Earth Star

18

It took a while for things to get back to normal after the funeral. The Dig Site Federation Accident Specialist insisted on us suffering an entire day of boredom while Playdon repeated all the special Eden safety lectures. The following day, Eden Dig Site closed entirely while a doctor went around every dome giving people special inoculation shots. The class did get outside the next morning, but we didn’t go further than the edge of the ruins, and spent the whole time practising specialist sensor sled alarm drills.

Repeating lectures had just been tedious, but the drills were four solid hours of screeching sirens and hard physical work. Most of the time, the sensor sled just screams its standard alarm that means pull the tag leader out of the danger area, but some alarms warn of a serious threat to the whole team. Unstable ground, you get to the clearway as fast as possible. Tower falling, you get away as fast as possible and just keep going. Magnetic, you cut all lift beams, abandon sleds, and run like chaos before things start exploding or your own suit kills you. Radiation, you head for the nearest evac portal and get Dig Site Command to warn Hospital Earth Casualty to prepare for a hot team arrival. Chemical is like radiation, except you pause on the way to the evac portal to spray yourselves with decontaminant.

Four hours of that added up to an awful lot of running, which is no fun at all when you’re wearing restrictive impact suits. We all hated it, but even Krath had enough sense not to utter a word of complaint. Playdon had had to portal to Asgard at two that morning to be interrogated by his department head back at University Asgard, and had barely got back in time for breakfast. He was even more exhausted than we were.

That evening, I watched Petra’s old friends pointedly ignoring her, and felt sorry enough for her to try approaching her myself. She answered my attempt at sympathy in a savage voice. ‘Don’t you realize I’d rather not have any friends than be friends with you. Nuke off!’

I got the message and left her to sit alone for the rest of the evening. I suppose it was stupidly insensitive of me to have even tried talking to her, but …

The day after that, the Dig Site Federation grudgingly gave us clearance to work on the dig site again. Since we were well ahead with theory lectures now, we spent two long days excavating the Eden ruins, only stopping when forced to by the inevitable rain.

On the first day, we found nothing, but on the second day we found a stasis box. Playdon let me help him run the Stasis Q safety checks, and we opened it to find the usual data chip with a farewell vid from a family leaving Earth in Exodus century, as well as something completely different to anything I’d ever found before. A set of diaries, actual physical books, handwritten by some eccentric back in the first half of the twenty-fourth century.

I’d have liked to spend the evening reading them, but Fian and I had arranged to portal over to Earth Europe and meet my friends from Next Step. We all went to Stigga’s MeetUp as usual, because Maeth had talked Stigga into letting us back in. It should have been really zan, but I felt uncomfortable about laughing and joking so soon after Joth’s death. Issette and the others kept talking about the Ark evacuation as well, reminding me of all the things I was hiding from them. I was relieved that Earth Africa was on Green Time plus two hours, so Fian and I had a good excuse for leaving early.

The following morning, the class headed out while the early morning rain was still falling, so we could go further than usual into the Eden ruins. Our little convoy of sleds drove nearly halfway to the Eden Ring, before we turned left on to a small side clearway that suddenly ended in the middle of an anonymous area of rubble.

The sleds pulled up in a neat line at the end of the clearway and I looked across at the nearest intact buildings. They glowed white with the occasional hint of blue or gold, looking deceptively fragile with their frivolous towers, archways, and balconies. It was hard to believe they’d been abandoned for over three hundred and fifty years. A casual glance could miss the fallen walkways and encroaching rainforest plants, and expect to see people looking out from those empty windows.

I pictured these buildings in the height of their beauty, and compared them to the functional domes that were the basis of half Earth’s current architecture. The depressing natural grey of the flexiplas was usually coloured to be more cheerful, but even so …

‘I wish we could make glowplas,’ I said on the team circuit.

Playdon was right next to me, so I could hear his voice echoing as he replied, the original voice a little quieter than the one speaking over the team circuit.

‘We know it’s a form of plas, like the flexiplas we use in a thousand applications today. Tougher and far more durable than concraz, with a natural white glow. The details of the manufacturing process were lost, along with so much other technology and knowledge, in the Earth data net crash at the end of Exodus century. For a couple of hundred years, humanity was too busy struggling to survive after the collapse of Earth to worry about making glowplas. Since then, there’s been a lot of research into it, but no one has managed to come up with a form of plas that’s anything like it.’

‘We’ll probably never find the secret,’ I said. ‘We’ll never build anything as beautiful as Eden again.’

‘Don’t give up hope, Jarra,’ said Playdon. ‘Perhaps one day, scientists will rediscover the process, or some dig team will find a stasis box containing the answer.’

‘Just imagine the bounty payment they’d get for that,’ said Krath.

Everyone laughed. While we were working on New York Dig Site, our class had found a stasis box holding ancient paintings, and been rewarded with one of the bounty payments you got for especially valuable finds. Ever since then, Krath had been constantly discussing our chances of getting another reward.

‘Team 1 will be excavating the remains of a fallen building in this grid square, and will be using the team circuit for their communications,’ said Playdon. ‘We’ll let them start work, and then I’ll get team 5 doing a little practice firing tags at glowplas.’

There were some exaggerated groans from the members of team 5, who preferred to sit and watch the rest of us do the work.

‘I know, I know,’ said Playdon. ‘You lot want to be theoretical historians, and you hate the dig site work. I understand, but you must do enough of it to pass the practical side of this course because it’s a prerequisite for starting your full history degree.’

Fian went to the tag support sled, Krath and Amalie to the heavy lifts, and Dalmora to the sensor sled. They began moving them into position at the extreme edge of the clearway. I waited until the tag support sled was stationary, and then went across to collect my hover belt and tag gun. Fian attached his lifeline beam to the tag point on the back of my suit, and there was a familiar itching feeling between my shoulder blades, which vanished even before Fian had finished double-checking the beam was properly locked on to me and closed it down to minimal power. The itch was pure self-conscious nerves at being at the mercy of the lifeline beam operator, most tag leaders got it, but I had total confidence in Fian so mine faded very fast.

I put on my hover belt and enjoyed the luxury of swooping across to Dalmora’s sensor sled. A fringe benefit of being a tag leader was hovering above the uneven rubble that formed the clearway, instead of having to walk on the stuff. Dalmora was ready and waiting for me on her sled, already holding a set of four sensor spikes.

Playdon recited the codes for the positions of the four corners of our sensor net, and I took each spike in turn from Dalmora and input the numbers, then gathered all four spikes under my left arm.

I set my comms to speak on team circuit. ‘Heading out to set up sensor net.’

I hovered my way across the rubble, noting an awkward length of metal girder that could cause problems later. It was unusual for an Eden building to use metal in its construction, so this had probably just been a storage warehouse.

A sensor spike bleeped as I reached its position. I juggled it into my right hand, gave the single sharp downward thrust to activate it, then moved on to place spikes 2 and 3. There were several huge blocks of glowplas blocking the point where the fourth sensor spike should go.

I sighed. ‘Sensor 4 will be about three metres above optimal.’

‘Adjusting for that,’ said Dalmora. ‘Activate.’

I perched myself on top of the blocks of glowplas and activated the sensor. ‘How’s that?’

‘Sensor net is active and green,’ said Dalmora.

I skimmed back across my dig site to join her at the sensor sled. I like to take a look at the sensor displays, and get an idea what nasty surprises might be under the rubble, before starting work. Playdon was at the sensor sled too. He always kept a close eye on the displays himself. Dalmora was good, but reading the shifting, confused images is a very specialized job that takes a long time to learn.

Around the main sensor display were the six peripheral ones for major hazards. Fire, electrical, chemical, water, radiation and magnetic. All of them were clear, so I concentrated on the main display. ‘No old foundations littering the place. Good.’

‘That’s one of the joys of working on Eden,’ said Playdon. ‘Other sites have layers of old buildings under everything, but Eden was built from scratch.’

Dalmora pointed at the display. ‘That might be a stasis box.’

There was a blank point in the images that could be a stasis box, or just an empty cavity under the rubble. Sensors can’t detect stasis fields, so you have to work by a process of elimination. Cross off all the space taken up by detectable objects and look for stasis boxes in the gaps.

‘It could be,’ said Playdon.

‘Starting tagging now,’ I said.

I hovered out across my dig site to a position above the possible stasis box, and looked around to assess the situation. Not only were huge lumps of glowplas on top of where I wanted to dig, but the girder stretched across it as well. I decided to shift some of the glowplas before worrying about the girder. I checked the setting on my tag gun, saw it was set for concraz and boosted the power. Tags needed to be fired at higher speed when working with glowplas.

I tagged a dozen or so pieces of glowplas successfully before I got a ricochet. The small, sharp, metal tag bounced back at me, hitting my right arm, and I gasped as the material of my impact suit locked up in that area. A few seconds later, it relaxed so I could move my arm again.

That’s the one thing I hate about glowplas. It looks totally zan, and it doesn’t have the nasty tendency of ancient concraz to break in pieces when a lift beam is moving it, but it’s really hard to tag. Even with the gun set to punch out the tag at maximum force, it’s easy for the tag to ricochet off the smooth hard surface of glowplas.

My suit had saved me from serious injury, but I’d have another impact suit bruise there to add to the collection I already had. I guessed team 5 would be suffering from ricocheting tags as well, but Playdon was keeping their complaints off the team circuit so they wouldn’t distract us.

I tagged half a dozen other lumps that I wanted to move, and then floated aside. ‘Amalie, Krath, please shift those over to my left. Dump them over the boundary into the next grid square which has already been worked.’

I watched the heavy lift beams lock on to the tags on the first two lumps, and checked they were moving them to the right area, before I turned to hover my way back to the clearway.

‘I’ll need a laser gun. That girder is rotten with either rust or chemical corrosion. I want to cut it into sections rather than risk it breaking while it’s being moved.’

I went to the back of the transport sled and collected the laser gun case from the heap of equipment piled up there. Laser guns are fiendishly dangerous things and kept safely locked up, so I had to take it over to Playdon.

He unlocked the case. ‘I know I keep repeating this, Jarra, but be careful with the laser gun and keep the safety on whenever it isn’t in use. I’ve seen too many accidents with them. Those include someone slipping and cutting off their leg.’

There were a few gulps on team circuit. One of them came from me.

‘What do you do if that happens, sir?’ asked Fian.

‘The impact suit clamps down automatically at its severed edges, but don’t count on that holding. Get a medical tourniquet on above the wound.’

Playdon’s words left me with a painfully graphic picture in my head and a screaming left little finger. I headed out over the rubble to where the girder was lying. I examined it carefully, deciding where I would cut it, before taking the safety off the laser gun and using it with painstaking care. When the girder was in six pieces, I put the safety on the laser gun and zoomed back to return it to Playdon. With the image of a severed leg in my mind, I wanted to get rid of the evil thing as fast as possible.

I went back to tagging for a while, before pausing to consider my dig site. ‘The heavy lifts can shift the sections of girder and the tagged glowplas out of the way, then do a drag net of the smaller rubbish.’

I left the heavy lifts at work, and went to sit on the tag support sled with Fian. Amalie and Krath shifted the big pieces out of the way, then expanded their heavy lift beams to their widest extent to drag random small bits of glowplas, concraz, metal, and rock out of the way. The widened beams were too weak to lift the largest of these off the ground, so they bounced along until they reached our rubbish heap. After the heavy lift beams had made several passes over the site, the next layer of larger rubble was exposed ready for tagging, and the beams focused in tightly again ready to lock on to tag points.

I went out and started tagging again. We’d shifted three more layers of rubble and I was tagging the next when I heard the sensor sled alarm go off. The blocks of glowplas beneath me suddenly shifted and fell downwards. My hover belt, designed to stay a fixed distance above the ground, let me fall after them. Rubble toppled in from either side, attempting to bury me in a glittering tomb, but I was already being yanked back upwards clear of the landslide. Fian had pulled me out with the lifeline.

‘Thanks for the save,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome, Jarra.’

I swung through the air on the end of the lifeline beam, and was lowered neatly on to the clearway next to the tag support sled.

‘Stay clear of the site, Jarra,’ said Playdon. ‘Dalmora and I are still working out what happened.’

I climbed on to the tag support sled, feeling a bit shaky. The unnerving thought had occurred to me that if the ground had given way under my feet while I was using the laser gun, Playdon might have had another amputation on his hands.

After a moment, Playdon spoke. ‘There was a major collapse into some sort of deep underground storage tank. The cavity we were interested in has closed up, so definitely no stasis box down there. There aren’t any other likely spots in this grid square, and this area is highly unstable now, so team 1 should move to the square directly ahead of us.’

I collected our sensor spikes, overrode their settings with four new location codes from Playdon, and moved to our new work site. This grid square contained a glowing building, which looked almost intact. I set up the nearest two sensor spikes.

‘I’ll need to move the tag support sled closer, Jarra,’ said Fian. ‘You’re on the limit of my beam range.’

‘Make sure you keep well clear of the area that collapsed,’ said Playdon. ‘The other sleds should stay on the clearway until we’ve got the sensor net active and checked for hazards.’

Fian drove his sled slowly and cautiously towards me and parked it. ‘You can carry on now, Jarra.’

I checked my third sensor spike reading. ‘Optimal position for the third sensor point is inside the building. Can we move three metres sideways?’

‘That’s over our limit,’ said Dalmora.

I sighed. ‘The building still has the remains of one of those external spiral ramps that the Eden designers loved. I could set the sensor spike on that. That’ll only be a metre sideways, but about four metres too high.’

‘That should work,’ said Dalmora. ‘It’s always easier to compensate for height than for distorting the square.’

I moved carefully up the spiral ramp. ‘I’m in position.’

‘Activate,’ said Dalmora.

I thrust the sensor spike downwards, and it activated. As it did so, the sensor sled alarm shrieked at me in a tone that triggered instant adrenalin. I responded without thought, instinctively leaping off the ramp in the direction of the tag support sled. There were two hazard alarms that you hoped like chaos you’d never hear. Radiation was bad, but magnetic was worse. This was magnetic.

I fell downwards, but only for a second before my impact suit tightened around me, and then I was falling upwards instead. My lifeline was tugging at my back, but that was trying to take me sideways. It was something else that had me in its grip, making me fall upwards, and that meant I was dead.

Playdon shouted on the team circuit. ‘Cut beams. Run!’

My impact suit was crushing me, and my lifeline was battling against the upward force. The lifeline beam was still on! I was already dead, and there was no sense in both of us dying. I managed a strangled yell despite the pressure from the suit. ‘Fian, cut beam!’

There was a strange high-pitched sound, and I wasn’t falling upwards any more, but spinning over and over. Sky, ground, and glowing building whirled frantically around me, and there was a deafening explosion. I knew what that was. That was Fian dying. I would have screamed, but I’d already used the last of the air in my lungs to tell the idiot to cut the beam and save his stupid life. He’d been too nuking stubborn to do what he was told, and now he’d never be stubborn ever again.

The impact suit wouldn’t let me breathe any more, so I couldn’t say the swear words that would have earned me about ten red warnings under the Gamman moral code. I didn’t have time to say anything anyway, because the ground flew up and hit me in the face.