Omake
A small group of adolescents marched with purpose from the protective walls of Greengraft into the charred remains of the forest. Their rebreathers' communications exchanged short ranged messages between them, filtering out the lingering ash and trace toxins released by an uncaring and inhospitable forest. Their leader, Oory, was the oldest of the lot and consequentially the one carrying the lightest load. His subordinates were hauling heavy packs or in the case Blake Jonahson pushing a wheelbarrow, while Oory 'just' had a regular backpack and suitcase.
After the watchful safety of the settlement receded into the distance, Oory called a halt and surveyed the flat expanse they stood in. Dandriss' geography, at least in the area near Shattersaw, was nearly flat thanks to the megaflora's roots eroding the folds and depressions common to other planets. That meant that finding applicable terrain for their experiments nearby was somewhat difficult, though Oory seemed to have come through for the gang. "Alright, this is the place!"
"Finally." Thomas grumbled, sitting down on a charred stump and taking off the pack. "That took forever."
Blake, the youngest and newest member of the group, followed suit. He wasn't entirely sure that they were supposed to be doing this, especially out in the forest and with no adult oversight, but kept those concerns to himself. He was finally in with the cool kids and didn't want to screw things up. His buy-in to the group had been collecting the scrap from the machine shop where his mom worked and using some of the tools to (occasionally literally) hammer them into roughly the right shape.
Oory began unpacking the video recorder from the suitcase and setting up the tripod while directing the others to clear out an area some fifty meters away from the tripod. As they did so, he addressed the camera. "Alright, this is the first series of tests for the Holistic Weapons and Tactical Armament Society" Holding up a slate of steelcork with the club's logo burned into it by the woodworking class, Oory checked to see that it caught the sun at the right angle to make things look as cool as possible. "And today we're going to be focusing on a battery of tests about how to make rockets work."
The club had this project on the back burner for a while, but they couldn't move past basic data gathering and theoretical work until the firestorm had tore through the area. The bulk of their work had been working from...nontraditional sources, such as the nearly-full collection of STAR CONQUEROR: THE TALES OF ZAPP BRANNIGAN comics and novels Davey Thule found. Oory wasn't sure how they'd make the fishbowl helmet work, but the there were enough pictures of the outside of the rocket ship to start with the design. They had to scale things down a lot, but he had a good feeling about this.
"Alright, we good to go?" He shouted, and Davey gave the thumbs up. Rickee was pouring gunpowder into the model rocket's fuel reservoir before attaching the fuse-wick. "Alright, light it up!" Davey's lighter spat sparks of electricity at the wick and the boy ran back to his friends as they counted down. When the fuse disappeared in the cylinder nothing happened for several seconds.
"Think it's a dud?"
"Dunno. Blake, go check it out." Blake hesitated, then took two steps forward when the first explosion knocked the rocket on its side. A second propelled the rocket in fits and bursts all around the depression in random directions, scattering the crowd of adolescents when it zipped by them.
"Shit shit shit shit!"
"Save the camera! Save the damn camera!"
--
"HWTA Rocketry test #2, it looks like despite our earlier projections, gunpowder does not make for good rocket fuel." The image of the test site reveals a mound of Dandriss soil piled into a sort of bunker near the still-blasted earth of the launch pad. A somewhat flawed pane of brown glass is set into the soil embankment as a blast shield. "We are using grease mixed with roachrhino fat for the fuel, hopefully that should burn more evenly."
A much longer wick is lit this time, allowing for Davey to trot back behind the blast shield before the rocket...fails to lift off. Globs of something drip out of the bottom of the rocket burning hot. "What's going on?"
"I...think it's leaking."
"It better not be leaking."
"It's fuckin' leaking! Look, it's not lifting, it's just-" A gout of green-tinged flame shoots into the sky as the rocket finally lifts off five meters into the air, dribbling its burning payload down on the rocks below. "It's spreading! Turn off the camera, turn off th-"
--
Shoots were peeking up through the scorched earth now, plant life being restored from the firestorm. A barren, roughly circular patch retains the blackened appearance, however. "HWTA Rocketry test #5. We've had to replace the rocket due to metal fatigue screwing with our results. We're trying a double lining this time, the nynx fat mix doesn't react well to the aluminium and titanium alloy we've been using, so we're using a copper sheathe to keep it from corroding everything into uselessness."
A number of shovels and buckets of earth stand at the ready at various points near the edge of the black areas. "We also have a new club member, everyone say 'hi' to Cathy."
"My eyes are up here, jackwipe." The camera zooms up to look at the barely exposed face of the first girl in the group. "Right, so it looks like there's a pretty strong corollary between how much force going up you need and how much the rocket weighs. I'm working on the math right now, trying to figure out the right kind of units to use but what I've got so far is-"
"All listed with our records." It's important to have records. They make things official. "Want to push the button?"
Cathy glares at Oory but takes the re-purposed detonator and clicks it twice, sending a signal to the auto-lighter half-submerged in dirt. The fuse is lit and the boys gather around the window and begin chanting in semi-religious anticipation. "Ten...nine...eight...seven....six...five!...four!...three! Two! One!"
A brilliant flare and roar as the tiny rocket is hurtled into the air with a shrill cry. The cameraman follows it barely, but as it disappears no one is watching.
"Aggh!" Davey Thule is holding his hands over his eyes. "I'm blind! She---she blinded me! With science!"
"Get over it, it's not that bad you great pansy." A popping sound is heard and the camera swings into the sky where what looks to be flaming wreckage begins raining down on the area. The image blurs as the cameraman rushes under the cover of the overhang they'd erected.
Rickee's voice held a degree of forced calm. "So...we keeping the copper?"
--
Blake trudged through the halls of Greengraft's Learning Annex B, where his general-education classes had just let out. Their end-of-semester exams were coming up soon, the ones that would determine what kinds of courses they'd be taking next year. His Socialistics-Theory coursework was irretrievable garbage and he didn't want anything to do with the military's feeder programs, but...what should he focus his time and effort on? Going by his current grades, he was a shoo-in for Advanced Macroeconomics hands down. The stuff was...well, not 'simple' but certainly easy. It was a system, and he could figure how the major factors worked and estimate close to the right answer without too much effort. But it was dull.
He didn't want to end up as some bean-counter somewhere, not after he woke up from a really weird dream involving a big red button that would make the economy blow up and one of his classmates sitting on the desk in a very interesting pose. He was usually pretty tongue-tied around girls these days ever since he noticed that girls were shaped very differently from boys, but whenever he looked at Arah today all he could think of was how he'd like to see her indecently bared arms. Needless to say, he was beet red all day today.
Lost in his thoughts, he didn't notice where his feet led him until he was setting his backpack down at a table in the library. It wasn't the original library (having been declared a national resource and taken over by the faculty and staff years ago), but rather a side-room stocked with spare books.
"Yo, Blake." Cathy's greeting knocked him out of his reverie, forcing him to notice that he was nowhere near where he thought he was going. "What's up?"
"Cathy!" He yelped in surprise. "How'd you get here?" She just raised an eyebrow, causing his face to burn like rocket fuel attempt #4. "I mean, ah, hey...there?"
"Pull up a chair short stuff." She padded a stool nearby, which drew his eye to the other person at the realwood table. A girl with a metal collar around her throat and the sunken features of long-term malnutrition sat in a wheelchair, probably one of the refugees that had come to Greengraft over the years. Chalk slates lie scattered around the table with complex mathematics etched onto them in as fine a detail as you can realistically get with chalk, and stacks of books stood next to either of the girls. An archival tool was plugged in near a charging station, though he wasn't sure if it was theirs or just one for use by the library itself.
Obediently, he set his stuff down and sat next to them. "What's this?"
"Those are tomorrow's bio-chem problems." Cathy said, gesturing to some of the more convoluted numbers. "These are stress calculations."
"So...stress calculations?"
"You don't think I did all that work on the rocket project myself, do you? Lorelei is the one that figured out how to make an even mixture for the fuel, and Abigail Clearwaters did some work in the archives looking for similar projects."
Blake blinked. "I thought it was just us working on it." Though now that he thought about it, Oory had mentioned early on that 'girls were into science and stuff', which given how the older boy managed to date no less than seven girls over the course of a month, some of them at the same time (until they found out) seemed to hold true. "Oory didn't need to do all those calculations."
Cathy rolled her eyes. "Oory likes science until it's time to do something that doesn't involve lighting things on fire. He's got good ideas, but will just keep spinning his wheels until someone comes along to try to make things work. For example, you notice how the rocket keeps disintegrating?"
Blake nods, hesitantly. "There's too much pressure on the inside and it explodes."
The girl with the metal collar pressed a finger against the hole in her neck. "You. Need. A. New. Rock. Et." Her voice sounded weird, and she could only seem to speak one syllable at a time. "Too. Much. Dam. Age. Weak."
"What? But that's all we've got!" There wasn't a whole lot of scrap laying around to use, most of it being recycled as much as possible when not outright reused. The only sources of new new materials were the machine shops and the refineries. To be honest, it was half a miracle that he'd gotten as much as he had from the machine shop, given the general demand for more of everything. After getting the scraps, he had been able to beg time at some of the welding lathes during downtime for the shop a few minutes at a time, but if the welds were weakening the structure...
...there was another alternative, actually. The UAM, which was always in use. Time on the UAM was one of the de facto underpinnings of the Shattersaw economy. Well, technically it was based on a formula of labor costs and production values including things like the amount and sophistication a skilled artisan could produce and a common laborer's daily wage working at the mill minus costs of living and maintenance and like fifty other factors, but one of the key ones was the UAM Bottleneck; the amount of high-end materials available from only one source.
Given the simplicity of the design itself it shouldn't take much time for the UAM to assemble it, minutes at most. Having the materials like they already do would negate the cost of materials, but the bulk of the cost would be buying a time slot on one of the UAMs. They were always in high demand, production schedules set months in advance...but the product delivery itineraries meant that there was variation on the most (and thus least) valuable time on the machines. If he bid for the least valuable time slot, using his power usage allotment as something to barter away on the town's market over the course of several weeks he could conceivably save up enough to make it.
"I...think I can manage that. Maybe."
"Awesome. So, got a question for you; what does HWTA stand for?"
"Uh, well officially it's the Holistic Weapons and Tactical Armament Society." Blake shifts, a little embarrassed to be put on the spot like that.
"And unofficially?"
"Oory was looking for a way to make 'Hey, watch this' into an acronym."
