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.