Earth Star(125)
‘Captain Eklund had better enter our answers,’ I said.
I stood watching while Fian conferred with Leveque and then stepped up to the panel. He waited for the blue phase to appear and tapped some symbols. The pattern stopped scrolling upwards, and flashed for a moment.
‘First answer accepted,’ said Leveque’s voice.
The flashing stopped and Fian entered the next set of symbols, which was again accepted. After the fifth answer, I started to wonder how long this would take. Fian entered another three answers before the panel suddenly went dark and the door swung open. The aliens worked in base eight, and wanted eight correct answers. Well, that made sense.
I stepped up to the door, and my light showed the tunnel continuing ahead with the same curious horizontal white crystal line. ‘I see another door ahead.’
I walked on down the tunnel, with Fian beside me. We’d taken six or seven steps, when I heard a sound overhead and instinctively looked up. I saw the darkness of the ceiling move, a shaft of light where there shouldn’t be one, and then rocks crashed down on me. My impact suit triggered hard in response, freezing me like a fly trapped in amber, and sending me into the darkness of impact suit blackout.
37
I woke up, unable to move or see. There was the usual second of disoriented panic after impact suit blackout, before I worked out where I was and what had happened. The suit material was clamped tight around me making it hard to breathe, my comms had gone to emergency mode and were squawking Mayday codes, and there was the sound of Colonel Torrek’s tense voice. I remembered the panic when Drago’s fighter was hit by the sphere’s meteor defence, and gasped out a few urgent words.
‘Cave-in. No attack. Repeat, cave-in.’
‘Major Tell Morrath, you’re sure you haven’t been the target of a hostile action?’ asked Colonel Torrek.
‘Perfectly, sir. I saw the ceiling coming down. What comms channels am I speaking on?’
‘You’re on command and auto distress channels, Major Tell Morrath,’ said Leveque. ‘We still have your suit telemetry but we’ve lost sensors and vid bees. What is your status?’
‘I’m buried under rocks,’ I said. ‘The tunnel ceiling was probably weakened by the landslide, and opening that door made it collapse. Captain Eklund, are you conscious yet?’
‘Yes. I seem to be in one piece but buried too.’ Fian’s voice sounded breathless but calm.
I relaxed. ‘Good to hear that. Can someone please patch our comms into site broadcast channel?’ I heard the comms note change as someone did that. ‘This is Major Tell Morrath. What’s our suit pressure looking like?’
‘This is Dig Site Command. Both your suits are green, except for your left leg, Major. That’s green flickering amber, indicating increased pressure from a sharp edge of rock, but still within safety margins. We have a lot of teams volunteering to assist you.’
‘This is Major Tell Morrath. Thank you for the offers. We’ll need to use some non-standard methods on this, because I still don’t want to risk lift beams too close to alien technology.’
‘This is Commander Leveque. Major Tell Morrath is correct to avoid the use of lift beams. The Science teams’ initial analysis indicates the control logic for the doors is encoded into the glass control panel and might be disrupted by a lift beam.’
I’d actually been worried about the alien technology hurting us, not the other way around, but it would be better not to break anything.
‘This is Colonel Torrek. Although I want to avoid damaging the alien technology, I also want my officers out from under that rock fall. How do we handle this, Major Tell Morrath?’
‘This is Major Tell Morrath. We need the assistance of the correct experts, sir.’ Thankfully, I knew exactly who to call on in this situation. ‘Are Rono Kipkibor and Cassandra 2 listening to this?’
‘This is Rono,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Cassandra 2 are in the volunteer queue.’
‘This is Major Tell Morrath. Captain Eklund and I were injured by a magnetic hazard at an old research laboratory on Eden Dig Site. I believe your team went in there to deal with it, working without sleds or lift beams, so you’re probably the best experts in this situation. I saw light from the floodlights outside as the roof caved in, so we have an opening in the tunnel roof.’
‘This is Rono. If the opening is big enough, we can set up a block and tackle and use ropes to lower people down to you. They may be able to move the rubble aside by hand. If necessary, we can shift larger rocks using ropes and some of the harnesses we normally use for stasis boxes.’