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
