Earth Star(120)

‘I. See.’ Playdon spoke the two words very slowly. ‘I noticed a few around, but. …’

I wished I could see Playdon’s face at that moment, but of course it was hidden by his impact suit. We followed the road through the trees to the target point, and then dodged our way past the people hard at work cutting a new route down the hill. Once we were safely out of view in the trees, I paused to examine my hand sensor. Turning it on was easy. It started making clicking noises.

‘What’s the clicking?’ I asked.

Playdon took a look at it. ‘It’s already been set to test for something.’

Fian turned on his own sensor. ‘Dust levels in the air.’

‘If we just …’ Playdon tapped at my sensor, and a faint, cone-shaped light appeared. ‘You should be able to use this to examine what’s underground, but it’s much smaller than any sensors I’ve used and I can’t see a display.’

‘Perhaps if I …’ I held the sensor above my forearm lookup, both chimed, and a fuzzy image appeared on the lookup. I pointed the hand sensor at the ground ahead of me, and the lookup image became sharper.

‘You check the ground, Jarra, I’ll check the air,’ said Fian.

We headed downhill through the trees, managing to get over a fallen one by setting our hover belts to their maximum height. The clicking on Fian’s hand sensor was getting steadily faster.

‘I see what you mean about the Tuan creepers,’ said Playdon.

I’d been concentrating on finding my way between the trees and making the odd sensor check of the ground, but now I looked up. ‘I’m not even going to try and count that lot.’

‘There’s over sixty,’ said Fian, happily.

The trees thinned, and we found ourselves at the top of the landslide. I stopped and looked warily down the steep slope that ended in a jumble of fallen trees and rocks far below.

‘We’ll have to go around that,’ said Playdon.

I stared at it a moment longer. ‘You two go around. I’ll go straight down and meet you at the bottom. If there’s anything for us to find, I’m betting it’ll be in the middle of that. You’d cut a tunnel into the steepest point of the hillside, just before it starts levelling out, wouldn’t you?’

‘You can’t possibly climb down that, Jarra,’ said Playdon. ‘It’s a mass of loose stones and soil, so you’d slide down out of control.’

‘Once we’ve got a tag support sled here, I could use the beam to lower Jarra down there,’ said Fian.

I shook my head. ‘If there’s anything under there, I don’t want any beams, even tag support ones, near it.’

‘I know aliens wouldn’t think like us,’ said Fian, ‘but it’s silly to dig a tunnel into a landslide.’

‘There might not have been a landslide back then,’ I objected. ‘It looks like a whole section of hillside recently collapsed.’

‘Wait a few minutes, Jarra,’ said Playdon. ‘I’ll go back and get a rope.’

Fian laughed. ‘Now that’s a really old fashioned lifeline. Will they have any on the site?’

‘Yes,’ said Playdon. ‘Not genuine ancient rope of course. The research teams use ones made of plas fibre compounds, virtually unbreakable, resistant to being cut, and fire proof. They’re useful in really awkward or high places.’

It seemed a long wait before Playdon returned with a length of thin rope, a harness, and some other mysterious items. He was followed by Krath and a hovering vid bee. I tried to forget we were being shown live across all the sectors of humanity, and concentrated on putting on the harness while Playdon and Fian picked a tree and set up some sort of framework around it to allow them to let the rope out slowly. When they were ready, I clipped my end of the rope to my harness, checked I was firmly attached, and started backing down the slope.

Progress down was slow. I had my hover belt turned off, because it would just send me skidding wildly downwards. Even on foot, small stones constantly slid away from beneath me, and I’d have followed them downwards if it wasn’t for the rope bracing me. More worrying was when a sudden shower of debris fell on me from above, and a large boulder came bouncing downwards and narrowly missed me.

At intervals I stopped and tried to ignore my hazardous position, while checking dust levels and taking sensor images of the ground beneath me. I’d set my lookup to relay everything to Fian, so he and Playdon were watching them too, and talking to me on a safely private channel where Krath and his audience of billions couldn’t eavesdrop.

‘There’s an awful lot of dust here,’ said Fian.