirts.”

“Seriously,” Sheila said. “That’s real?”

“Very,” Jason said. “Came down to do some low-rent commercial fishing. And that monster showed up.”

“How’d you bag it?” Reg asked.

“Jewel, drone shot,” Jason said, gesturing up. When the drone was in position, he held up the Garand.

“You shot that with .30-06?” Reg asked. “Are you nuts?”

“Jury’s out,” Jason replied, grinning. “Didn’t have a premier gun collection. The choice was .30-06, .308, 5.56 or 12 gauge. Which would you choose?”

“To stay in the station,” Reg said. “I’d prefer .50 cal., .458 at the very least.”

“Ah, a connoisseur,” Jason said, making a moue and kissing his fingers. “While the .470 with its five thousand, one hundred and forty foot-pounds of energy is considered the premier round for large hostile game, the .458 is a more . . . subtle round, delivering similar results with far less punishing recoil and available in a five-round box magazine versus double barrel.”

“You know your guns,” Reg said.

“FFL,” Jason said. “Most of my later life has revolved around gun culture. My early life mostly revolved around the out-of-doors until I got too beat up to hang. That being said, never had the money to go on safari, but here I am.”

“That’s gonna make a bunch of shoes,” Sheila said wonderingly.

“Shoes,” Jason said, nodding. Hadn’t been his first thought but it was a thought. “Handbags. Maybe crocodile-skin miniskirts will make a comeback.”

“How did you get down there?” Sheila asked. “I’ve heard it’s nearly impossible.”

“Business trip,” Jason said. “Lots of small investors who wanted some fresh food. Enough investors to bribe a pilot.”

“Fresh food would be great,” Sheila noted, cocking her head. “I don’t suppose . . . ?”

“When I get back, I’ll ensure you get a care package,” Jason said. “Fish, shrimp and wild mushrooms. Unless you’d like some crocodile meat, which is quite tasty, of which I have far too much.”

“I just realized I know . . . really nothing about you,” Sheila said, frowning again. “I hate to say it, but I don’t think . . . ”

“I was sort of the lost brother,” Jason said. “Kevin and I would communicate about once a year. It was the only way I knew you’d been born and I sort of heard you’d gotten married.”

“Which time?” Sheila asked. “This is husband two.”

“Have to admit wasn’t even sure it was husband,” Jason said. “No offense intended.”

“None taken,” Sheila said. “I’ve lived with guys before.”

“Including me,” Reg said, shrugging.

“This one stuck,” Sheila said, dimpling. “Not sure why sometimes, but he did. Three grown kids, all on this station, thank God. I don’t know what I’d do if my kids were somewhere lost in the galaxy. Two grandkids. Both on the station.”

“Good to hear,” Jason said.

“Did you have any . . . ?” Sheila asked carefully.

“Nope,” Jason said. “Various reasons. Mostly came down to I can’t have them and the two times I was married it didn’t work out. Since we’re catching up after . . . everything, short version of my life. Joined the army out of high school, airborne. Never went to college. Over the years I’ve been an EMT, volunteer fireman, woodlands firefighter which ended up with minor disability check up until the Transfer, contractor in Croatia, Iraq and various other places, sometimes carrying a gun, sometimes in an office as a logistics guy, written bad science fiction, travel writer, pornography . . . ”

“Pornography?” Sheila said, grimacing.

“Hey, it pays the bills,” Jason said. “Worked as a DJ and conservative talk radio in a small-town radio station, run warehouses, driven trucks, commercial fishing, rodeo clown, run gun stores, owned one and learned I’m terrible at business, repped for Ruger for a while till I got laid off. Been laid off several times. Worked for companies that don’t exist anymore. Had a parachute fail. Been audited by the IRS and the ATF. Been arrested, released and record expunged. ATF thing. Been blown up by an IED, couple of firefights. Married my high school sweetheart which was an incredibly bad move. Divorced in the Army. Married a girl from Croatia who I knew at the time was out of my league and ended up divorcing me and marrying her boss shortly after she got her citizenship. Lived with a stripper once, platonically. Had a roommate who was a gay Catholic priest . . . ”

“Oh, my God,” Reg said, belly laughing. “Hey, hon, your uncle sounds way more interesting than your dad.”

“I hear ya,” Sheila said, shaking her head. “I think I got the wrong Graham.”

“And I’m currently doing something I’d wanted to do several times which was professional hunter,” Jason said. “Of a sort. Mostly I’m commercial fishing, again, trying to load enough shrimp to fill twelve, count ’em, twelve conexes so as to feed the hungry masses that are tired of print food.”

“A little shrimp for your niece and her hungry children?” Sheila said, holding up her thumb and finger slightly apart.

“I shall assuredly send a care package to make up for some of the missed birthdays and so on.”

“That looks like a river,” Reg said. “Really cool river. Shrimp? Those are ocean aren’t they? Or different here?”

“They run upriver this time of year,” Jason said. “Same on Earth. Sort of like salmon but for different reasons.”

“Is that one of the volcanoes in the background?” Sheila asked.

“Chindia Mons,” Jason said, standing up and pointing. “You can just see the very top of the tree line then the snow zone then the bare zone. Pretty cool that it goes so high the snow peters out.”

“How far away is it?” Reg asked.

“Eight hundred kilometers,” Jason said. “Say five hundred miles.”

“And you can see it from that far away,” Sheila said wonderingly. “The sky is super clear.”

“Counter monsoonal winds,” Jason said.

“Counter . . . what?” Sheila asked.

Jason thought about how to explain monsoons in the simplest possible terms without it sounding like a lecture.

“During the summer, the air on the mountain gets hot,” Jason said. “Heat rises. Air is drawn in from the ocean which is warm and moist. That causes rain. Lots of rain more or less every day for six months. That’s the monsoon. Doing okay so far?”

“Yeah,” Sheila said, cocking an eyebrow.

“For the next six months, the air falls down along the mountain and pushes the air back out to the ocean. The wind right now is from the mountain. That’s the countermonsoon. It’s the dry season. Rain’s stopped, skies are clear as a bell, rivers are falling and it’s a little cooler. Monsoon, countermonsoon.”

“Science is not really my thing,” Sheila said. “I’m more into the raising kids and being political.”

“She was all over Facebook and Twitter,” Reg said.

“I got out of that after failing in conservative talk radio,” Jason said.

“You mentioned that,” Reg said.

“Yeah,” Jason said, a little ruefully. “I tended to be a little too politically philosophical for a small-town radio station in Arkansas. Not to mention a bit too provocative.”

“Provocative?” Sheila asked.

“One of my questions for the very few listeners who ever called was ‘How do you define conservative?’” Jason said. “So, I’ve got a caller, local politician running for office who’s a part-time fire and brimstone preacher as well. I asked him the question and he started maundering on. I could tell that other than ‘What God Says!’, i.e., whatever he thought it meant at the time, he didn’t really have an answer. So, I posed a conundrum.

“‘You’re holding a politically conservative event, Republican fundraiser, say, and a new lady shows up. Good-looking young lady. She supports all the usual politically conservative positions. She’s pro-Second Amendment. She’s small government. She thinks government, especially the federal government, should stay out of people’s lives. Is she a conservative?’ He says yes. ‘Well, then you find out she came to the faith and eventually to conservativism after having an abortion. Still okay?’ Kind of cautiously says that the Lord is forgiving, so, if she’s found Jesus that’s okay. ‘Then you find out she’s a stripper, bisexual and a porn star. Is that conservative?’”

“Oh, my God,” Reg said, laughing again. “You didn’t.”

“So, then I’ve got half his congregation outside the station picketing and I was asked to seek opportunities elsewhere,” Jason finished. “After that I decided to stop discussing religion or politics and especially both. The end. Your Uncle Jason has all the best stories.”

“You really do,” Sheila said.

“Jason, Tim’s on the line,” Jewel interjected.

“That’s my business partner,” Jason said. “Gotta go. We need to get together. Out here. Switch.”


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