The next day she was out working late on a trencher.  It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble;  Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out.  They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.

Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists' to the permanent habitat.  The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree.   Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft.  "Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?" Spencer asked.

"Break the boulder," Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached.  She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe.  She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked it drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.

Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest.  Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white.  There were shouts in her ears:  "What's wrong?  What happened?"  She must have screamed.  "Help," she grated.  She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer.  She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock.  Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free.  The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint.  Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone.  She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain.  Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in. . . how long?  "Freeze, damn you, freeze," she cried.  She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it.  Blood all over, steaming.  She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand.  Already it hurt less.  Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand!  Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted.