Free Earth Girl by Janet Edwards

didn’t share my feeling that the past was still alive, but Playdon did. It was strange to recognize my own passion for pre-history in an exo.
    We all stood there for a while after that, silently thinking. Finally, Playdon spoke again in a brisk voice. ‘Tomorrow, we’re working in Sector 22, and we’ll be heading out on to the site along the clearway that you can see over there.’ He pointed out the path, with its glowing markers, leading off into the ruins.
    Playdon had been carrying his lookup with him. Now he worked on it for a moment, and a miniature model of the New York Dig Site appeared in mid air ahead of us. He increased the projection to a huge size that would be quite a drain on the lookup’s power, and zoomed in. We could see the clearway now, with ruined buildings either side.
    ‘This is the way we’ll be going tomorrow. I’m getting this image from the data mosaic for New York Main. This is how the area looked at the last aerial survey about ten months ago. I can look at it in several ways. Plain image like this one, or hazard rated by grid square.’
    The image changed. Now it was coloured in patches of red, amber and green squares.
    ‘As always,’ said Playdon, ‘green is good, red is bad, and black is access forbidden, but bear in mind that the hazard ratings are only a best guess from the computer. I can add in the information on which grid squares have already been worked and they go blue.’
    Some squares changed to blue. Not surprisingly, the blue squares tended to cluster near the clearway.
    ‘Notice some areas are flashing blue.’ Playdon pointed at one. ‘Those mean they’ve been partially worked, but still contain something interesting. I can call up further information on those. Usually, people stopped work because they came across an unexpected hazard, but tomorrow we’re going to a grid square where they just ran out of time. The team dug out a stasis box from there, and believed there was a second one but didn’t have time to reach it. Normally they’d come back for it the next day, but this was just before Year End and their last day at New York Main. Tomorrow, we’ll be picking up where they left off, and we hope they were right about that second stasis box.’
    Zan, I thought joyfully. Tomorrow we would be digging, and with every chance of finding a stasis box!
    Playdon turned off his lookup, and led us all back to the base. ‘You’ve got an idea now of the conditions you’ll be facing. This afternoon, I want you all to practise suiting up. I’m sending details of styles and prices of skintights to your lookups. If anyone wants one, let me know this evening. We can get a discount on a group order, and they usually deliver within a day.’
    ‘That’s all for now,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we start the real work.’
    We headed into the dome and there was a race to get out of our suits and be first into the bathroom. I won!

6
    The next day we headed out for our first dig. It was another slow start, with people still struggling with impact suits. We finally got outside and Playdon opened up the big doors of the huge sled storage dome that sat next to the accommodation dome like a big brother. He turned on the glows, which slowly beat back the shadows and illuminated the huge space. There must have been nearly twenty hover sleds, in varying sizes, and I couldn’t even see some of the ones at the back.
    ‘We have several types of small specialist sleds, as well as the big transport sleds.’ Playdon looked round at us. ‘Who’s had experience driving a hover sled?’
    I put my hand up. In an Earth class, just about every hand would have gone up. Here only about half the hands did. I suppose exos don’t have as many hover sleds around as we do on Earth. We get more solar storms, so have more portal outages to worry about, and every settlement has its emergency hover sleds.
    ‘Good.’ Playdon made notes against names on his lookup. ‘If you can’t, then it’s really