Earth and Air

by Janet Edwards

  “Amaz,” said Wren joyfully. “We’ll be doing real excavation work tomorrow. Totally zan!”

  “If you think you’ll be doing real excavation work, you’re deluding yourself,” said Landon grumpily. “Crozier won’t let us do more than play around on a flat area of rubble. You’ll be shifting rocks exactly the same way you’ve been doing here.”

  “It won’t be exactly the same,” said Wren. “Every rock on the training ground must have been moved hundreds of times by dozens of people. We don’t stand any chance of finding anything interesting here, but we will on the dig site itself.”

  “You really think you’re going to find an exciting historic artefact?” Landon gave a disbelieving laugh. “You can forget that. If the sensors show any hint of something valuable, Crozier will have three proper working teams arguing over who’ll get to excavate it.”

  “People often find valuable things by pure chance,” said Wren, “and we’ll have Jarra deciding which rubble we should move. She’s the best tag leader in the history club, so she’ll spot every place that could hide something.”

  I could tell by her tone of voice that Wren was picturing us finding some long lost treasure, like one of the missing sculptures by the twenty-second century twin geniuses Isha and Ishani Patel. Everyone excavating the ruins of the ancient cities, whether they were part of a school party working on a Fringe dig site or a specialist research team braving the deadly towers of the heart of an ancient city, had these fantasies.

  I felt perfectly justified in encouraging Wren’s optimism. Everyone knew that most of the valuable finds were made on the main dig sites, but there’d been startling discoveries on fringe dig sites too. There must still be countless treasures of art and science lying hidden somewhere in the sprawling ruins of the ancient cities. Perhaps someone would even find the Mona Lisa one day.

  “We’ll find plenty of things once we’re working on the proper dig site,” I said.

  Inevitably, Landon was as negative as possible. “You mean that we’ll find plenty of rubbish. Everything will have been broken or damaged by fire in the centuries since New York was abandoned.”

  “Even if the things are broken or burnt, we’ll still get to see and touch them,” said Wren passionately.

  “Yes,” Alund agreed, his voice quieter than Wren’s, but holding the same depth of emotion. “We’ll be finding things that were last seen, or touched, or worn by people centuries ago.”

  I gestured at the flat area ahead of us. “Let’s get to work now. Here at training area 6G, there aren’t any genuine rocks, just concraz cubes in three different sizes. You’ll be stacking cubes of the same size on top of each other, trying to build as high a tower as you can.”

  “I don’t see the sense in stacking cubes,” said Landon.

  I tried to keep my voice calm and patient. “As I’ve explained three times already, Landon, each of the training areas is set up to teach a particular skill. Yesterday, we were at training area 6F, where people learn to adjust the lift beam to move varying sizes and weights of rock. Training area 6G is about learning fine control of the lift beam. Once a tower is several cubes high, it gets increasingly difficult to add the next cube without knocking it over.”

  “All the training areas we’ve seen have been about learning to drive and use heavy lift sleds,” said Wren. “Are there other training areas for teaching you to be a tag leader?”

  I shook my head. “All the training areas are aimed at helping people become heavy lift operators because that’s the first job everyone does on the dig site.”

  “Is that because it’s the easiest job?” asked Alund.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “People start by working on heavy lift sleds because they’re easy to operate and you can learn to do the basics very quickly, but it takes a lot of experience and skill to become a really good heavy lift operator. Next time you’re watching the rest of the history club working, pay attention to Meiling on her heavy lift sled. Whenever there’s a crucial rock to move, one that could crush a buried artefact or cause a wall to collapse, you’ll see Milo call on Meiling to move it. She controls every movement of her lift beam perfectly.”

  I grinned as I remembered something. “Last summer, Crozier held a club competition at a training area just like this one. We all took turns using heavy lift sleds to build towers of the smallest cubes. Meiling’s tower was fourteen cubes high before it fell down. Totally amaz! You can compete to see how tall a tower you can build today. Wren can go first. Start working with the largest size of cube, because that’s easiest.”

  Wren climbed into the heavy lift sled, and put a rolled up sleep sack on the seat so she could reach the controls. Landon opened his mouth to say something, but I stabbed a finger in his direction and hissed at him.

  “One joke, just one joke, and you walk back to the dome.”

  Landon reluctantly closed his mouth again. I sat on the remains of a wall to watch Wren work. Landon sat down on my left. Alund pointedly chose to sit on the other side of me.

  I kept Wren building towers with the large cubes for fifteen minutes, and then moved her on to working with the medium sized cubes. After half an hour, Wren had managed to build a tower eight cubes high.

  “Stop working now,” I said.

  Wren reluctantly climbed down from the sled and came over to join us.

  “Alund can have a go now,” I said, “and then we’ll have a second round with you two working with the smallest cubes. After that, I’ll finish the afternoon by giving Landon some driving training.”

  “Do the main dig sites have more advanced training grounds?” asked Wren.

  “They don’t have training grounds on the main dig sites,” I said. “Everyone starting their Pre-history Foundation course will have spent time learning the basics on fringe dig sites like this one.”

  “I know everyone from Earth schools does that,” said Alund, “but what about the off-world Pre-history Foundation classes? Norm students coming from other star systems won’t have worked on Earth’s dig sites.”

  I shrugged. “There’s nothing stopping an off-world class from booking a dome on one of the fringe dig sites and using the training grounds. They never bother though. They just go straight to working on the main dig sites.”

  “Naturally norms will think they’re so superior to us that they don’t need basic training,” said Landon bitterly.

  “I don’t know or care what norms think,” I said. “I’m just happy that we don’t have to put up with them coming here to sneer at us and ...”

  My words were drowned out by the distant keening of a hazard siren. I jumped to my feet and looked around anxiously. My trainees were standing up and looking around too. Why the chaos was an alarm sounding here on the training ground? Then the hazard siren switched from the standard alert sound to a distinctive set of high-pitched notes that told me exactly what was happening.

  At the same instant, an urgent voice shouted over the broadcast channel. “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. Radiation spike! All teams, seal your suits and set to recycle air! All teams, seal your suits and set to recycle air!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Radiation spike! My trainees were just standing there, frozen in shock. I was shocked too. I’d never heard a genuine radiation alarm before, but all the years of practising alarm drills with the history club meant my reaction was instinctive.

  “Don’t breathe! Hoods up. Seal suits. Set to recycle air.” I screamed orders, while yanking up my own suit hood and sealing it.

  “This is Fringe Dig Site Command,” said the voice on broadcast channel. “All teams, radiation levels are spiking across New York Fringe. We are calling an immediate emergency evacuation. Repeat, radiation levels are spiking and New York Fringe is calling an immediate emergency evacuation. All evac and dome portals have been activated under major incident protocols. Evacuate by your nearest route.”

  The kids were trying to follow my orders, but with the slow and clumsy movements of
those still new to wearing impact suits. The suit air systems were designed to detect bad air and automatically switch to recycle mode, but they couldn’t detect radiation. I hit the red recycle air control on my own suit, saw Alund was struggling with a tangled hood, and reached out to pull it into place and seal it. I slapped his red recycle air control in the same movement that shoved him out of my way so I could reach Wren.

  The girl had her hood up and sealed properly, but was staring at her suit controls, clearly forgetting which control was which in her fear. I hit the red button for her, and turned to Landon.

  “Evacuate by your nearest route,” repeated the voice on broadcast channel. “Equipment and sleds should be abandoned. Anyone in difficulties should use the emergency channel to request additional instructions.”

  Landon had his hood up, but it wasn’t sealed correctly. As I adjusted his hood, and checked his air control, I was worrying about what to do next. I’d been trained to respond to an emergency evacuation order by running to the nearest portal. Since training grounds were supposed to be hazard free, there was only one emergency evac portal here, and that was all the way back at training area 6C.

  For an experienced impact suit user, running was faster than driving a hover sled, but I had a group of total novices with me. They were still finding it hard to walk in their restrictive impact suits. If they tried running to training area 6C, they’d keep tripping over, and drop from physical exhaustion long before they reached the portal.

  I wondered if I should ask for advice on the emergency channel, but Crozier’s voice spoke on channel 3. “Jarra, what’s your situation?”

  He was gasping out the words, obviously running. Of course the rest of the club would know how to seal their suits and adjust their air controls themselves, so they’d already be heading for their closest evac portal.

  “Suits checked and ready to move,” I gabbled. “The training ground evac portal is back at training area 6C. Do we drive or run?”

  “Drive!” Crozier snapped the order.

  “Get on the sled!” I yelled at the others, and climbed into the driver’s seat of the heavy lift sled.

  Wren and Landon piled aboard the sled, dragging Alund in on top of them. I got the sled moving and accelerated to its top speed, bitterly aware that we were still moving slower than running speed.

  A sudden radiation spike here on New York Fringe had to mean that either a dig team had unearthed some radioactive waste, or a containment field had failed and released it. The source could be close to us, or somewhere on the far side of the vast area covered by New York Fringe Dig Site, but wherever it was the radioactivity would be spreading on the wind. Our impact suits would only give us limited protection, so every second of exposure counted.

  “Jarra, status check?” Crozier’s voice spoke again.

  “We’re driving to the portal now.”

  For the next minute, there was silence on the comms, except for the voice on broadcast channel repeating the order to evacuate. I guessed Crozier was too busy with the other club members to talk to us. I was aware of my trainees huddling behind me like petrified mice. They didn’t have their suits set to speak on the comms, but they were all close enough that I could hear their sobbing breathing, as well as a weird humming sound that must be one of them fighting off a panic attack.

  I was fighting off a panic attack too. The main board of Hospital Earth believed in preparing its wards for the possibility their settlement would be hit by a radiation or chemical leak and they’d have to be evacuated. Unfortunately, they also believed that the best preparation was to make us so terrified that we’d obey any evacuation orders without question, and our training started when we were still in Nursery. One of my earliest memories was sitting on the floor with my friends chanting the radiation song.

  You can’t see it.

  You can’t hear it.

  Run to the portal, run!

  Back then, I’d thought of radiation as a ghastly invisible bogeyman that would rip you apart if it caught you. We’d had more detailed lessons when we were older, and my ideas got more realistic but even more frightening. Right now, I was remembering the science teacher’s radiation lecture. Twentieth and twenty-first century radiation could do nasty things to you, but it was the melting people of the twenty-second century that really terrified me.

  The pictures the science teacher had shown us back then started swirling around in my head, and were joined by an image of Dezi’s nightmare painting. I had to blank out those grisly memories, forget that I had three kids’ lives depending on me doing the right thing, and focus on driving this sled to the evac portal.

  That was a perfectly simple job. There was no reason for my hands to be shaking on the heavy lift sled’s controls. There was no reason for sweat to be dripping into my eyes. There was no reason for me to be gasping for breath.

  Crozier’s voice came on the comms again. “We’ve reached our evac portal, Jarra. The last few club members are going through it, and I’ll wait until you’re all safe too before going through myself.”

  The rest of the club would be safe in a Hospital Earth America casualty unit now. My friends would all be getting medical treatment. Crozier’s voice was a precious lifeline calming my terror, but I had to get him to go to safety too. There was no point in him risking his life by staying when he couldn’t do anything to help us.

  “Go!” I said. “The rest of the history club need you with them. I can see the evac portal ahead of us, and we’ll be through it in a couple of minutes.”

  “You’re sure, Jarra?”

  “Last week, you told me you trusted me, Crozier. Prove that now by getting the nuke out of here, or I’ll report you to Fringe Dig Site Command for disobeying evacuation protocols!”

  I heard a startled laugh on the comms. “I do trust you, Jarra. Portalling out right ...”

  Crozier’s sentence was cut off as he went through the portal. At that moment, there was an odd clicking sound on the broadcast channel, and a new voice started speaking.

  “New York Fringe is undergoing an emergency evacuation due to radiation levels spiking. New York Fringe Dig Site Command has evacuated, and command functions have been transferred to New York Main. Radiation levels are holding steady on New York Main, but a precautionary evacuation is in progress. New York Main Dig Site Command is currently remaining operational.”

  I felt horribly isolated. Crozier had evacuated. New York Fringe Dig Site Command had evacuated as well. I was alone in charge of three kids who were total novices on dig sites. Their lives were my responsibility.

  Landon spoke in a high-pitched, shaky voice. “Jarra, I can’t see the evac portal.”

  I took a deep breath, and tried to sound calm and confident as I answered him. “It’s not far now. Those trees just ahead of us are blocking our view, but I had to say we could see it to make Crozier go to safety.”

  “You swore at Crozier and he just laughed.” Alund sounded as shocked by that as by the radiation alarm.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to try that during a history lesson,” I said. “These are unusual circumstances.”

  We were past the trees now. I expected to see training area 6C and its evac portal ahead of us, but there was just another group of trees. Nuke it! Had I missed a turning and gone the wrong way?

  “All teams, evacuate by your nearest route,” the voice of New York Main Dig Site Command nagged at me. “Abandon sleds and equipment. Anyone in difficulties should use the emergency channel to request additional instructions.”

  We went past the second group of trees, and I finally saw training area 6C and the red circle that was our escape route. The evac portal was glowing, showing it was already active and ready to send us to safety. I gasped in relief, drove up to the portal, slammed on the brakes, and yelled at the kids.

  “Get through the portal!”

  They tumbled off the sled, dropped to their knees, and crawled through the miniature portal. I counted them through, crawled after
them myself, and felt hands grab my arms and tug me up on to my feet and forwards.

  I gave a wild look round. We were in a grey-walled room, with half a dozen people in strangely bulky white suits and helmets. My training kicked in again.

  “Hot team!” I shouted. “Hot team! Radiation exposure.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “We know,” said the calm male voice of the nearest white-suited figure.

  I felt a nardle. Naturally the medical staff here would know exactly what had happened. This wasn’t the usual situation of a single dig team getting in trouble, but a major incident, so Dig Site Command would be coordinating with Hospital Earth America Casualty.

  The man started waving a sensor at us, and I felt the burden of responsibility drop from me. These people were in charge now. I could go back to being a kid again, just doing what I was told.

  The man studied his sensor for a moment and then nodded. “Take off your suits and dump them. Put your lookups and any other personal items in the red crate by the wall. Don’t keep anything but your skintights.”

  I dumped my lookup in the red crate, and started tugging off my impact suit. The kids were emerging from their suits too, and turning to look at me with terrified faces.

  I realized I’d been celebrating too soon. My trainees had already been panicking. Now they were naked except for the skintights they wore under their suits, and feeling even more vulnerable. The presence of anonymous strangers, sealed inside what had to be special suits with radiation shielding, was making things worse rather than better.

  My responsibility wasn’t over yet. The kids needed comfort and reassurance from someone familiar, and right now I was all they had. I was chaos bad at dealing with my own feelings, so I was the worst possible person to give others emotional help, but I had to try.