Earth Girl (13 page)

‘Are they alive?’ I asked.

There was a pause of about ten seconds or a few years before Dig Site Command responded. ‘Alive and in need of urgent medical assistance. Emergency evac portal 3 is activated and Hospital America Casualty is standing by for incoming injured.’

A female voice spoke up. ‘This is Earth 19. We just arrived at rescue site. Asgard 6, should one of our sleds ferry casualty to portal?’

‘Thank you, Earth 19. Please do that.’ Playdon sounded relieved that he didn’t need to send novices off on a sled alone.

‘Moving our lifting sleds into position to assist, and awaiting tag leader orders,’ said the Earth 19 team leader.

That was me. I hesitated. ‘Earth 19, do you wish to send in a new tag leader?’

‘You are tag leader, Jarra. You’re familiar with the site and doing a fine job. Call for our lifts when ready.’

I glowed at the praise for about a microsecond, then got tagging. Things went a lot faster with five sleds lifting, and three of them fast professionals. I stabilized a bit of the havoc around where we’d dug out the person with the failing suit, and then went back to steadily working downwards across the whole area where people were trapped. Progress went abruptly slower as we neared their level, and Playdon guided me as I carefully freed one impact suit after another and tagged them for rescue. One, two, three … Finally, we reached number nine and I could relax.

When we had everyone aboard the sleds, we headed off in convoy towards the emergency evac portal. I lay on the bench at the back of the tag support sled, lost in an exhausted daze, as I vaguely listened to the voices chattering away on the broadcast channel.

‘This is Beowolf 4 team leader. Smooth work Asgard 6 and Earth 19. Sounds like you have the situation secure so we’re returning to base.’

‘This is Asgard 6,’ said Playdon. ‘Thank you for responding in case we ran into trouble.’

‘This is Dig Site Command. Patching Cassandra 2 team circuit to broadcast channel.’

‘This is Cassandra 2 team leader, Rono Kipkibor,’ said a new voice. ‘Thank you for your assistance, Asgard 6 and Earth 19. Great job, tag leader, we appreciate it.’

Several other weary voices chorused agreement.

‘We hope Stephan is all right,’ said Playdon. ‘Things got too close when his suit failed. Say something, Jarra.’

Me? I set my comms to speak on broadcast channel for a moment. ‘Glad to help, Cassandra 2.’

We reached the portal. It was only an emergency evac one, so it was tiny and had no controls, but was just calibrated to transmit to a specified receiving portal. We strapped each Cassandra 2 team member to a hover stretcher before sliding them through, then there was another round of polite conversation involving the various teams and Dig Site Command on the broadcast channel before things finally went quiet.

Playdon ordered team 1 across to one of the transport sleds, and picked out some of the rest of the class to drive the sleds back. I shifted across from my bench on the tag support sled to a bench on the transport sled, and stretched out again. With the excitement over, I was so tired that I actually fell asleep on the way back to the dome. This wasn’t a good idea. I’d never fallen asleep in an impact suit before, and waking up was quite disorienting and scary. In my panic, I hit poor Fian. He had been holding on to me to stop me falling off the bench whenever the sled hit a bump.

‘Sorry,’ I said, staggered my way to the edge of the sled, and nearly fell off.

Fian and Playdon grabbed me, one on each side, got me off the sled and steered me into the dome ahead of the crowd.

‘That was totally amaz!’ Dalmora said. ‘Jarra, you were just …’ She broke off. ‘I don’t know the words to describe it.’

Yay, I thought. I have Miss Alpha lost for words. I tugged my suit hood off and swayed a bit.

Fian caught me for the second time in two minutes. As my tag support, he probably felt it was still his job. ‘You all right, Jarra?’

Good question. I had my feet on the solid flexiplas dome floor, but I felt like I was still hovering in mid air.

Dalmora dashed off for a moment, and reappeared with a glass of Fizzup. She passed it to me, and I gulped it down.

‘Jarra’s just been working very hard saving some lives,’ said Playdon. ‘The Military are only human like the rest of us. Get her to the bathroom, Fian, and then to her room.’

There was a bathroom. I managed to peel off my impact suit and there was, oh joy, a shower. After that, there was a bed, and I slept in my skintight rather than making the effort to change. After a few hours, I woke up, dressed, and groped my way to the dining room. There didn’t seem to be a class in progress, everyone was just sitting round tables and chatting. They all went quiet and watched me as I got some food from the dispensers and started eating.

‘We’ve had a news report from the hospital,’ said Playdon.

I stopped eating and looked up.

‘Stephan, the tag leader whose suit failed, lost both legs but has no brain damage. A month in a regrowth tank getting new legs and he’ll be perfectly fine again. Everyone else just has minor injuries. I’ll be heading over to visit them later.’ He paused. ‘The Cassandra 2 team are very good friends of mine.’

I probably should have asked Playdon to give them a message from me, and wish them a speedy recovery, but I was too exhausted to do more than mutter I was glad Stephan had made it. I finished eating after that and staggered back to bed. I’d helped save some lives. The lives of norms not Handicapped. All through the madness I’d never even thought about that. They’d just been people.

There was something else. Playdon had referred to me as Military. He’d shifted sides, from threat to ally and I didn’t just feel safer because of that, I felt … I felt good.

I fell asleep again.

After sleeping most of the afternoon and evening, I had a restless night with weird panicky dreams. I was the person stuck in the rubble in the failing suit, lying there helpless while my legs were slowly crushed to a pulp. Not nice. Not nice at all.

We had ordinary lectures all the next day. We didn’t go on the dig site, or even set foot out of the dome. Playdon must have felt we needed some recovery time before facing the dig site again. I don’t know about the others but in my case he was certainly right. My body was stiff and aching, and my mind was a mess.

So, Playdon spent that day taking us through twentieth century history and the birth of the mega cities instead of working the dig site. The twentieth century is the one they summarize as war, war and bore.

Well, of course it’s boring in school history lessons. They miss out the space race since it was made irrelevant by portals. They miss out the cold war because it involves the ‘nuclear’ word too much. All the kids keep sniggering, tell their parents what teacher said, and the school gets swamped with complaints. At least, that’s what happens with ProParents, and I can’t imagine real parents are any more sensible about their kids going round saying ‘Nuclear bomb, nuclear bomb, I’m allowed to say nuclear bomb because teacher said nuclear bomb.’ As far as young kids are concerned, the line between nuclear bomb and the proper nuke word is so thin it might as well not be there.

Playdon wasn’t afraid to refer to nuclear bombs with a bunch of allegedly mature 18-year-olds, so we got war, war, cold war and bore. If there was the odd faint snigger in the class when he said the word nuclear, then it could well have been the memory of him swearing at Lolia on the dig site yesterday, rather than pure childishness.

Boring or not, I was deeply thankful to sit in the dining hall and let a couple of world wars drift past my ears. My nerves were still vibrating like tightly strung wires, and the boredom was soothing.

It was worrying to find I was still so wound up. It was all over. Everyone was fine. Why was I still a nervous wreck? At one point, I even found myself wondering if I should talk to my psychologist, but fortunately I returned to sanity ten seconds later.

I comforted myself with the thought that Playdon seemed to be looking a bit ragged too. Yesterday must have been a nightmare for him, landed with a rescue when all he had to work with was a clueless bunch like us. He’d said the buried team were friends of his, so he must have been trying to stay professional while going through personal hell.

Class finished about five, and Playdon grabbed some food and vanished off somewhere. Maybe he was in his room, reliving the rescue and quietly screaming to himself, the same way I’d been last night.

The rest of us lounged around in the dining hall, snacking on whatever we felt was the closest approximation to real food and drink that the food dispensers could produce. Having discovered that it’s more or less impossible to laze comfortably in a flexiplas dining chair, the class dragged in all their pillows and cushions and lounged on the floor instead. They kept making admiring comments about me being tag leader on the rescue. Even Lolia seemed to be rather impressed. It was somehow nice but embarrassing at the same time, so I retreated to a quiet corner by myself.

Fian joined me after a while, and handed me a fresh glass of Fizzup. ‘Playdon was talking about some interesting stuff today. My school barely mentioned pre-history. Delta sector isn’t exactly keen on any sort of history for that matter. That’s why I applied to Asgard rather than a Deltan university.’

I suddenly realized that while making a cross-sector university application wasn’t as crazy as an ape pretending to be a norm, it was still quite a brave step. ‘Are you finding it hard on this course?’

‘I’m coping. Yesterday was a shock of course. How are you feeling today?’

I hit the glass of Fizzup with a finger nail so that it made a ringing musical noise. ‘You hear that? That’s my nerves still twanging.’

‘You did great yesterday.’

‘Only because I knew I could depend on you to get me out of trouble.’

There was a pause before he spoke again. ‘I wondered if I could ask you something. It’s always puzzled me, and you’re Military so you probably know all about it.’

Playdon had called me Military in front of the class, and I’d decided that was a message. I’d helped save the lives of his friends, so he’d stop challenging me on my Military knowledge. I’d let myself relax a bit, thinking things would be easier now. I was wrong. Playdon might have stopped deliberately testing me, but my classmates would keep doing it in total innocence, and avoiding talking to people would advertise the fact I had something to hide.

‘Yes?’ I asked, warily.

‘Why did Kappa sector get settled after Epsilon? Shouldn’t it have been Zeta?’

I was lucky. I’d wondered about that myself, and worked out the answer years ago. I reached for my lookup, and displayed a standard holo of the three concentric spheres of humanity.

‘Alpha sector is the first sphere centred on Earth. Beta, Gamma and Delta cluster round it forming the second sphere. Beyond those, the third frontier sphere has lots of sectors marked out, though we’ve only started colonising two of them so far. Now, look where Zeta sector is, and you’ll see your answer.’

Fian frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘When the Delta sector planets were nearing the end of Planet First, the Military started setting up the portal relay network for the first frontier sectors. What was happening when Delta was being colonized?’

Fian’s eyes widened. ‘The Second Roman Empire! Zeta sector is right next to Beta sector.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Beta sector was independent and hostile back then. They’re still the most … different … of the sectors even now. Their clan system. Their class system. Their lack of a nudity taboo. No wonder Lolia and Lolmack don’t fit in with the rest of the class.’

Fian and I instinctively glanced across the room at the two Betans, before tacitly abandoning the subject. I’d answered Fian’s question and could relax again, but not too much. I’d passed this test, but I knew there’d be another and another and another. I couldn’t afford to fail any of them.

Dalmora entered the hall at this point, carrying a guitar. She explained it was an instrument that dated far back into pre-history. There is a natural law of the universe that says someone always brings a guitar along on a history dig. They always play the same songs too. Two people in my school history club had them, though I had to admit Dalmora played better than they did.

We listened to Dalmora singing the song about two boys and one girl. My first year in Next Step, everyone was singing it. The boys keep asking to date the girl, and she can’t decide between them, and the chorus has her singing that her mum won’t let her go triad so she can only go two. In the last verse, the boys decide to forget her and date each other instead. Dalmora got the words muddled in verse three, but it was a pretty good performance all the same.

‘My home planet is Hercules,’ said Fian, when things were quieter again. ‘Please don’t say that I haven’t the muscles for Hercules. Half the class already said it.’

I giggled and looked him over. He wasn’t exactly a muscle man but … ‘I’ve seen worse.’

He looked absurdly pleased at my comment. ‘My parents are specialists in solar storm prediction. My older sister is studying multi particle wave expansions.’

‘I understand solar storm prediction,’ I said, ‘but multi particle wave expansions mean nothing to me. Like … what?’

He smiled. ‘Me too. Delta sector is heavily into science, like Beta sector is heavily into sex, but I can’t see the appeal of it.’

I laughed.

‘I meant I can’t see the appeal of science, not sex. Sex is …’ Fian shook his head. ‘I’m digging myself in deeper here, aren’t I?’

I nodded.

‘Well, I can’t understand the fascination of science, and my family feel much the same about history. It’s pretty zan being here with people who I can actually talk to about history without them falling asleep.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was always boring my friends to death, and getting told off for lecturing them, but when I find out something totally amaz about the past I just want to share it with someone.’

‘I can imagine history isn’t the number one topic of conversation on the average Military base.’