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.’
