It did? I should? That had just been a mistake, but …
Dalmora looked around. ‘We’d better start in here so people can see your face, then go outside. Is there anything secret we shouldn’t show in the vid?’
‘I doubt it. The Military would have warned us, and anyway they can edit it out.’
‘Dalmora, Krath and Amalie will be making vids, but what do you want me to do while we’re here, Jarra?’ asked Playdon.
‘You’ll be my liaison with Pereth, and stop me saying anything embarrassingly stupid to him,’ I said.
The vid team set up, and crowded with Playdon into the far end of the sled behind the vid bee view. I ached all over, I wanted to lie down and whimper, but I had to do this first. I remembered Dalmora’s words and pictured Issette. She was back in Ark, with Keon. She’d be watching this soon, so I could talk to her.
Vid bees glowed and Dalmora made technical-looking hand gestures at me. She was probably ready for me to start.
‘Welcome to … No, hold on a second.’ I turned to Fian and adjusted the controls on his Military blue impact suit.
‘What?’ He looked down suspiciously at what I was doing. ‘Why am I getting silver bars on the arms of my impact suit?’
‘My suit has command gold bars. You get silver for being deputy.’ I nodded to Dalmora. ‘Ready.’
‘That makes me feel a bit silly,’ said Fian.
‘How do you think I feel?’
Dalmora made hand signals again and I smiled at the vid bee. ‘Welcome to Zulu Dig Site. I’m Major Jarra Tell Morrath, Field Commander for this operation. This is my deputy, Captain Fian Eklund. As you can see, we’re currently inside our Field Command sled. Zulu Dig Site is located in the African rainforest, so we have to take precautions against predatory animals, insects and other hazards. We’ve not only got the normal species of Africa here, but mutated forms of those originally native to South America, and some that were genetically salvaged after becoming extinct in the past.’
Was I sounding as exhausted as I felt? I hoped not. ‘Creatures like scimitar cats and dire wolves are obviously dangerous, but the insects are an even bigger problem. Fire ants and bullet ants have extremely nasty stings, so we need to put up our hoods and seal our suits before we go outside.’
Fian and I did just that, and then I started talking again. ‘As we leave the sled, you’ll notice some sonic blurring and coloured lights which make sure insects don’t get inside.’
We headed out of the sled, with the vid bees and their controllers trailing behind us. One of the Earth 2 heavy lift sleds towed a huge tree across in front of me, and I paused to let them go by. A vid bee danced around to get both me and the tree in image. No, it wasn’t a vid bee, it was frizzy haired Issette, and I was explaining things to her.
‘You’ve probably already seen an aerial view of the trees covering this area,’ I said, ‘but now you can see the sheer size of them and begin to understand the conditions we’ll be struggling with. We don’t dare to use sonic missiles near the possible location of the alien device, so we have to cut a path through the trees the hard way.’
I gave Issette another moment to take in the size of the fallen giant being towed away, and then walked closer to the forest edge. ‘We’re looking for an alien device buried here over a thousand years ago. You may wonder why aliens chose to leave it in the middle of the rainforest, and the answer is they didn’t. There was plenty of rainforest in Africa back then, but not right here. A lot has happened since then; climate changed, humans devastated the rainforest and then decided to restore it. The forest now covers a much wider area than before, and is very different from the way it used to be.’
I could see my ghostly Issette pulling a face, and imagine exactly what she’d be saying at this point. ‘No history lectures! Bad, bad, Jarra!’ She was out of luck, because Colonel Torrek wanted me to show off my specialist knowledge.
‘Humans introduced genetically modified species of tree to help the rainforest colonize new areas. The trees you can see here are almost all Griffith hybrids, which means this area of rainforest is only about fifty years old. When the Griffith hybrids die naturally, or get cut down by us, new saplings will race to grow in their place. True rainforest species will win that race, because Griffith hybrids were designed to survive in a wide range of conditions, but be slower growing than the original rainforest species.’
Something blue caught my eye. I stooped to pick up a fragment of broken branch, and disentangle something from it. ‘This creeper, with greyish green leaves and pretty blue flowers, is another genetically modified plant, one that’s been busily reclaiming the deserts of Earth for several hundred years. It’s started living in rainforest, which it was never intended to do, but so far it’s very rare here and does no harm.’