Rock Rift, page 7
“You said all hands.”
“All helping hands,” he said through gritted teeth. “We don’t need a report for management right now. Although I’m sure Scraff will be waiting to hear about the failure of safety standards and the dangers of overworking.”
She shook her head. “That report writes itself. But more importantly, as intercessor I can unlock some emergency resources.”
He glared at her. “So do it.”
She didn’t bristle at his tone. When they arrived at the shaft where Tillerson, Arjay, and the other miners had descended, she went immediately to the comm panel, jacked in her company tab, and entered her code.
The hoist platform was crowded with milling bodies. Emergencies and rescues were all too common on Ydro-Down, and yet every time, the initial response was chaos until protocols—cold and practical—kicked in. Rescuers were already roping in to rappel into the hole since the hoist had lost power in the explosion. Even if power had been available, they couldn’t risk igniting the scintillating dust still uncurling from the hole like the poisonous breath from some abyssal monster.
The rescuers’ lume-stick headlamps swept around the tight space in a confusing light show that made Gavyn’s eyeballs ache. He adjusted the setting on his lenses, further restricting the light as he reached for one of the e-suits that the rescue team had brought on a rolling rack.
“Grey, you can’t go down there.” Jashanna wrapped her fingers around his elbow, her grip harder than she’d hold a whomper, as precise over his pressure points as she’d hold her recorder.
“I’m supposed to be down there already,” he growled. “Arjay took my place.”
“So? We need you up here.”
“Up here is down there,” he snapped. “You think there’s a difference?”
Jashanna scowled back at him. She was one of the few miners who matched him in size and strength, but he’d never made her part of his inner circle. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. But if their nascent rebellion were quashed, someone would need to take over the leadership of those who survived. And she was both experienced and well liked by the others. “They need you, Gavyn,” she murmured. “Don’t lose it now.”
“Exactly. They need me, which is why I’m going down.”
“Not them,” she said in an even lower voice. “You know they’re probably lost already. I’m talking about the ones right here.”
He opened his mouth to tell her to get vacced—not helpful at all, he knew—but Yumi strode up. “I’ve requisitioned the gravity assist to bring over the largest whomper, two crawlers, and an extra 3D printer from the open pit mine in the next valley. It’ll be here in about two hours.”
Jashanna blinked at her. “How’d you do that?”
Yumi patted the QueCorp tab at her side. “I have the code.”
“Too long,” Gavyn growled. “They can’t hold their breath for two hours.”
“They had the best suits,” Jashanna argued. “If they weren’t killed in the blast or crushed in the cave-in, their filters will last until we can run an air line. And then get extraction down there.” She nodded at Yumi.
Rather than fight, he reached for one of the e-suits on the rack. Yumi’s hand was right beside his, though he could see that any suit was going to be much too big for her.
He sputtered. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you,” she said simply. “This is the job.”
“Not for you,” he snarled though he didn’t slow in pulling on his suit. “You’re not needed down there.”
“Scraff is going to complain about production, and this will reveal his mistakes.” She flicked the hood up over her dark hair and pulled down the face shield. Despite the anti-radiation film on the safety glass, her amber eyes were piercing. And through the suit comm, her voice was throaty and intimate in his ear when she said, “You can rage all you want, but I’ll be right beside you.”
He didn’t have time to stop her. And maybe this would be a good chance to get rid of one more intrusive intercessor.
Despite the vicious thought, he checked her harness as they backed toward the open shaft. With the power out, they’d have to rely on their fellow miners to belay them down into the darkness. “Let us know the instant the equipment arrives,” he told Jashanna.
She nodded. “Send up word as soon as you contact the team down there.”
They dropped down into the hole.
The lume-sticks on their helmets were insufficient against the gloom with the dust still hanging heavy. They dropped fast, but in the relatively light gravity he didn’t worry too much about hitting the bottom, wherever it might be.
“Lights below us,” Yumi reported. “Must be the first emergency responders. We’re getting close, so bend your knees.”
“I know,” he snapped, surprised that she knew.
Once again, despite his temper, her tone didn’t waver, not in anger or fear. “Besides the unstable and radioactive elements in the mine, is there anything else I should be aware of?”
“Q-bombs aren’t bad enough?”
“A known unknown,” she murmured. “I’m wondering about any unknown unknowns.”
“I’m just a miner. I don’t know anything.”
“If you expect me to believe that, you must think I don’t know anything either.”
Side by side, they slammed into the bottom of the shaft, where the rest of the rescue team waited in the dusty clouds, their headlamps turning the air itself grey. “I know you shouldn’t be here,” he said gruffly.
“But I am. So use me.”
Before he could wonder at that husky command or remember the way she’d stepped up to him in the garden right before the alarm went off, the other rescuers clustered around them.
“Looks like some of the cross bracing failed, boss.” Bohai’s round face filled most of his visor, every square millimeter projecting his concern. “And fibercrete was sprayed across only a portion of the exposed faces.”
Striding partway down the tunnel that Bohai indicated, Gavyn slipped back his face shield. The choking dust made him cough, but there was enough breathable air left to keep him alive. For a while, anyway.
“What are you doing?” Yumi hissed. “You think suffocating in solidarity is a reasonable idea?”
Facing her, he lifted his chin at the same time he raised the protective lenses to the top of his head. Her startled inhalation through the comm bud in his helmet sent a shiver down his spine. The eerie lightning in his irises caused by kindled electrons when he was seeing always startled people, so he ignored her as he turned his attention to the nearest broken crossbeam. Its shattered end jutted like a broken bone from the shreds of fibercrete. “This was printed at three-quarter density,” he reported. “Those freezing idiots were printing too fast and without enough scrap ore.”
Bohai clenched both hands over his head. “Obviously they were trying to keep up production, harvesting as much as they could, digging as fast as possible.”
“How do you know the crossbeams were flawed?” Yumi stepped up beside Gavyn. “We need to take a sample for testing.”
“Boss has the best eyes in the business,” Bohai said stoutly. “He knows what he’s looking at, always. That’s why he’s always found the best veins of Q and…” He slanted a glance at Gavyn, who was growling under his breath. “Other things.”
The intercessor didn’t seem to notice the other miner’s hesitation; she was too busy studying the warped crossbeams above their heads. “Should we even be down here?”
“You shouldn’t,” Gavyn said curtly. “Go back up and write a little note to Scraff telling him greed may have just closed the most valuable vein on this planetoid.”
“And maybe killed a whole crew,” Bohai muttered.
Yumi shook her head. “They might still be saved.”
But despair rolled through Gavyn in thicker, toxic waves. If Tillerson had been running the 3D printer fast and light to increase production, then this whole length of reinforced tunnel could very well be compromised. All the way to the missing miners.
“The new printer will be here soon, so we can rebuild the braces,” Yumi said. “And the whomper is big enough to dig out the debris quickly.”
“We’re not waiting,” Gavyn said. “We dig the old-fashioned way.” All the deep crew’s gear was crushed or trapped with them on the other side of the collapsed tunnel, but the rescuers had brought everything they could from pickaxes to shovels, even hand brushes. “We need to start with an air line, communications, and water, in that order.”
The rescuers, except for Yumi, nodded. She was still staring at his exposed eyes. With a muttered curse, he lowered the protective lenses and slammed the face shield back into place. The filter on his suit grudgingly cleared the dust, but he felt the grating weight of her attention like tiny rocks against the back of his neck.
Did she think he was less than human? Some did, when they really saw how he’d been altered by his corporate owners, making him unsuitable for anything except the poisoned depths of the mines.
With a fury, he swung his ax at the wall of rubble. If it was all he was good for, then he would use it to save his people.
She didn’t argue anymore, just took turns sliding up beside him to shovel away the piles rapidly accumulating around him. QueCorp had made him foreman, but he was first and always a rock-wrecker. He ripped through the rubble, tireless and unflinching, until his e-suit beeped an alarm that his carbon dioxide and sweat were overwhelming its filtration. With another curse, he shoved back the faceplate and kept digging.
He missed his stroke when Bohai grabbed his arm. “Printer is here, boss. Give us a minute to reinforce the beams.”
How could he stand back when his people were trapped? His legs cramped as he staggered out of the way. Yumi and a couple other rescuers were chucking smaller chunks of debris into the printer hopper.
As the printer spat out components for the crossbeams, other rescuers took the tensile spans and bent them into place as protection against continuing cave-ins. Another miner aimed the wide bore of the fibercrete cannon at the exposed rock, spraying a thick layer of slurry that would harden into another sort of support.
“Bring me one of the crawlers,” Gavyn shouted over the roar of the cannon. “I’ve uncovered a small opening.”
“If we lose this crawler too, they’ll dock our pay,” Bohai warned even as he carried the small, eight-legged robot into position.
“I’ll take the debt,” Gavyn said.
“Wait.” Yumi stepped forward, once again ignoring Gavyn’s angry glare. She flipped open her face shield and dug the comm bud out of her helmet. With quick, clever fingers, she attached the small transmitter to the crawler. “That’ll extend its range, and the miners on the other end can keep the bud when they send back the crawler.” She glanced at Gavyn sidelong. “You’ll just have to yell at me so I can hear you.” She slammed her face shield down.
Was that a comment on his leadership skills? She wasn’t wrong. He could definitely yell at her loud enough to hear through the shield, even across the distance of space.
He wedged the crawler as far into the tumble of rock as he could, and it was instantly lost to sight as it picked its way through the rubble, hopefully toward the missing miners.
“Move that whomper up here,” he demanded next. “I want this hole man-sized for as soon as we make contact.” They obeyed.
In the numbing roar of the whomper, he almost missed the first ping from the crawler. He held up one hand, fist clenched tight, silencing all work.
In everyone’s helmet, a breathless voice reached them. “Did we dig all the way to hell?”
A quickly muffled cheer went up from the rescuers before Gavyn waved them to quiet again. “Arjay.” He swallowed hard. “What’s your status?”
“Tillerson was out front with the blasting squad. I’ve got half our crew digging toward him, the other half clearing a path toward you. Our printer was crushed and the whomper is at half power and overheated. It keeps sparking, which…isn’t great.”
“Injuries? Fatalities?” Gavyn kept his voice low and even.
“A couple bad crushes, and a few guys are sharing air already.” Arjay’s tone wavered. “I think Lalabey is not doing so good. And there’s been no contact with Tillerson’s group, not even knocking.”
“Stay still,” Gavyn instructed. “Save your breath. We’ll have an air line to you soon. And then we’ll be coming for you.”
“Gavyn, Tillerson was running the printer at fifty percent density. We’re at least a hundred meters down from you and the scrap we were using is too rotten for you to dig past. It will collapse on you too, for sure.” Despite the grim assessment, Arjay’s voice was steady this time. “I don’t think you can get to us in time, not for Lalabey, not for any of us.”
“You let us run the numbers. You just keep your people quiet.” Gavyn glared at the other miners. “We’re going to keep digging, and we’ll be to you before you know it. We might look like demons from hell, but say your prayers for us.”
“Gavyn, save our reserves—”
“Save your breath.” Gavyn toggled off the crawler’s connection. He spun on his heel to face the rescuers. “You heard him. We’re going to have to shore up strong as we go. But we’ll only go at half width, and all the rubble goes in the printer. We’ll worry about the fines when we have everyone back in the mess hall dancing to Jashanna’s recorder.”
He didn’t bother tracking the hours, or even meters through loose rubble. It didn’t matter. He was always digging for his life.
Yumi tried to stop him once. “Drink something, and have a nutrient shot.”
“Not until they do,” he growled.
He thought she would insist—she didn’t have any fear of his growls—but she just shook her head and, right to his face, consumed the offerings she’d been holding out to him.
He choked out a dazed laugh. “You didn’t try very hard to convince me.”
“Since you are a high-powered robot, you must not need anything as boring as water.”
He grimaced. “I’m not a robot.”
She held out another tube of water and nutrient shot. He couldn’t very well turn her down again. He sucked them down quickly while the rescuers installed another web of stronger crossbeams through the cleared half of the tunnel.
“Why would Tillerson risk using weak supports?”
“Because the potential reward was worth it, or so he must’ve decided.” Gavyn tipped his head back against the ragged rock wall, closing his eyes. “Scraff has rigged the system so we can never get ahead, but we can always get behind.” The nutrient shot—just a hyperconcentrated solution of carbs, fats, and stimulants—clogged in his throat. He shouldn’t be revealing his feelings to her, even though it had to be obvious. He couldn’t trust her, not on such short acquaintance, but for some inconceivable reason, he needed her to witness. “What QueCorp makes us do isn’t just unfair or wrong, but evil.”
Rolling his head against the rock, he glared at her though he couldn’t quite bring himself to lift the protective lenses over his eyes.
“I’m seeing that,” she said softly. “Sometimes it seems that evil is the inevitable decay state of the universe. And how do you fight the galaxy’s weight in entropy?”
His heart beat a heavy tempo. This conversation was more dangerous than digging tunnels without support. “I guess we just weave crossbeams for our little corner,” he said warily.
“Or embrace the entropy.” Through the shield, her expression was too hard to read, but all his internal warning alarms were tolling.
“Boss.” Bohai hustled up beside him with a tab. “We’re bleeding off most of the damps, but we’re getting bad readings of Q dust. We need to run the air line right now. If they’re not getting wormy from the hallucinations at the very least, soon they won’t have anything to breathe.”
Gavyn cursed but didn’t bother checking the data. He knew it was bad. “The crawler isn’t going to be able to carry a hose big enough to vent the tunnel and supply the group. And we’re all too big to fit through the hole we’ve made so far.”
“I’ll take it,” Yumi volunteered. “I’m the smallest one here, but I’m strong enough to haul the line.”
“No,” Gavyn said. He couldn’t trust her, not with their lives.
“What other choice do we have?” Bohai murmured, as if in answer to Gavyn’s unvoiced dilemma. He sidled around Gavyn to the intercessor, angling his data tablet toward her. “I hope you don’t suffer from claustrophobia.”
“Not so far,” she said.
“Good, because it’s going to get tight through here.” He traced a finger over the map. “And you have to make sure not to kink the hose or the whole operation is vacced.” He eyed her. “You’re a little bigger than the crawler, and you’ll be going through a section that’s not reinforced. Once the line inflates, you’ll be stuck with Arjay’s crew until we get there. They might not be too happy with Scraff’s rep down there with them.”
“I’m not too excited about it either,” she admitted. But she accepted the end of the telescoping hose from one of the other rescuers.
Gavyn and Bohai accompanied her to the narrowing diameter they’d dug through the rubble.
“Don’t puncture the hose,” Bohai reminded her. “If you start feeling lightheaded… Well, don’t pass out in the hole or we’ll just have to blast you free.”
She pulled her hood into place, and even through the tinted face shield, her eye roll was obvious. “Can I go now?”
Gavyn grabbed her elbow, not gently. “You said this is your job. But it’s our lives. Don’t vac this.”
For the first time, she seemed to take offense at his tone. She glowered at him. “I’ve never botched a mission.” Since her comm bud was still with the trapped miners, she had to yell to be heard, and she seemed happy to be yelling at him.
“You’ve done something wrong if you ended up here,” he shot back even louder.
