Earth Star

by Edwards, Janet

  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.

  19

  When I woke up, every inch of my skin seemed to be on fire. Impact suits are designed to protect the wearer, but high magnetic fields do terrible things to them, turning them into a torture machine. They contract, crushing the victim inside, their material distorting into a mass of jagged points.

  I should have died, pulled helplessly towards whatever was generating that magnetic spike, my suit continuing to squeeze me until I was crushed into pulp. I was in agony, but still alive, because Fian hadn’t cut power to the lifeline beam.

  He’d known exactly what would happen, because the safety lectures spell it out. Strong magnetic fields create a power feedback in lift and lifeline beams. That’s a very calm sentence to describe a nightmare situation. When a magnetic alarm goes off, everyone hits the beam emergency power cut off buttons and runs for their lives, praying the sleds won’t explode before they’re out of range. Fian hadn’t done that, he’d pulled me out of the grip of the magnetic field instead, and he’d paid the price for it.

  I opened my eyes to see a blurred, demonic red sky swaying drunkenly above me. My eyes still worked, since the strip of special material that let me see out of my impact suit was rigidly inflexible. I could hear my comms too. There was a confusing babble of voices talking on broadcast channel.

  ‘This is Earth 3. We can come and meet …’

  ‘Negative! This is Dig Site Command, repeating negative. Sector 21 is now code black. Earth 3, acknowledge that.’

  ‘This is Earth 3. Acknowledging code black.’

  ‘This is Dig Site Command. Emergency evac portal 57 is active. Earth Africa Casualty is standing by to receive critical injuries.’

  ‘This is Asgard 6. Estimate four minutes from portal. Tell them to prep two tanks.’

  Playdon’s words were staccato, as he panted for air between them. I must be on a hover stretcher, and Playdon would be running alongside, guiding it with one of the handles. Months ago, I’d helped transport injured members of the Cassandra 2 research team and send them through one of the small, one way, emergency portals that were linked to casualty units. Now I was strapped to a hover stretcher and headed for one myself.

  My brain was stupid with pain, but it finally processed Playdon’s words. He’d said tanks. Two tanks. I forced out a single word question. ‘Fian?’

  ‘Jarra?’ Playdon sounded startled to hear my voice. ‘Fian jumped at the last minute. The blast caught him, and he was hit by flying debris, but his suit says he’s alive.’

  I made a noise that was something between a cry of pain and relief. Dalmora spoke, the direction of her breathless voice telling me Playdon was running on one side of my stretcher and Dalmora on the other.

  ‘Can we give Jarra pain meds?’

  ‘No!’ Playdon shouted the word. ‘There’s no time and we mustn’t open her suit unless she starts drowning. Hold on, Jarra. It won’t be long now.’

  Fian was alive. I concentrated on that and enduring the pain one second at a time. A fragment of my mind chased something that didn’t make sense. How could I drown in an impact suit?

  The crimson sky made a sharper swing than usual and stopped moving. What was happening? I couldn’t hear properly now, my ears were full of liquid, and I just caught a murmur of words without meaning. They’d stopped running so we must be at the portal. They’d send the stretchers through first, one at a time, followed by the rest of the class and finally Playdon. I wasn’t moving, which meant they were sending Fian through first.

  I waited several interminable seconds, before my stretcher started moving again. They were sending me through the portal, which meant Fian was already safely in casualty. He’d make it now, surely. He wasn’t sick like Joth, just injured. They had to get him in a tank, but …

  The face of a woman appeared above me, and she opened the front of my suit hood. The liquid clogging my ears trickled out and I could hear again.

  ‘Jarra, you’re in Earth Africa Casualty,’ she said. ‘You’ve got whole body surface wounds and have lost a lot of blood, so we’ll sedate you, take off the suit, and get you into a tank.’ She turned her head and shouted. ‘Get the rest of those people out of our way!’

  Blood, I thought, that’s how you can drown in an impact suit. I felt a nardle pride in solving the puzzle. The woman turned back towards me, smiled, and held a tube to my neck to give me a shot of sedative. The pain stopped and the world went away.

  20

  When I woke up the next time, I was in a bed, I could see Candace smiling down at me, and things didn’t hurt any more. I must have done my time in a tank, been fixed up, but where was …?

  ‘Fian?’ I demanded.

  ‘He’s in the next room, Jarra. He’s still in a tank, but he’s making good progress and they expect to decant him tomorrow. There’s absolutely no need to worry.’

  I took a moment to absorb that before moving on to the next question. ‘The others?’

  ‘No one else was hurt,’ said Candace. ‘You’ve been in a whole body regrowth tank for three days.’

  I instinctively lifted my hands and looked at them. I seemed to be back in one piece.

  ‘If you’ve questi
ons about what happened, I should call in Dannel. He’s waiting outside.’

  ‘Dannel?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Dannel Playdon.’

  Lecturer Playdon had a first name? Well, of course he did. I told myself that I was a total nardle, lifted the covers, and peered down to see what I was wearing. I was in a perfectly respectable, hospital white, sleep suit.

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked Candace.

  ‘Just checking I’m decently dressed,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to shock Playdon. He’s as conservative on sexual things as a Deltan.’

  Candace gave me a funny look. ‘Dannel Playdon is Deltan.’

  ‘What? Asgard is in Gamma sector.’

  She sighed. ‘Jarra, your lecturer grew up in Delta sector, but attended a University course on Asgard in Gamma sector and later joined their staff.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fian had joined a Gamma sector course because Delta sector didn’t do a lot of history teaching. Playdon must have done the same and …

  I let the thought drop, because Playdon had arrived. Candace was sitting in one of two chairs by my bed, and Playdon took the other.

  ‘It’s good to see you looking well, Jarra,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir, and thank you for getting Fian and myself out of there. It was a risk coming back for us.’

  ‘I’ve lost one student this year, and I’ve no intention of losing any more. When the alarm sounded, I ran down the clearway with the rest of the class. Fian’s sled exploded, but the others didn’t. I told the class to stay where they were and went back. I didn’t dare use any of the sleds of course, but I picked up two hover stretchers and a hand sensor and went out to collect you. I was watching the magnetic readings on the sensor with every step I took, and I was ready to ditch my suit if necessary.’