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A week later, the history club was driving a line of sleds through New York Fringe training ground 6. It was a perfect summer afternoon, warm without being uncomfortably hot. Since there were no hazards here on the training ground, everyone had their impact suit hoods down to let them enjoy the sunshine.
I was driving the heavy lift sled at the end of the line, with Landon sitting next to me, while Alund and Wren were perched on the bench seat at the back of the sled. Landon jabbed a finger across at the small, red circle of an emergency evac portal next to training area 6C.
“I don’t see why we can’t just portal over here to do our training instead of having to drive here.”
“Can’t you see that emergency evac portal is only big enough for a person to crawl through on their hands and knees?” Wren’s voice was filled with sarcasm. “How do you think we’d get our heavy lift sleds through it? Take them apart and pass them through a piece at a time?”
I heard Alund laugh, but felt more like whimpering myself. Wren and Landon had had an especially bitter argument four days ago. I’d no idea what it had been about, but it wasn’t just Landon starting fights now. Wren had gone on the offensive, grabbing every chance to insult Landon.
“I wasn’t suggesting that we’d drive the sleds through the portals with us,” said Landon. “I was thinking that New York Fringe could keep some sleds here. Then people could portal in, use the sleds to do their training, and portal back to their domes.”
“Again, people can’t use evac portals to travel around the dig site.” Wren’s voice was even more sarcastic now. “Emergency evac portals do exactly what their name suggests, Landon. They’re the cheapest possible type of portal, just used to evacuate the dig site in an emergency. You can’t choose your destination. They just dump you out of New York Fringe to somewhere like a casualty unit.”
“That’s a stupid system,” said Landon. “They should have proper portals here.”
“It’s not the system that’s stupid,” said Wren. “It’s you. It would cost a fortune to scatter proper portals all across an area the size of New York Fringe.”
“I didn’t say they should have proper portals everywhere, baby Wren. I said they should have proper portals here at the training ground.”
“You can stop calling me baby!” snapped Wren.
“I’ll stop calling you baby when you stop calling me stupid!”
“Calm down, both of you,” I interrupted the argument. “There’s a simple reason New York Fringe doesn’t leave expensive equipment like hover sleds here to be used in training. If someone damaged a sled, like the time one of the history club spilt Fizzup on a sensor sled’s controls, they’d sneak off without admitting it.”
“It’s not just that Landon doesn’t know about the evac portals.” Wren gave an angry shake of her head. “He doesn’t seem to know anything about dig sites at all. I don’t understand how he managed even a minimum pass score on his gold safety award.”
“Yes, I only scraped a pass on my gold safety award, while you were highly commended.” Landon was shouting now. “You point that out at least ten times a day. All it proves is that I’m not as obsessive as you.”
“It’s not that I’m obsessive,” Wren yelled back at him. “It’s that you don’t pay attention. We’ve been at New York Fringe for eleven days now, and Jarra’s been training us every afternoon. Alund and I have nearly completed our heavy lift sled training exercises, but you can’t even drive a sled in a straight line yet.”
Alund was a quiet boy, who’d been staying out of the Landon and Wren conflict. I was surprised to hear him suddenly join in on Wren’s side.
“I’m getting tired of this too. The three of us have been spending every morning watching the others working on the dig site. Wren and I are desperately keen to start doing real excavation work ourselves, but Landon’s going to keep us stuck on this training ground all summer.”
“We could be working on the dig site already,” said Wren, “if it wasn’t for Landon being so lazy and useless.”
“Stop insulting me!” shouted Landon.
Technically, my position as club captain only entitled me to intervene to stop bullying, and this wasn’t a case of Landon bullying Wren any longer. If anything, she was the one bullying him. I didn’t care whether this counted as bullying or not though. I’d just suffered a whole morning of listening to Gradin and Valeska arguing, and was in no mood to listen to my trainees screaming insults at each other.
“Quiet, both of you!” I ordered.
Landon shook his head. “Wren is being a ...”
“Quiet, Landon!” I yelled at the top of my voice. “If I hear one more word from you, I’ll throw you off this sled and make you walk to our training area.”
Landon gave a heavy sigh, but grudgingly went quiet. We drove on in silence past more training areas, until the line of sleds stopped next to the flat expanse that was training area 6G.
I parked our sled, jumped down to the ground, and waved at the rest of the history club. I could see Crozier sitting on the lead transport sled, unmistakable in his green impact suit and baseball cap. He waved back to me, and I heard a background click as he joined comms channel 3 for a moment.
“We’ll be back to collect you in two and a half hours, Jarra.”
“Good luck with the excavation work,” I replied.
There was another click as he left our comms channel. I watched the other sleds drive off down the track into the ruins, and then turned to where my little team of three had gathered in front of the heavy lift sled to wait for instructions.
“Landon has been making very slow progress at using heavy lift sleds,” I said. “I know the other two of you find that very frustrating, it’s frustrating for me too, but you must be patient and polite about it. If Crozier joins our comms channel and hears you shouting insults at each other, then you’ll all be thrown out of the history club.”
Wren gave a groan of despair.
I ignored her and kept talking. “You don’t have to worry about being kept here on the training ground any longer. Crozier told me that as soon as you were competent using heavy lift sleds, I could take you to do some very simple excavation work alongside the rest of the history club. I’ll talk to him tonight, explain the problem, and tell him I want us to start working on the dig site tomorrow afternoon.”
Landon scowled at me, but Wren and Alund were looking hopeful now.
“My plan is that I’ll have Wren working a heavy lift sled to move rubble for me for the first hour,” I continued. “Alund can move rubble for the second hour. I’ll spend the remaining time working with Landon on the basics of using a heavy lift sled.”
“Do you think Crozier will agree to that?” asked Alund.
I nodded. “Crozier can’t let us drive sleds through the dig site alone, so the rest of the history club have to make detours on the way to and from their excavation to bring us to the training ground and collect us afterwards. Spending more time here waiting for Landon to catch up wouldn’t just be frustrating for us, but waste precious working time for the whole history club.”
“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!”
