Chapter 7 – Discovering Fire

Mk23 -IRJ Droplet – Class 7 – Carpe Victoria (Wrecked)

Sector - Unknown

Planet - Unknown

3rd May 2341 (BSST)

Next priority for me is to build a fire or locate a source of food. Since the water has been found I only have a couple portions of purification tablet left. After that I will have no safe drinking water. So, I need to work out a method to purify the water.

But, fire first. Fire is one of the most important facets for survival from warmth and protection to the sterilising effect of cooking food and boiling water.

To make a fire I will have to resort to the tried and true method, the fire sticks. To start with I’ll need a small flint knife. I scrounge around on the floor for a few minutes discarding stones until I find a small dark stone. It’s about half the size of my palm and when I stare at it just right I can see the faint lines that separate the layers. It is both matte and gloss with the undulating layers creating a discordant pattern that shimmers in the light. One side is narrower that the others and it is this side I will knap into a rough blade. I can’t use my fighting knives as they have small molecular edges and a shape designed for fighting. Using them for anything else blunts and breaks them. Sharpness doesn’t matter if the shape is wrong. It unbalances the blade and makes it useless. There’s a reason axes are used for tree chopping and not swords after all.

Karambits are a version of a punch knife not a slasher. They work by driving an ever-widening point through flesh forcing a cut by converting forward momentum into lateral pressure. Then ripping out the blade, tears and breaks muscle and tendon debilitating and crippling the target.

A flint knife can be used without a thought as it’s disposable. You can always get another.

To knap a flint knife, I’ll need another rock. Something hard with a point. Some form of igneous rock will do me well. Eventually I find one. It has a white and grey pearlescence to it and a cubic blocky nature to it’s shape.

With short, sharp motions I bash the harder rock into the softer rock. The softer rock is supported by a tree and the glancing blow chips of a small fragment of the stone. A smooth semi-circular concave indent is now present in the stone with a lighter grey colouration compared to the rest of the rock.

More and more glancing blows whittle down the edge to a slant. The surface is now pockmarked with small edges like burrs that are sharp enough to cut me. When I finish the blade profile I will have to take care of that issue before use. The new edge is slanted like a chisel, but I need to shift the edge location to the centre thickness of the blade for the purposes I’m thinking of.

You see I need to cut a notch into the fire sticks and it will only work on the edge side if the edge is chisel like and the other edge will not have the right shape for the fire sticks to work properly.

I flip the knife over and begin the arduous process once again. Softer this time taking much smaller chunks out. The edge is weaker now that material has been removed so the kind of hits I was doing at the start would be quite liable to snap of all my progress.

Eventually I succeed in getting a descent edge on the blade. Not sharp by any means but enough to start honing it with. It will never be comparable to a modern or even twentieth century blade, but it will do for basic survival.

I head back up to the pool. Water is necessary to hone a blade. That’s how wet stones work after all. I find two large rocks. One to sit on and the other that can rest comfortably on my knees. It has two smooth sides which is perfect. Reaching down into the pool I scoop up some of the finer silt and gravel that forms in the bottom of the pool. Rounded by the abrasive actions of the water it will be perfect for taking off the rough edges. Splaying it across the stone I scoop up water with my hands multiple times as to my annoyance it keeps escaping through my fingers. It’s one of the few drawbacks of the suit. Normal fingers have yielding flesh that can almost form a seal so that water would leak out much more slowly. However, this doesn’t occur with the suit and the water falls through my fingers like a colander.

Eventually, it is wet enough to begin. In a methodical manner I scrape the belly of the blade up to where it joins the knap marks or the grind line on a normal blade. The sharp edges that were similar to burrs slowly come off and I have to keep replacing the grinding powder. Wetting it constantly helps but the friction builds up a lot of heat and I still feel it through the suit. It would be useful on a regular blade so that I didn’t ruin the thermal cycling of the blade nor the temper, or other heat-treating processes. But it is a rock blade so that doesn’t really apply.

Eventually as I proceed from the rougher grain to the more sand like one the marbled glossy colour begins to reappear. Then it’s time to switch sides and do the same to the belly on the reverse side.

It takes maybe an hour of constant grinding to get the belly of the blade done. Unfortunately, this is the least arduous process. The actual blade part is far worse. Less pressure and more scraping are what will help me achieve a proper blade here.

It takes almost the rest of the day and by the time evening arrives I am done with the blade. In the dying light I examine the blade. It glints when the occasional ray pierces the foliage and strikes it. No where near the lustre of a proper blade. But it sparkles nonetheless.

The edge still undulates. Almost like a Kris but laterally. A flaw, beautiful in its rawness but it is still a flaw. A flaw I will be unable to correct. Perhaps when I move onto iron tools I can forge a proper blade. But that is a long way off. A very long way off. Almost too far away to even imagine. Will I still be alive by then? It is at times like these that I’m so glad that dad instilled survival instinct in me.

We would go off world and into the wilderness and just survive. No net, no help. No tools. Just go with a knife and some back up supplies and survive. It gives me hope I will survive until rescue, whenever that may be. Pity he was such a bastard though.

In the fading light I estimate I have enough time to climb up into the canopy for a night’s rest. I imagine it to be much safer than the ground.

As night closes in like a blanket thrown across me I picture what I will accomplish tomorrow. Hopefully the basis for the water purification will be done. Hopefully. It’s the last thing I remember before I surrender my mind to the blissful release of sleep.

I awake peacefully for what I think is the first time on this planet. I’m still perched up in the canopy. Straddling a y-split in the trees. My legs ache with a fierceness that is quite a shock. Especially when I move to get up. I hope my face remains sangfroid, but I somehow doubt I have maintained an inscrutable countenance. It doesn’t matter but for some reason it truly offends my pride that I might have given my composure away for something so trivial as a little pain.

I sigh. Oh, who cares, no one is here anyway. Smiling at my silliness I almost snort.

The climb down is an agony I can’t wait to be rid of. There may be a reason humans have never slept in trees. I may be missing something, but it seems we are very poorly adapted to a life in the tree tops.

Once I’m down I take a few moments of peace to observe my surroundings. Scouting the area, taking my morning water rations and generally planning out my day takes most of the morning until perhaps around ten AM. Enigma tells me he will need another hundred or so reference points until can compile a working clock for me. Though he does give me a rough indicator of how much daylight I have left. A small sundial like icon in my top right. It’s not yet midday according to it. But Enigma can’t seem to stress how rough it is. I think perhaps he has reached a stage in the evolution from EI to AI. The sense of pride. It’s only natural that any form of intelligence would experience the seven deadly sins after all.

Now I have the knife I set off into the underbrush to find the driest sticks I can. It takes me a few minutes, but I eventually find a few dried sticks.

They are dry, but not really dry enough to light a fire with. Cutting them from the branches takes a few minutes and in short order they can be snapped leaving relatively clean break marks on the tree.

I strip away the bark and protective coatings. A thicker than expected layer of bark is the only major difference in the biology of trees. Once stripped, into two of the four sticks I drill a hole about two third of the way through. It has a diameter of about one centimetre. From the hole I cut in a wedge that connects to the hole and the edge at a down sloping angle. With a stone I smoothen out the wood removing what is actually burrs this time. Smoothening the passage will hopefully make it much easier for the hot ashes to fall out when I use the fire sticks.

I finish of the equipment by setting out all four sticks in the sun on a flat black rock to dry properly. I will check on them in a few hours. Until then I have a couple other tasks to do. First task is to get enough firewood to maintain a fire for a descent period of time. Tomorrow I will need it. For sure. I’ll need enough for today to get a fire started for a few hours. Overnight is too long at this point. I have no idea if fire scares of the worlds inhabitants in the same way as it does on earth. It looks like I’ll be in for another night stuck in the tree tops. Sigh. Major sigh.

The current knife is just too small, so I must make a small hand axe. It doesn’t need to be very well made. Rough will do. And rough is certainly what I get. About twice the size of my hand with a nice smooth hand placement. I take huge swings at it breaking off large chunks of rock. It takes me a few hours, but I soon have it finished.

My hand hurts but not too much to continue on. Leaving my camp by a few metres I select a small tree half fallen over and mostly dead it has some small amount of life in it still. Hopefully it will burn without too much smoke like green wood is likely to do. Using the hand axe, I chip away at the base. My god it hurts so bad. The jarring impact of rock against my hand bones. Even with the padding and support of the suit I reckon I will have a bone bruise for a while. I have to haft this axe head soon. The axe blade starts off strong but soon wood fibres that stick around compact into a kind of mat hampering my progress.

My flint knife can cut out the fibres and I’m glad I have discovered this fact, or I doubt I would have gotten through the seven-inch-thick tree in the daylight. Once I’m most of the way through I step back and take a running jump at the tree a few metres high up. I drag down the tree with my weight. It buckles at the cut but still stays connected. Twisting this way and that it takes a few stamps and just raw power to separate it.

Once cut down I strip the bark off and place it over a sharpish rock below the cliff. Dropping rocks on the tree damages it enough to snap the trunk in several places and I’m soon left with a small pile of wood ready for the fire. I leave it to dry properly.

Right so what to do next. I need kindling for the fire. Dried fallen leaves break apart when rolled between the thumb and fingers into a dry nest of kindling. Collecting an ever increasing in size pile of kindling takes another hour and I’m beginning to suspect I may not end up finishing my tasks today.

In the harsh midday sun, the fire sticks have dried enough to perhaps use now. With a shrug I think I might as well give it a try.

Taking them down I clear out a section of ground and make a small circle of rocks. Within the circle of rocks, I create a series of small grooves perhaps an inch deep. They all collect at a single point about twenty centimetres out from the circle. I cover up the groove outside the circle with a stone. This will be an air intake for the fire. Making up the starting kindling from the nest to the small sticks and wood fibre from the chopped tree I think I’m about ready.

I have to whittle down a point on one of the spinner poles to fit the hole very tightly but that is a small task. It was in fact too large to reach the bottom of the hole exactly. That was on purpose though as the size of spinner would decrease with use and more pressure can be applied if it doesn’t fit quite right.

I place the base on top of some kindling, the notch pointing out over it. Securing the placement with my feet I grasp the spinner at the top. Rubbing my hands back and forth across the stick hard and fast keeps the stick spinning fast. You have to work really hard to get any pressure and friction. So, my hands slip down towards the base as I’m applying a lot of pressure. When I near the bottom it takes me about half a second to transfer back to the top and keep going. My arms tire and I begin to get cramp, but I forge on ahead and I’m rewarded for my efforts with a little smoke from the joints. Unfortunately, I tire before I manage to get any hot ashes out.

With attempt one done the sticks will now be much drier and hopefully I can succeed. Second time around I do manage to get the hot ashes but, in my haste, to tip them out I jitter around too much and miss the tinder.

A few more tries and I have it down to an art. Or at least I think so. Blowing gently on the nest cradled in my hand I spot a small glow. More blowing and encouraging and a small flame breaks out consuming the tinder rapidly. Carefully with deliberate motion I shift over to the fire and get it going.

It’s about fifteen minutes before I sit back for a second comfortable that the fire will not just go out if I don’t constantly tend it. I’m right. I fantasise about just resting on my laurels but that’s not what survival is about. There is always something to be done.

While the fire roars and crackles breaking down the wood. To fuel its incessant hunger, I decide to make proper use of the fire. First, I cut more trees and break them up. Setting the wood near the fire to dry. To the leaves I do the same.

When one of the logs is nearly finished I extract its remains and carry it over to the water. Dropping it at the bank I break it up into a fine ashy powder. I scrape it into a plie before creating two more piles with silt and gravel. Taking out a flat rock I dig a small ditch beside the pool. Like a dog I splash water over into the pool and tip the loose dirt in. Making a mud takes a bit more water but eventually I get the right consistency. Like pastry I have to work the mud for quite a while, folding and beating it.

Taking some of the mud out I work it more on another flat rock and fold in gravel, ash and sand until I get a sticky clay like substance. The dirt was from Enigma’s analysis close enough to perfect clay. Near the waterfront dirt becomes saturated with the right kinds of minerals. The clay minerals are often weathering products like abraded feldspar and fine grain sedimentary rocks like the silts found in the water basin. Organic material is another component that is very commonly found in clays, so the ash was used for that purpose.

Clays form structures similar to micas. Hexagonal sheets that give clay its particular properties. Clay is a form of phyllosilicate and is characterised by two dimensional sheets sharing either SiO4 or AlO4 in the tetrahedral or octahedral configuration respectively. These two layers bond alternately and this provides much the same properties as materials such as plasticine. However, when baked or fired the chemical structure changes towards a more crystalline structure. With metals, non-metals and metalloids held together in an ionic and covalent framework. Known commonly as ceramics and pottery.

When fired the clays become hard and since they are impermeable they can be used to store and carry water. As such they are very useful for building materials and I will be using clay a lot in the future.

Rolling the clay into twenty-centimetre-long sausages I slowly build up a pot smoothing the joins out with water and creating an even thickness. Rubbing the ash on the outside I set the pot aside for now. I create a plate of the clay. Two centimetres thick and about five centimetres in diameter. A hole is pushed through the centre of the clay and I’m finished for now. Coating with ash again I take my creations back to the fire and slowly lower them into the edge of the fire.

I have to build the fire back over them, but I’ve soon got the flames roaring steadily baking the clay into a hard shell. I should have a pot which I can use to make more clay with in the future and of course the disk. More progress will have to wait for tomorrow though.