Engineered Magic

2 AL: Irene

The pump intake was completely clogged with weeds. Irene was knee deep in cold muddy water trying to clean it out. The specifications called for the pump to be set into a cement box complete with intake screens. Instead it was sitting on a couple rocks in the bottom of a hole in the dirt. Over the winter the dirt walls dissolved into mud. The mud ran down over the rocks providing the perfect bedding material for the local equivalent of bindweed.

No one inspected these pumps before they were activated in the spring. The pumps sucked in the water, mud and weeds in equal measure. The long stems of the plants were wrapped around the bars of the intake rock shield. It was only when the pump motor pulled too much power as it fought against the plug that anyone noticed that something was wrong.

She was sent out to check that the pump was wired correctly. One look at the green mass in the inlet and she didn’t even bother to inspect the wiring. After half an hour of trying to clear the inlet with her bare hands and a pair of wire cutters, she went back to Stores and requisitioned the largest knife they stocked. It came with its own sheath that would slip onto a tool belt. Irene didn’t have a belt, only her trusty tool bucket but she was thinking about getting one. She loved this knife and she was not giving it up.

Irene cut another handful of plant material free and threw it up onto the bank where it wouldn’t get sucked back in again. The rock guard was hinged and could be swung open easily enough to get to the back side but removing it was much harder. Which was why Irene was standing in snow melt water, losing the feeling in her toes.

Once she got the bulk of the material off, she switched back to her wire cutters to get the last bits that were wrapped tight. She carefully dried off the knife and stored it in her cart before heading back into the water. She was shivering violently by the time she was finished. With the rock guard locked back into place, she dragged herself up the bank and dropped the wire cutters into her tool bucket. She crawled into the cab of her cart and ran the heater to try to warm up.

She still needed to turn the pump back on. This pump supplied pressure for the irrigation sprinklers on their western most field. West of her a rocky ridge rose up. The forest on it was untouched. The tall trees and dark rock made a pretty backdrop to the plowed and planted field. There was a green aurora on the field, caused by the crop of soy or corn or wheat just starting to sprout. Honestly she had no idea what was growing in the field. Agriculture was not her subject. It could be sunflowers or cotton for all she knew.

As she sat there and shivered she noticed that a well worn track ran along the north edge of the field running west. There was no reason for anyone to be driving a vehicle to the west. This was the western most field. The irrigation pond with its water pump was located on the field’s north east corner. The irrigation ditch ran south from here before turning east at the corner of the next field to the southeast. Even the rolling irrigation sprinklers were fed from the east.

Irene realized she was looking at the road to the ruins. The number of groups traveling to the ruins tapered off in the fall. Over the winter about a hundred pregnancies among the colonists became publicly known. The people living in the temporary housing received most of their food and water from the ship’s systems. Almost everyone was sampling fresh food off the fields in the fall but only those posted to the edges of the settlement area were also drinking from portable water purifiers.

A hundred or so new infants should not be a problem. Over a quarter of the last generation of flight crew passed away since the landing. That was over five hundred individuals the food production plan included. No one knew how many of those who went into the ruins were now pregnant. There was no communication with the official teams since before the recall went out. The unofficial teams sent back random, confusing messages until winter, when their messages too stopped.

To Irene it felt like no one who entered the ruins ever returned. Maybe she was a pessimist but she kept thinking the reason communication stopped was because they were dead. She didn’t want to think that her mother just forgot her. At the same time she was as intrigued by the promise of magic as anyone else. Why would anyone invest so much engineering and technology to get that effect?

The loss of labor from those who chose to enter the ruins was starting to show. It was likely a contributing factor to this irrigation pump ending up sitting on rocks in the bottom of a hole and not in its concrete enclosure. By late fall many people were putting very little effort into their assigned tasks, instead they spent their time planning their escape.

Winter stopped the losses. With snow on the ground, everyone was grateful for the warmth of housing inside the Speedwell. Irene thought the heavy rains of spring and the coming births were keeping a damper on it.

Irene got out of the cart and walked over to the turn off from the official path to the irrigation pond. The tracks were fresh. Someone drove on the road since the last rain. The weather was clear for that last week. That was why the pumps were powered up. There was a light rain the week before which meant these tracks were made since then. She suspected they were fresher than that. They looked like they were made last night but like the plants in the field she was no expert on tire tread impressions.

She looked down the path. It was straight as an arrow with a slight rise to it as it ran along the north edge of the field. It disappeared into the virgin forest beyond the planting. The clearest set of tracks were from a set of tires larger than the small tires on her repair cart. It must belong to one of the larger exploration or construction vehicles. There were multiple overlapping treads. She couldn’t tell in what direction they traveled.

She was about ten miles out from the landing pad. It took her over an hour to get the knife from Stores and return here. The top of the ridge was at least another five miles out, maybe more. From what Irene remembered from aerial photos, there was about as much forest on the other side before there was a section of meadow on either side of a stream. On the far side of the creek was the entrance to the ruins.

It would take longer to drive the ten miles over the ridge than the twenty minutes or so it took her to get back to the ship. The route to the Speedwell was all prepared and graded roads. Who knew what the route through the trees looked like.

She began to shiver as her wet clothes chilled her again in the open air. She turned away from the track and headed back to the pump. She checked it over one last time, looking for anything else she needed to do before restarting it. There was a strainer built into the pressurized line leading to the sprinklers. There was a full manifold in place to reverse the water flow in order to clean it. To remove the debris from the line there should have been a valve with a hose attachment. The hose was used to reroute the water back into the irrigation pond and not blast the soil with it. There was no sign of it. Instead there was just a threaded plug in the last fitting.

There was no way that the strainer wasn’t packed solid with rock and mud. She wasn’t going to get that threaded plug out with a set of wire cutters. She would have to go back for a pipe wrench; a large pipe wrench. She gathered her tool bucket up from where she left it on the embankment and got back into her cart. At least she would get a chance to dry out a little on the trip.

It was lunch time when she got back to the Speedwell. There was a small ‘out to lunch’ sign on the clerk’s desk in Stores. Irene wandered the shelves herself looking for the items she needed. She found the hose and hose connection but there was no sign of the valve. In the end she settled for a short section of threaded pipe. She would have to remove the pipe again after she was done flushing the strainer and replace the plug.

Along the back wall of Stores she found a shelf that contained more copies of her new knife. Next to them was a stack of binoculars. Curious, Irene picked one up and tried it out. A small spot on the far wall jumped out at her as she adjusted the focus. They included a built-in camera that could record both stills and video. It was equipped with the standard electrical interface so Irene could charge it up in her cart.

She headed up to the engineering tool room to get the pipe wrench and pipe dope she would need to get the threaded plug to seal again. While she was there she used one of the office terminals to record the deficiencies with the irrigation pump installation. The office was completely empty. She wondered about that. Even if it was lunch there should have been someone on duty.

She decided to swing by the cafeteria herself before heading out. The room was emptying out as she got there. There was still hot food available and with everyone leaving, there were plenty of seats.

Her work clothes were mostly dry when she climbed back into her cart. She looked at the pile of tools and equipment and went over the task in her head trying to make sure it was everything she would need.

She drove back to the irrigation pond on the western field. She stopped her cart short of the pump at the turn to the path to the ruins. She sat there for several minutes debating with herself. She looked at the binoculars sitting in the charging station between the front seats and wondered who she was fooling. She decided on this course of action when she picked them up.

She turned her cart onto the side track and began the long drive. The road was much better than she expected. It looked like someone put it in with heavy construction equipment. You would need it to remove the trees and cut the switchbacks. The path widened out at the top of the ridge, where stone protruded out through the topsoil.

Irene got out of the cart and climbed up the local high point with her binoculars. The view was beautiful but the trees on the down slope to the next valley blocked any view of the ruins. She climbed back into her vehicle and continued on.

The trees ended high on the east wall of the valley. Irene stopped the cart and climbed out. She leaned against the front of it to steady herself as she aimed the binoculars at the valley floor. The stream in the center was still running high with melt water. It was high enough that Irene didn’t think her small repair cart could safely navigate it. There was freshly turned mud on both banks where someone had driven through it.

The other side of the valley rose up at a steeper angle. It looked like the stream cut more sharply into that side in the past, washing away soil and revealing the remnants of a stone structure. There were dark openings reaching back into the hill behind. The tumbled stones and broken paving looked exactly the same as it did in the images Agatha shared with her last year. The same could not be said of the two exploration vehicles that were parked in the soil just beyond the stone paving.

The windows on the first vehicle were shattered and the tires were flat. Rust streaked the dented sheet metal of the body where large sections of paint appeared to be missing. The second vehicle appeared in an even worse condition. In addition to the same kind of damage that appeared on the first cart, it was also rolled over on its side. It must have been the one with the repeater since there was no antenna on the roof of the upright cart.

They looked like they were caught in a raging river and pushed over to the bank, then left to rot in the rain for years. Although the creek was running high in the center of the valley, Irene could see no sign that it rose anywhere near the ruin entrance during the winter.

She scanned the grass of the valley. The only disturbance she could find along the creek bed was where the track crossed it. As she studied it, she thought the entire meadow seemed too precise. She didn’t see any plant debris along the water or dead overgrowth from the fall. The entire area looked freshly mowed. She set her binoculars down and inspected the plants under her feet.

There were no obvious cut marks but each of the stems seemed to be exactly the same height as the one next to it. It looked nothing like the wild areas around the colony’s fields. Actually it looked a lot more like their cultivated land only denser with more growth on each plant.

She was raised on a generational spaceship in interstellar space. She knew very little about agricultural plants let alone wild ones. Still the whole meadow did not look right to her. Right there she concluded that it too was part of the ruins. Which made her start wondering how far its influence reached.

She picked the binoculars back up and activated the recording function. She did a slow pass of everything she saw, paying special attention to the ruined carts. That done she got back into her cart and turned it around. Driving away from the meadow she felt a little bit lighter. Logically she knew that Michael was driving the carts back, so she wasn’t the first person to return up the track. She wondered if any of those couriers stepped inside the entrance before making their way back.

The pump was still in the bottom of a muddy hole when she got back there. A lot of that mud ended up on Irene by the time she finished cleaning out the water line. She was rolling up the hose when she noticed a large cart heading towards her. It was one of the construction carts designed to haul a full crew out to a job site. It pulled over on the side of the road at the turn out for the ruins. Darien climbed out of the passenger side of the cab and walked up the road to her.

“Hey, Irene,” he said as he recognized her. “Did you need any help?”

“Nope, I’m all done,” Irene said with a nod at the sprinklers running in the western field. “I’m just packing up the last of my tools.”

“Good job,” Darien replied. “Will we see you tonight at stick practice?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Irene replied. She continued to be on the bottom of the class, although she had improved enough that even she could recognize it. She just didn’t like how everyone seemed to enjoy beating her in sparring matches. As a kind of petty vengeance she didn’t tell them any of Agatha's theories about magic. “Right now I am cold and covered in mud. All I am thinking of is a hot shower,” Irene said as she heaved the hose into the cargo area of her cart.

“I hope you can make it,” Darien told her as she walked over to pick up her tool bucket. “We are going to break into groups for the sparring session,” he explained. Irene checked to make sure all her tools were back in the bucket.

“That sounds like fun,” she replied to him tiredly. She set the tool bucket into her cart. She thought it was funny how Darien asked if she needed help but she was the only one carrying anything. A quick glance around showed that everything was loaded. She walked around her cart and opened the driver's door.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Darien said as Irene slid into her seat.

“Later,” Irene called as she eased into her seat. She shut the cart’s door and pulled away, waving at Darien. As she passed the larger vehicle Darien arrived in she saw that Michael was in the driver's seat. As she gave him a quick wave it occurred to her that the larger vehicle would have an easy time driving through the swollen creek in front of the ruins.