“Okay,” I said as my cut caught on fire. “One idea is that we do not even bother with a door. Instead, we dig a trench around the entire fort and leave a dirt bridge leading out from our entry.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“Look back at our current walls,” she said as she gestured to our camp. “Imagine how hard it would be for aggressive dinos to attack us if there was a six or eight-foot trench around our wall.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I tried to imagine it. “It would be like having an extra six or eight feet of wall.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Our enemies would have to run down the slope into the trench, then climb up the slope to our walls. Meanwhile, we could rain arrows or spears down upon them.”
“If we dug the trenches too deep, wouldn’t that risk the wall posts coming out at the bottom?” I asked.
“We’d put a bit of space from the slope of the trench and the wall,” Trel said. “Maybe three feet or so. But remember that our new wall is joined by dowels. Once we have the door arch erected, there will be no way an enemy can just pull down one of the posts. Even if they dug to the root of our wall, they are all forced together with the dowels that lock between them.”
“Makes sense,” I said as we walked to the next log to burn. Both Sheela and Kacerie had moved next to us so that they could hear Trel’s plans, and we all went to work on lighting the next log ablaze.
“We’ll leave the ground alone at the door, so it makes a land bridge across the trench.”
“The design will filter any group that attacks us into one area,” Sheela said. “I like the idea.”
“Agreed,” I said as I thought through the layout. Trel was pretty much making a “moat” around our castle. And while there wouldn’t be water in the trench, leaving the land raised and leveled at the gate would give us one point where we could leverage our defenses. “What about the gate?”
“That’s a bit of a challenge,” Trel said. “Initially, I thought we might not even need a gate.”
“What?” I asked with surprise.
“We have the group of trikes,” she said as she gestured to Tom, Nicole, and Katie. “And you seem to be on a dinosaur acquiring kick, so I imagine you’ll get more. You’ve taught them how to guard us, so I thought we could just leave a pair at the opening. Nothing will get past their horns, and we’ll be able to come and go easily when you just command them to step aside.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I thought through her plan.
“I do not like the idea,” Sheela said.
“I figured you wouldn’t, and I’ve reconsidered after what I saw at the lake. Those dark raptors are monsters, so we are going to need a door, and the trikes, and maybe a secondary wall that I will have to think through. Walk over with me to the dirt here, and I’ll show you what I was thinking.”
The three of us followed Trel to the side of the burning logs. We had a pile of wood there we were using to help build the fires, and she grabbed a few smaller branches and began to lay them out on the ground.
“Two doors for the gate. Each door made of three thicker vertical posts. We’ll use the dowel method to fill in the space between them with smaller vertical posts that will only extend down half the length of the three thicker posts. Across the back, I’ll tie horizontal logs for more strength.” Trel laid out more logs as she spoke and the design made sense to me.
The design looked a bit like the letter “H” but with one extra vertical post on the side and horizontal posts tied to the face of the door pointing outside.
“How will it stay locked?” Sheela asked.
“Those three posts. We’ll dig holes that they set into. Then we’ll just pull it up and out of the holes when we want to open it, but I’m not liking the design.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s going to be heavy,” Trel said with a shrug. “Each door will probably weigh a few hundred pounds, so I can only make it about eight feet high with posts four feet in diameter. We are going to have to muscle it up and out each time we want to leave. I might be able to craft a pulley system that uses the header of my frame, but that’s only going to help a little with the weight. The issue is that you are the one leaving most often, so we can’t count on dinosaur power to move them open and closed consistently.”
“Do you have any other ideas?” I asked as I puzzled through the problem.
“Plenty,” Trel said, “but they all need metal. Or more time. I can improve on the design in the next few months, but if you want a gate on this fort the day after tomorrow, we either have to do this heavy twin door design, or you are going to have to keep the trikes as sentries.”
“Let’s go with the doors first,” I said. “If they become too hard to move, we’ll just use the trikes, and I’ll see if I can tame a few more. We’ll have to make them guard in shifts, but I can tell I’m starting to wear them all out with the building.”
“I’ll get to work on it tomorrow after we finish preparing the last group of fallen trees,” Trel said, and we went back to work burning this batch of logs.
We finished a bit after the sun had set. I was still a bit worried about leaving all these smoldering logs burning inside of a redwood forest, but I realized I didn’t have much of a choice. We needed to do this to alleviate the potential bottleneck. Trel and I could put these sixty logs up in the trench tomorrow while the parasaurs pushed down the final group of fifty-ish. I felt as if I’d gotten rid of all the possible bottlenecks in our process, and the original plan of six weeks was going to take us just two more days.
We were all exhausted though. It had been a month since Sheela and I took a day off, and even our break of lovemaking at the side of the river had been an exercise. The team ate dinner in silence, and it was apparent that each of us was lost in our own thoughts.
“You are all doing a great job,” I said after we finished eating and decided who would take which watch shift. “We just have two more days of this, and then we can take a bit of a break. We probably won’t ever be able to relax, but having this new fort wall up is going to give us a lot of protection and space. Then I’ll get more dinosaurs and we can work on some comfort projects.”
“I am looking forward to that,” Trel said, as she lifted up a clay funnel to show me. It was part of the water filter design she had crafted with Galmine. “This will be ready for finer sand after we get the wall up and trenches built. Then we will have clean water.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said as I turned to Kacerie. “And your soap.”
“Me too,” the beautiful pink-haired woman smiled at me and then her eyes opened wide with surprise.
A glowing light filled her skin as if she had a spotlight aimed at her. Trel, Sheela, Galmine, and I gasped when a loud popping gun-shot sound cracked.
The light from Kacerie instantly faded and the woman let out a long exhale.
“Ahhhh,” she sighed with pleasure.
“What was that?” I asked, but I already guessed the answer to my own question.
“That was my Lance recharging,” she said as her eyes narrowed.
“Ahh. That’s sooner than expected?”
“Yeah,” she whispered as she turned to look at Trel. Then Kacerie turned to look at Sheela.
There was suddenly a lot of tension in the hut.
“Well…” Kacerie said as she set down her empty plate. The woman stood up gracefully and then flexed the fingers of both her hands as if she was preparing to play the piano. “I guess it’s my watch.”
“Yeah,” I said as I felt a bit of relief pour into my stomach.
“Alright, I’ll wake you up for the second one, Victor.” Kacerie smiled at me, and then she stepped out of the hut.
Trel, Sheela, and I all let out long exhales as soon as she left.
“What’s wrong?” Galmine asked as she picked up Kacerie’s plate.