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 up there. Laser guns are fiendishly dangerous things and kept safely locked up, so I had to take it over to Playdon.