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Diary of Inji'Zora Jerall, 21.4 Changes
Becoming a member of the emergency response team may have been the worst or the best idea I have ever had. On one hand, I see more surface light and suncaves than anybody else, on the other hand I could really use a full down-cycle of sleep once in a while. We are getting more and more tremors and cave-ins. I asked the geology department, the architects and the techs to come together for a conference later this week on the stability of the caves. Hopefully that will bring us some new perceptions.
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The blaring of the alarm horns woke Inji up after too few hours of sleep. She rolled out of her bed with a yawn and sat on the floor to put on her clothes. She had started to wear a tight undersuit for sleeping and only needed to pull over a sturdy overcoat to be ready for First Response. Five minutes later she was out on the walkway and ran towards the main base in this part of Mekken.
They cabin she shared with Gilaan and Heon was near the sunfarms in a new part of Mekken. It also happened to be close to Veelen's cabin. A fact that had nothing to do with why she liked the area. At least that was what she was telling herself.
She was the first at the base, she was a bit proud of that. The alarm-waveat was buzzing with automatic messages from the seismographs, needles scratching over parchments. She saw that it was the northern part of the cave again, another tremor. The sound of another seismograph needle starting to scratch made her wince. It had only dithered when she had entered but now it was fully oscillating from one side to the other. The alarm-waveat beeped even more, indicating a second tremor at the north.
Two people stormed into the room, emergency response helpers like her. She knew them both well, one was a geologist, the other was the head constructor of the first suncave that Inji had installed. His name was Lergten'Ibani and the way he usually acted, he had constructed and installed Suncave Star all on his own, carrying the scaffolding himself on his massive shoulders. But he was always respectful to Inji and the other members of her suncave team, so she didn't mind his boasting.
The geologist, Binali'Gikki, slid on a chair next to Inji. She was the complete opposite of the burly constructor, small and fragile but with a grim determination in everything she did. "Where is it?"
"North, a second one has just begun."
"The crack we saw two days ago?"
"Possibly." Inji jumped up and grabbed her gear, the other two did the same. They shouldered their bags and ran towards the northern part of Mekken.
The walkways were full of people running the other way, away from the tremors. Emergency helpers let them over trembling walkways, making them walk fast one after the other to prevent accidents. During one of the first tremors, people had panicked and two men had fallen off the walkways and had to be rescued from the nets. One had died later from his wounds of the impact. The emergency response helpers had been established to prevent such accidents in the future.
The training for the emergency response helpers was still in development but Inji was quite impressed how well they worked. Small children were carried, bigger children walked behind adults, everybody formed a neat row. They left a gap in the middle of the walkway so that other emergency response teams could get through. People looked worried, the whole row flickering and flaring in many shades of blue and purple but nobody panicked out here.
That changed as they got closer to the disaster area. It began with small pebbles littering the walkway and soon became a bed of rocks to climb over. People were running around disoriented, some of them bleeding from head wounds. There were cries for help and sobs; parents and children calling for each other. A big chunk of the walkway to the cabins was missing and some helpers were placing iron beams and hardened fabric over the gap.
A young girl stood beside the gap, clutching a stuffed toy to her chest. She was completely silent, not even her lights were twinkling, she was almost invisible. One of the workers noticed her and waved down a helper to have her brought to safety. The helper lifted her on her arm and carried her past Inji. The girl still had no lights but she whispered "Father was there..." when they passed Inji. She wanted to ask what the girl meant but a scream from someone with his leg buried under a beam distracted her.
Inji kept running after Binali and Lergten until she bumped into a woman who just stood in the middle of the walkway, pressing a bleeding hand to her chest. One of her two fingers was missing and her blood ran down her dress and dripped to the floor. A little child was pulling on her dress, trying to get her to move. But she just stood there, blood dripping down and her lights slowly dimming. Inji wrapped a bandage around her hand and tried to get the woman to react to her but she was not successful. She finally managed to get her to turn around and walk with her to a small medic station.
The nurse took the woman and Inji ran back to the main disaster area. Lergten was climbing over a pile of rubble that had completely flattened a house and made the buildings next to it tilt dangerously. He shined a blue light from a portable light-tube towards the stalactites above the rubble. Inji felt a tingle of pride at seeing that, Heon had developed these light-tubes with his new small energy cells.
She climbed up besides Lergten and followed the beam of blue light with her eyes. A big rock or many had broken rafters and scaffolding on the way down, a steampipe was severed and billowed out white steam. What they could see of the ceiling looked solid, it had not been a full cave-in but a large part of the stalactites had just dropped down. It wasn't the only place where that had happened, all around them they could see fresh edges where rock had broken out of the solid cave walls.
Below the top level of cabins where they were now, the destruction was not quite so bad. Inji had read in the news pamphlets that people had begun to move out of the housing on the top levels and that cabins at the low level, formerly neglected because of the bad infrastructure around them, were now in high demand. Inji didn't blame them. She could see that some houses on the lower levels had been hit with rocks and debris but the damage was negligible compared to the disaster here on the top level.
People were still screaming, calling for friends or family members. But the emergency response helpers successfully evacuated the area, leaving Inji, Binali and Lergten alone to access the damage.
The three of them were supposed to catalogue the damage, order repairs and mark on the map where new support beams would have to be installed. Inji was not quite sure how they had become the leading team for this task, only Binali, the geologist, actually knew something about rocks and tremors. Lergten knew more about construction and the stability of iron rafters and scaffolding than Inji would ever manage to forget, so he was quite useful. Inji was considered the leading expert in dealing with surface contamination, a fact that greatly amused her. Somehow, they had become the first team everybody called when something happened in the caves.
Lergten shined the blue light to a crack in the ceiling. His voice boomed over the scaffolding. "I think this one is new, it might have started here."
Inji set up the picturegraph and waited for the exposure time to pass. They would be able to compare this crack to others they had in their library, so that they could make predictions about the stability of this area. She reseated the picturegraph three times, that way she had a good chance of getting at least one useful picture.
Lergten was already climbing further out and down, looking at the scaffolding underneath the destroyed cabin. Inji followed him, consciously ignoring the signs of a lived in house now crashed under the weight of a giant boulder. A colorful curtain was peeking out on the side and in between the rubble one chair stood out, intact, only a few pebbles on the seating. All other furniture had been reduced to splinters of hardened Kathurka fibers and bend metal. Inji didn't know if anybody had died inside of this house and she didn't want to think about it.
She took another three pictures of the scaffolding, having Lergten shine the blue light on it to get a decent illumination. He didn't say anything but he looked worried when he wrote in his notebook. Binali called them over, she had ventured out to the far end of the cave and was almost outside of the disaster area.
"Look at this," she pointed towards a small tunnel in the cracked wall, "this section is new. We audiographed this whole area only a few weeks ago, we had no indication of cavities behind these walls."
"What does that mean?" Inji asked.
"It means that either our audiographing methods are faulty or that this section is under much stronger geological drift than we have anticipated." Binali carefully balanced her weight on a beam to get closer to the part of the cave wall that looked like it had sacked and folded in on itself. Lergten grumbled something under his breath and pulled her back to tie a rope to her belts. They were supposed to be roped tight at all times but Binali was always the last one to actually remember that.
She flashed a thanks at Lergten and leaned out again to hold her stethoscope against the wall. Inji held her breath, even though she knew from experience that Binali couldn't hear anything when she had the pads from the stethoscope over her ears. Binali took out an iron rod and tapped the rockface in a slow pattern, listening intently. After many minutes - Inji was already getting impatient - she finally took off the earpads and leaned back.
"It definitely sounds different, like a new cavity has formed there. That would explain the destruction on this side, such a shift inside of the mountain would cause massive deformations and adjustments to this whole area." Binali spread out her arms to indicate the size of the affected area and it included almost everything they could see. "That means we could get shifting and faulting right around this scaffolding. This area is not safe and the scaffolding will fail."
Inji gasped, "Are you sure?"
Binali nodded. "I'm here to assess whether this area is safe to return to and I'm saying, based on what I know and my recent findings, that this area is unstable, not suitable for residential living." She pulsed her lights in confidence.
Lergten snorted. "The mayor won't like that, Mekken is already overcrowded, losing this part would mean that almost a quarter of the population will have to move to the other cities."
"How ironic," Binali said, "thanks to your suncaves, they finally have the protein shortage under control and now they have to reduce their population."
Inji sighed. They just had the first massive harvest, an enormous success for the suncave, with a harvest yield 400% over the normal rate. And the next harvest was only a few weeks out. The other cities already put in demands for their own suncaves. The old lumi-fungi farmers were not happy and spread the rumor that the sun-grown protein was not as nutritious and tasty as the traditional grown protein. But only very few people believed them.
Not having a protein shortage led to lifting the birth control act. With enough food resources for sustentation of the population, the quarians could grow again. Losing part of Mekken would make overpopulation a problem again and new residential caverns could not get constructed as fast as it was necessary anyway. Lergten was right, the mayor would not like this at all.
"I'll talk to the mayor," Inji said. She was supposed to meet him anyway, once again for a date that somehow turned into an official business meeting. The same stuff had happened three times already. Of all four dates they had had, only the first actually was a normal date in a restaurant. After that, whatever date they had arranged turned into a business meeting. Even when Inji had taken him to the unfinished suncave to watch the stars, they had to take his assistant and Lergten with them. That date was a lot less romantic than Inji had it imagined before.
Binali crawled back towards the new gap in the rockface. "I can't see how deep it is, hand me the light-tube," she held her hand out and Lergtern placed it into her hand reluctantly. That light-tube was his very special baby. Binali stretched as far as she could to shine the blue light into the tunnel. "I still can't see how deep it is, let's send the robot in."
"No, can't do that." Lergten pointed upwards to the severed steampipe. "Not enough pressure on the steam pipes until that up there is fixed."
"Sekka!" Binali flashed angrily and climbed further up in the shaky scaffolding. The blue beam of the light-tube travelled over the slanted wall as she looked for more cracks. Inji followed her and climbed over to the side above the new tunnel. The wall began to slant here and transformed into the ceiling. From below she had seen some cracks between the stalactites that she wanted to investigate.
It was difficult to climb the scaffolding, it had lost connection to the walls and was swaying. A few pebbles rained down on her and she used her own light-tube to shine blue light over the section above her. She froze and angeled her light to see better. The shock had her draw in a breath with a sharp hiss that made her colleagues look up to her.
"What is it?" Lergten called to her. His voice was so loud that it vibrated through the scaffolding.
"Shh, quiet!" She tried to keep her voice down but still loud enough for Lergten to hear her. Dust trickled down on her from the stalactites and she began to climb down as fast as she could. "Go! Leave!" she whispered to the others with all the urgency she could put in her voice. "Get away, hurry!"
Binali climbed down but she kept looking at Inji and slipped on a bar. Lucky for her, Lergten had paid attention and caught her. They crawled back to the walkway, making this whole section of the scaffolding sway. Inji almost lost her balance but she kept on climbing towards the walkway. "It's loose," she whispered when she was close enough for Binali and Lergten to hear her, "the whole section up there is cracked, it might come down any second!" She frantically waved to the others to move and not wait for her. "Go!"
Binali turned around and ran down the walkway towards the next intersection, pulling Lergten on his arm behind her. The vibrations of their steps forced Inji to stop climbing for a few seconds until the scaffolding stopped swinging. When she felt secure again, she started lowering herself down on the bars, step by step as fast as she could. Another rain of dust and pebbles fell down on her.
She finally reached the lower cross section of the scaffolding and crawled more than ran towards the walkway. A tiny sound like the crumbling of a parchment was all the warning she got before part of the ceiling came down. Stalactites crashed on the scaffolding and on the walkway, an arm's length away from her. The walkway folded up on itself, trapping Inji inside. Another load of stones and rocks crashed down, right where Inji was lying but the back of the walkway over her body protected her. In the silence that followed, she dared to take a shaky breath only to scream as the walkway broke off the scaffolding and fell down.
The folded up piece of metal groaned, sliding and screeching along the bars as it crashed down. Inji cried out as another hard collision catapulted her out of the contraption and threw her into the scaffolding. She heard more than felt her ribs breaking. Her fall stopped hard in a tangle of metal bars but more of the scaffolding piled up on her. One broken beam flew at her like a spear and almost stabbed her, another trapped her leg and twisted it. Inji cried out, she couldn't move and the pain was unbearable. She kept on screaming until the world went dark.
Thanks for reading!