The Last Guardian

ch 5 Industry start ups and recovery

 Austin would have sighed in relief if he could actually sigh, he was down to twenty three percent on his remaining power when the new reactor kicked on. It was nice to finally watch the number tick up and with that he could finally begin his counterattack on the ants and continue digging down into the caverns below. The tractor beam turret he had set up in the tunnel where he had found the ants' word to life. This one was far more powerful than the ones he'd put on his own mechanical ants. It was built to haul around cargo containers and asteroids to load them into ships. He fired it at the hole on low intensity and watched as earth and rubble and Ant corpses floated towards it slowly as a horde of tractor beam ants began collecting the debris and moving it to designated stockpiles. The system was pretty simple but shockingly useful. A small force field emitter blocked the debris from traveling too far and kept any biological ants from entering. Without the modulation from the mechanical ant's tractor beam emitters to disrupt the field and let the objects pass through. The force field was divided into two parts, a radon field which would instantly cook anything that tried to pass through it. Thus, killing any of the ants that got sucked up and an actual force field to stop them from going too far. While the tractor beam emitter wasn't powerful enough, at least at this setting to tear apart rocks it was powerful enough to yank some clean out of the earth given they weren't too big. So, any fault or seam allowed chunks of it to fly off only to be captured by tractor beam ants. That then loaded them into the rock disposal pile which would automatically be fed into a grinder converting it into powder. This powder was then fed to a molecular disassembler to print resource blanks. The local terrafirma was a unique mix of an iron heavy phosphate a densely packed regolith mixed medals and carbon with small chunks of meteoric iron mixed in. Considering his ship had crashed from upper orbit that shouldn't be that surprising but the shear amounts of metal he was getting was absurd. Then again that would also explain why so many local fauna had adapted metallic exoskeletons and other such adaptations. Anything that hadn't adapted to this area would likely been poisoned by heavy metals......

Wh-which probably explained why Sophia's village didn't grow crops instead raised livestock and why they didn't have wells instead relied on those crystals for their water. The ground around them was poisonous. Loaded with heavy metals, though that were extremely good for him they were very bad for the local human community. The only exception seemed to be those odd herbs, they were extremely rich in metals, yes but not toxic heavy metals. It was as if it had been designed to provide as much nutrients as possible while breaking down the heavier metals. Its other medicinal qualities seemed just a byproduct. Though he'd have to do a bit more research to be sure but he guessed these properties probably would be poisonous to the creatures that had adapted to a diet rich in heavy metals.

The locals probably couldn't eat the meat of the monsters in turn but their own livestock. Some weird sheep cow hybrids like creatures seem to have no problems breaking down the toxic plant life and probably weren't nearly as poisonous. Likely without a constant influx of the chemicals in the plants the humans would ge-get sick....... Crap.

He quickly pulled up the scans of Sophia's older relative and compared it to examples of heavy metal poisoning in his database and well.... He-he would be wincing if he could. The concentrated herbal extract he had given her would most definitely fix her right up and faster than he had originally predicted but it also would rather violently purge the toxic chemicals from her system. He quickly instructed his bot to fetch a bucket.

Meanwhile he began producing his next Beatle. He wanted at least two to protect against anymore breaches in his perimeter and a third to start scouting the surface nearby. The semi functional assembly Bay would also begin printing out parts for a second fully functional assembly bay. Once he had that up and running, he began work on a foundry. While the molecular disassembler could produce resource blanks from the ground soil and regolith from the local geosphere, he was having a harder time processing salvaged metals and the metallic corpses of the insects. A fully functional foundry would be needed or at the very least a basic material refinery in the short term.