A fifty meter windtrap could feed a moderately sized family. Water their crops, quench their thirst, for years, so long as it was maintained. Small villages, on the edges of the great deserts, appeared as ancient shipyards from the sky, sails spread against the wind, catching the sparse moisture from the bitter winds. Farther out, where the dunes shifted and the roads led to ruins, the windtraps were warped and dried, stiff with sand and dirt blown across their membranes.
In the deep desert, nestled between outcroppings of wind-torn granite, a small forest of twisted and torn sheets leaned away from the prevalent wind, and in the center, a single pristine sail.
In 613, Lord Blys, the last remaining overlord of Sherwood had brought his family and his retainers to Crete. With the riches they'd pulled from Bretonia's markets, they bought and traded and wormed their way into the Corsairs. With the very last shreds, they constructed windtrap after windtrap, modern and effective, mechanized, more than they could have needed. They planted gardens and apple groves, built forges and blasted their way into the rocks. The Estate of Blys had fallen, of course, but the line was not extinct. Catalina a Jovem wandered the waste above the vaults, toward a little house under a single sail, which she'd stayed at, during her summers as a child.
When the gladiator had settled down just outside the villa she grew up around, a small house near a lemon tree. Since she'd left, her mother away to Zoner worlds for years...the staff had left, and the tree dried up, choked on the soil. On her way to the door, she reached out and grabbed a twig from that tree, tucking it into her pockets as she crossed the threshold.
The windows were down, the comforting flicker of the heatscreans gone. In her room, her things were sparse, scattered by the winds. On her bed, a quilt, marked with an ancient coat of arms. A Bretonian thing, Gram had given her.
With the quilt, she flew to the Spaceport, and hammered on the door of Juan Montoya's apartments. She needed to access council records.
These were old-model triangle-sail windtraps. No frame or tower, the fabric was spread from a single vertical mast, toward, ideally, an aqueduct leading to the cistern on the base. These, the aqueducts were buried under centuries of dust, and the sails bent straight around the masts, backwards from the prevailing wind.
The fabric was stiff, but not brittle around the mast, where some moisture was still being caught. Though the edges were frayed, there was still just enough material at the tips to attach bucky-cables to the groundside corners, to pull the sand-plated sheets forward on great pulleys, to just above the aqueduct. This took days of slowly pulling and then cinching the cables where any faster the fabric would crack. A pilot couldn't afford even one new sheet, the corsair empire as a whole could barely afford enough new sheets to replenish those lost in storms.
She didn't own a crane, nor could she afford to rent one. To rent a crane, she'd also need a flatbed, and she'd have to drive it over two hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, only an intermittent fifty of which actually had uncovered pavement, so it'd have to be a crawler with dustproof intakes. She couldn't afford to rent a crane, and she definitely couldn't afford a crane and a trawler.
She'd thought about a ladder, but where could she get a ladder seventy meters tall? Same place she could get a crane, and such a large ladder, that would take a trawler to move. A smaller trawler, but the problems were the same. Instead, she'd have to climb.
Sweat dripped from her brow. She was thirty meters up, hauling on her magnetic rung. She had thirteen, but was only using four...pull one off, by the cables that led to her belt. Haul it up, mount it, then haul herself up another rung. She had to get to the top, to wrap a cable around the top so she could attach another pulley chain and haul it back upright, and she had to do it while the sun beat and she could see. She'd bring a great deal more water, for the next windtrap.
Juan Montoya was just arriving at his city apartments. This particular residence was in a small spaceport, quite a while away from Crete's largest city. It was also a small harbour town, on the edge of one of the few small seas that graced Crete's surface.
Getting off the shuttle, he stepped in the direction of his apartment. Nursing his sprained and lightly bandaged hand as he went, he barely paid attention to the soft sea breeze brushing against the side of his face.
Once he arrived, he was confronted by his door.
But he was much more interested at what was on his door than the key he needed to open it.
"What's this rag?! Who in the world would've nailed this to my door?"
He pulled the quilt off his door with his uninjured hand and eyed it closely. It was dirty, but it didn't look worn. The seams were still tight, and only the dust prevented him from making it out.
"Oh well. I'll just wash it..."
He slung the quilt under his arm and put his hand on the door handle.
"Oh yeah, the key!"
Feeling his pockets for his keys and keycards, he fumbled about for a little bit. Soon, his hands were searching, ever more desperately, for his unlocking mechanisms.
"Crap..."
He desperately searched his pockets one last time.
"... For pete's sake!"
Keeping the dirtied quilt under his arm, he trudged angrily back to the shuttle-stop. He needed to find his keys. As he stepped on to the shuttle again, he remembered where they were; on his workdesk in his villa.
There were, settled beneath the last windtrap, a small house, flanked by a pair of lemon trees. The house was bare adobe, mud and sand and earth blown up against the plascrete walls. The glass was brand new, shining out the windows, and the compressor stuttered with age. Antique furnature mixed with state of the art fabrics, and an ancient netuplink glowed with activity. Crete histories, Declasified Council Records, Blys Archives.
Her family led back to bretonia, to something called the "Bretonian Bucaneers." Trafalgar was involved, something about previous owners, before the Junkers repressurized it.
To ressurect a settlement that'd been dead for decades and rotting for far longer, one could expect an aweful lot of work. Her Gran had lived here, and lived rather well, off of only one windtrap, lonely in the ruins. She hadn't ever been a particularly work loving induvidual, and only a pilot of passing skill, but Catalina threw herself into the repairs, the painting, the climbs and the hikes. It was an unasked for motivation which drove her to repair a house, and then another, down lines, without any intention of inviting others to live in her Gran's Mausoleum, and such it was, a port of boatless sails towering above rows of houses, only one lived in.
At night, the wind whispered through the sails and the shutters rattled. There was something wrong with the lines of the town, something slightly alien, something definatly not Cretan. These people were bretonians, once. She was Bretonian, in a way.
There had been time to re-dig the tunnels, against the storms. The mirror of the village paths above, carved into the ground. She dug them out by hand, without the aid of automation. Her ship had died, engines and filters clogged by the fine sand on the wind.
The machines she had brought had all succumbed, first the objects from other worlds, with open cracks and plastic oyster-shell cases. Such things, here, filled with sand. The sand got into the crevices, filled the buttons and packed itself into the layers of capacitive screens. The wind blew it lazily across the world, and even re-painted buildings, with fresh seals along their doors, unlived in, they collected dust as well. They filled up, and filled up...and after a while...
Catalina's dedication to her family's ruins turned to despair, and she fled underground. The houses sat on one side of the dunes, on another side of dead places..and things which had been planted in hope withered and died.
The oranges never grew.
And she turned to the tunnels, and dug them out with a dumb shovel, nothing else working. She lived off of long stockpiles of packed materials, and above her, on the edges of her system of tunnels turned crypts, she sqatted in a land once wet, once engineered to alluvial, dried under the sun as the wind wicked moisture away and parched it dead.
And again, the windtraps were bent back against the wind...for it would take more than one, lonesome girl, to fight the march of wind and sand.