Rock Rift, page 9
“I need to get back to the rescue crew,” he said. Was that a note of reluctance she heard in his voice?
She nodded. “I’ll be fine from here.”
Still, his hand lingered on her upper arm. “If you feel any lingering effects from the Q, just be aware that the outpost medic reports directly to Scraff.”
“Thanks for letting me know.” He was telling her about management’s spy; did that mean he considered her an ally to the miners instead of the company? If so, the minimal risk she’d taken in the cave-in was paying off.
He made sure she was standing steadily before he clasped his hands behind him and took a long step back into the hoist. “Make sure you scrub off the dust, or you’ll re-expose yourself. Sleep, and I’ll check on you when I return.”
“I need to get a report to Scraff,” she said. “They’ll want to know about the accident.”
Grey grimaced. “They only want to know about production delays.”
“Life matters more than rock. That’s what I’m here to teach them.”
He pulled the lenses down over his eyes. “Not when the rock is Q.”
She wanted to hold the hoist in place, suspended over the drop. “Maybe there’s no luck on Ydro-Down. But you can have faith I’ll do what I promise.”
Though she couldn’t see the direction of his focus, she had no doubt he was staring at her. “For some reason, I do trust you,” he murmured. “And I hope I’m not wrong about that.”
She watched him descend back into the death trap, and the dark glint of his eye coverings angled up at her was the last thing she saw before the darkness swallowed him.
Chapter 8
Tillerson’s risky attempt to speed up production and hit a new vein had been an abject failure. Not only were the seven members of the blasting squad dead—Gavyn’s assessment of the nearly solid rockfall beyond where the intercessor had dug had been correct—but they’d also lost the whomper and printer that had been at the front of the crew. Plus almost three days of digging had been lost with so many of the emergency crew pulled off of other details. And beneath all that, the timeline for their rebellion was now at risk.
Arjay had taken him aside briefly while the rescue crew had turned into a recovery effort. “This last load of ore was going to be our savings while we’re offline, a cache until we can establish business relationships of our own.” The engineer scowled. “Now we’re going to be short without the credits or the raw material on hand.”
Gavyn clenched one hand at the base of his neck. The muscles there had gone past burning, past numb, into some awful realm where he thought maybe he had turned to stone—about to crumble at the next bad news. “The galaxy needs Q. They won’t care if they buy it from QueCorp or us.” He knew he sounded indifferent to the tragedy, but he felt like any sympathetic touch, given or received, would crack him.
“Yeah, but they won’t buy from anyone until they’re certain who holds control of the mines.”
The grit on Gavyn’s skin was slowly wearing him down to nothing. “We’ll just have to prove definitively that Ydro-Down is ours,” he snapped. “We stay the course. Any delay could mean our discovery, and we can’t let the transport leave when we can’t guarantee the return of another ship.”
Worse, he wasn’t sure he could keep the miners’ allegiance if they waited. The deaths were already hitting them hard. The dangers of mining were too familiar, constant, and obvious to allow for much in the way of superstition, but still, a seething tension leached through every tunnel like a low, toxic fog. The intercessor had mentioned faith, but that was in even shorter supply on this dead moon than luck or biri-biris.
By the time the mangled bodies of their friends were retrieved and new assignments and schedules made to fill in the gaps, Gavyn felt that little was holding him together beyond the electromagnetic bonds of his atoms. All of his senses felt frayed, as if even the palest beam of light would sever his last bit of control and send his component molecules spinning off into oblivion.
And he hadn’t even started his post-incident reports yet. But when he dragged himself into the operations room and pulled up a management link, he found all the reports assembled, notated, and ready to send with his foreman code.
Yumi. She hadn’t done just her assessment but his as well. Too sapped to be grateful, he read through every page and approved the send. Then he headed for his quarters.
But somehow his steps carried him a different direction. He, who knew every twist and turn of every tunnel and natural fissure in the planetoid, found himself wandering. No, not wandering, not lost.
Outside the intercessor’s quarters, he hesitated. Why was he here? He took a step back, but before he could retreat farther, her door opened.
They stared at each other for a long moment. “How’d you know I was out here?” His voice was like sand in his throat.
“I have the only private sani-station,” she reminded him. “I figured you’d be here once you sent the reports.” She took a step back. “Come in.”
The open space she left in the doorway was like a small vacuity sucking him in. Vacuums were inimical to human existence. And yet he followed her.
He didn’t glance around—that would be rude—but his peculiar sight gave him greater peripheral vision, and he noticed she hadn’t made much of an impression on her personal space. If not for the black jacket of her QueCorp uniform hanging by the door, he would’ve guessed the room was unoccupied. Not that she’d been on Ydro-Down very long, but even the indentured miners, with essentially nothing to call their own, managed to put their mark on their place.
She was like a ghost, like his very own qubition hallucination.
“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t suffering any aftereffects from the rescue,” he said, even as his feet carrying him deeper into her room suggested his reasons were not so simple. “And to thank you for preparing my reports.”
She shrugged, the roll of her shoulders revealing the sleek musculature exposed by the wide straps of her jumpsuit. “Your reports and mine were basically the same. Across what’s left of the galaxy, admin hasn’t changed much.” Her amber gaze rested on him. “I’m sorry about the miners on the blasting squad. And I’m glad to hear that Lalabey will recover with some physiotherapy.”
“And another prosthetic.” Cynicism soured his tone. “In case any of us thought we couldn’t be replaced, bit by bit.”
“When I visited Lalabey in the med bay, they told me you’ve been constructing your own prosthetics from scrap ore down here. That’s impressively technical work, but I think I shamed the medic enough to requisition more refined parts from Scraff.”
“They’ll say we didn’t follow protocols on stabilizing the tunnels and blame Lalabey for their own injuries.”
“In case that happens, or if shaming wasn’t enough for the medic, I also sent a resupply note for two additional crawlers. Arjay can strip a leg or two for the hydraulics to power prosthetics and not lose much functionality in the crawlers.”
He stared at her for a long moment through the barrier of his goggles. Even with the lenses between them, something about her glowed in a way that made him twitch. When Tillerson had teased him once about seeing auras, Gavyn had tried to explain that he couldn’t see someone’s soul so much as all of bio-elec-mech-emical signals that made them who they were. And Yumi Swinton was like nothing he’d seen before, even in his Q mirages.
“How did you get here? What are you doing here?”
He didn’t even realize he’d asked the questions aloud, so tired was he, until she tilted her head. “I came on the transport,” she replied, “to be your intercessor.”
“You must’ve been an intercessor before to understand how to get around.”
“Not an intercessor, but…the one thing I’m truly good at is surviving.” She tried for a smile, and failed. “I was one of the few to make it off my world alive, so I guess I’m just trying to share that persistence with you and your miners.”
“We’ll take what we can get,” he said.
“That is the Salty Way.” She took another step back into the room, and he followed as if quantum entangled. “Go clean up and then I’ll check your wounds.” When he drew a breath to reject her proposal, she added, “Unless you’d rather QueCorp’s spy medic looked you over.” This time she did give him a little smile.
He let out a silent sigh. He was already here. She’d already used the facilities. He should leave the communal bathing facilities to the rest of the wearied rescue team.
Who was he kidding? He just wanted access to her private shower.
Except as he stripped in the tiny cubicle of the sani-station, he admitted he was still lying to himself. He’d stayed because he needed a place to hide where his people wouldn’t see him broken and hurting and, yeah, doubting. They needed to believe he was strong enough to hold up the collapsing weight of their world. And he’d failed them. He just couldn’t look them in the eye, not even with his goggles, for a little while at least.
The intercessor was an outsider. Yumi Swinton didn’t know that he was a rebel and, more reluctantly, a leader. Scraff had already made clear to her that Miner 488 was nothing more than a slave, doomed to the rock. She didn’t expect him to be strong or need him to be infallible. With her, he could be honest about his vulnerability—at least as much truth as was possible in the dark.
A brief trickle of recycled water wet him down enough to start lathering with the decon gel. Usually he just scraped off the lather, leaving a thin film of the gel to shield his skin, but with the temptation right at his fingertips, he treated himself to a longer stream. He bent his head beneath the cool flow until a gentle tap at the cubicle door roused him.
“Did you drown in there?”
While the thought held a certain grim appeal… “Didn’t use that much water.” He toggled off the spigot. The last gurgle down the drain sounded sad.
“I have a med kit here. Don’t bother getting dressed. Just come out and I’ll patch you up.”
At the thought of standing in front of her naked, the tingles in his skin became a full-body shudder. Though he’d had a few relationships since reaching his majority, the lack of access to reliable birth control had limited his sexual experiences. He would never, ever sire a child into intergenerational servitude, despite Scraff’s repugnant bounties for breeding new miners. The lovers he’d taken had understood and agreed, but knowing that the guards could be watching them—at least until the last turn, at which point he’d committed to insurrection—had always dampened any desire.
Not that he desired QueCorp’s new intercessor, he told himself severely. It was just his momentary weakness—and nakedness—letting a long-buried hunger rise from his very bones.
Also, he really, really didn’t want to put on the filthy clothes over his clean body. If he’d been thinking ahead, he would’ve brought something to change into. Of course he hadn’t planned this at all.
Which probably didn’t bode well for his insurrecting.
Resigned, he took a dry cleaning cloth and wicked most of the water off his skin. The towel was much too small to wrap around his waist, but he clenched it as a shield over his most tender bits as he warily slid open the door.
Yumi had her back to the sani-station—a rare time she’d let him stand behind her. She was politely giving him a chance to make a run for it, he decided.
The thought of fleeing through the tunnels with his ass hanging out actually relaxed his anxiety, and he cleared his throat.
She glanced over her shoulder, her amber gaze fixed on his. “The med options aren’t much compared to your…size,” she said. Was that an actual hitch in her voice? Did her attention flicker over him just for a moment, almost too quick to catch? “Let’s see to your most crucial needs first.”
Definitely her tone had thrummed on the word need, hadn’t it? Oh, why couldn’t he have enhanced hearing instead?
But his augmented vision returned some observations that he found very interesting. In the slender column of her throat, the tremor of her pulse—more delicate than even the most faraway earthquake warnings—was too fast, and the faintest glimmer of sweat on her skin had nothing to do with the ambient heat and the humidity he’d added.
The intercessor might act cold and bold, but she was as tentative in this moment as he was.
But her uncertainty didn’t galvanize him. “I should go,” he murmured. “I won’t die from anything I’ve suffered these last few days. During my augmentation, I also received somatotropic boosting. QueCorp wanted to make sure their investment in me lasted.”
“Metabolic hormones? No wonder you’re so big.” Twin spots of color dawned on her golden skin, as if she hadn’t meant to say that aloud. She lifted her chin. “Why don’t I just confirm that you’re not going to die, hmm? I’ve done enough admin and I don’t want to add your loss to my next report.”
She marched toward him, the med kit extended in front of her like a weapon. Her room was so small that three strides brought them together. Right before she trod on his toes, she stopped and stared up at him, her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t compare the loss of your friends with the grievances of paperwork, not even to distract us from this awkwardness.”
Despite the reminder of why they were here, he almost smiled. “Is it awkward?”
Her nose wrinkled up into a scowl. “Isn’t it?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, blocking out the enticing sight of her racing pulse and her luminous skin and her clear confusion. “I think…maybe being here right now—not in your room exactly, I mean, just being alive—is awkward.”
She was quiet so long that he imagined he was alone again. Then the soft whisper of her exhalation feathered over his bare chest. “Because we survived when they didn’t.”
“Tillerson had the seniority to take the foreman position.” He wasn’t sure why he was telling her. “But he didn’t want it. He preferred digging. He told me, more than once, that Q miners are like the rarest seeds in the Salty Way. We root deeper and deeper so that others might rise to the stars.”
She hummed low in her throat, and once again he wished he had augmented hearing that he might translate the ambivalent sound. “You risk while others take the reward. That sounds less like seeds and more like slaves. What happened to him and the others, what continues to happen to the rest of you, is wrong, and no poetry will change that.”
With his eyes closed, he was achingly aware the scent of her, clean enough now but with a hint of musk and salt as the mere effort of life here brought out the dew on her skin. If he opened his eyes, he would see those almost imperceptible beads, and if he touched her, he could trace his name through the condensation, leave his mark on her as she hadn’t marked her berth. If he touched her and left a sign, did that mean he wasn’t a qubition ghost wandering the hollow tunnels, lost?
“May I touch you?”
That was exactly what he’d been thinking, but she said it first. With a jerking nod, he gave his permission. Still he didn’t open his eyes, but his other unaugmented senses took over readily, overwhelming him with proof of her nearness.
Infused with antibiotics, growth proteins, analgesics, and a sealant, the med gel stung as she smoothed it over the back of his shoulder, but it was her proximity that made him stiffen. She’d slipped around behind him—where his behind wasn’t covered by the small towel.
“It looks like someone cut you,” she said. “A few of these are deep.”
“There are threads of volcanic glass—obsidian—in the ore. The shattered edges are sharper than steel.” He hissed in a breath as she continued her ministrations across the backs of his biceps and elbows where he’d shoved rubble away from his digging. “Obviously I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
The sting of the gel mellowed into a cool camphor burn as she worked the gel over his wounds. “What’s the point of those altered eyes of yours if you aren’t watching?”
“They make me look mysterious and alluring?”
The slow stroke of her fingertips over his skin paused, and he swore he felt little zings of lightning dance between them. Not the static of the potentially explosive electromagnetic discharges that sometimes built up in the tunnels during dust storms, and not the lingering pain of the gel. Just her touch, energizing something in him.
“I don’t know about the mysterious,” she said at last.
“But the alluring? You definitely agree with me on that, yes?” Why was he flirting with QueCorp’s intercessor? Hadn’t he failed enough already? Hadn’t he been close enough to disaster and death for one day?
But her courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness appealed to him in the way he was helpless to resist. Though the lovers he’d taken on Ydro-Down had each been special to him, Yumi had one quality as rare on this world as the qubition itself: she was free.
She wasn’t stuck on this hellhole, and he didn’t have to ask himself if the only reason she tolerated his presence was some twisted hope that he might be able to give her something she didn’t have. She knew he had nothing that he could give her. And yet still she’d taken a step back in the doorway and let him come in.
He didn’t even count the disparity in their size as an impediment between them. He might be double her mass, but he’d seen her strength and determination in the tunnels and watched the way she moved with deliberate balance, power, and restraint, and he suspected she could put up more of a fight than most.
Also, she still had that pistol hidden somewhere around here.
She’d likened him to a tool that the company should value. What a fine tool she’d make for his rebellion. He could tell himself that was why he flirted with this dangerous woman, the same way he’d light a fuse on a blasting cap at the dead end of a shaft—to go deeper, get closer to what he needed.
Slowly, he turned to face her. “So you have me where you want me,” he murmured. “What is it exactly that you want?”
“You do exude a certain…magnetism,” she admitted as if with great reluctance.
