Motus, page 25
“A glimpse of the future you will be missing, and a reminder of how foolish this endeavor was from the start,” he said. The vial, pinched between his thumb and pointer finger, contained a hazy and viscous yellow slime. It appeared to undulate as he tilted the vial back and forth, letting it catch the light of the lamps nearby. “‘With the promise of life in one hand and certainty of death in the other.’ It turns out the decision wasn’t at all as hard as Gerald Reed made it out to be.”
Corun understood. This was a sample of the organism they had discovered in the lower mineshaft.
Without bothering to look back at them, Wolfram resumed his walk to the mineshaft, his compliance officers in tow.
In unison, he and Cassi sank to the floor, holding each other as they listened to the sound of footsteps receding into the distance. When they were no longer audible, Cassi’s weeping was all that filled the silence. He held her to his chest and numbly wondered if the warmth of her tears on his shirt would be the last warmth he would ever feel.
“What do we do?” he asked, but his hope that she had a plan had diminished with every sniffle and sob.
“We die. What else? He’s right. I never should have brought us here.”
Rather than give in to despair, it was as if all of the determination she’d lost suddenly became his. Perhaps it was seeing her in pain, or perhaps it had been there all along, just waiting for the right time to step in. It was his turn to make a plan.
“We are not giving up. We can’t sit around waiting for someone to come rescue us. We have come so far.”
“You heard him, Corun. We can’t go back to the city. Even if we manage to dig through the mineshaft faster than they can fill it in, he will expect that and have someone watching and waiting.”
“I’m not talking about going back. I’m talking about going up.”
“What?” she said, voice breaking with incredulity as she pulled back to regard him. “There’s nothing up there, Corun. We’ve gone nearly ten times farther than they have but found nothing.”
“We found the cavern. We needed that space more than anything. They found rock so dense, they can barely dig through it. Nothing has changed. The rock can’t go on forever. Eventually we’ll come to a cavern bigger than all the others, a cavern so big you can’t see the other side.”
She let out a soft snort. “And you think we can get there all by ourselves? It took nearly a hundred miners to get us this far, and who knows how much farther we have to go.”
Corun sat back, considering. “We’ve got nothing but time,” he said, his words lacking their earlier conviction.
“Do we? We have the RTG, ice, and an oxygen generator, but what about food?”
“We have enough to feed three dozen miners for another week. With just the two of us and a bit of rationing, it could last us a few months. That has to be enough.”
“And the carbon dioxide? Even with just two people, it’s going to build up to toxic levels without the city to capture it.”
“Look around us, Cassi. We’ve got all this space. You said carbon dioxide sinks, right? We’ll be a kilometer up and rising. It’ll take forever for it to fill up this space and become an issue.”
She fingered the tearstains on Corun’s shirt.
“You’re not wrong, but that’s assuming something doesn’t break or the ceiling doesn’t decide to cave in.” The reminder of Bari’s death sobered him, but ultimately, it changed nothing.
“We’ll die if we do nothing. At least digging gives us something to do—and maybe we will find something up there, something to keep us alive. Just imagine the look on Wolfram’s face when we dig back into the city with news of paradise.”
“I can get behind that,” she said, chuckling as she sat back and wiped her eyes and nose with a sleeve.
Corun smiled and helped her to her feet. It felt nice to be the one with the plan for a change.
“Come on. Let’s take stock.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rhyo and Cinna hadn’t claimed any of their belongings before descending the mine shaft. They might have forgotten in the heat of the moment, but Corun preferred to think it was to give them a better chance at survival. He found a small stockpile of cured quail meat, mushroom jerky, and other foodstuffs, dozens of blankets and sleeping mats, plus some outdated carbide lamps and old, dented canteens.
They combed through the cavern, placing everything they might need in a pile near the stairs leading up the cavern’s slope. Their last order of business was to fill dozens of metal pails with ice from the cavern’s walls.
When they returned to their basecamp with their first haul of supplies, they learned they weren’t the only ones left behind. Canary was still roosted snugly in his makeshift cloth nest by the RTG. Corun and Cassi gave the hungry quail a handful of fried mealworms as an apology, neither voicing an objection to the use of their precious food supply.
It took them two days to carry everything up to the third basecamp, and another full day of rest before Corun’s leaden arms and legs obeyed him again. They spent that day sorting through the supplies and estimating how much time they had. It was a morbid sort of chore, looking at a package of milled barley and seeing only how many days it would add to their lives rather than what meal it could become.
Corun left the math up to Cassi. Her estimates for their oxygen and water supply were far more favorable than for their food, and so he racked his brain to figure out a way to extend it. But even the strictest rations would only buy them a few months. With all the mining they intended to do, they would need every calorie they could get. One option was not to mine at all and wait. They would last far longer, even extending their oxygen supply without all the exertion, but they would die all the same in the end. What use was there in prolonging it?
Corun spent the rest of that afternoon with a piece of paper from Cassi’s typewriter. On it, he scrawled everything he remembered from his brief conversations with Merrill, who had devised several ways to create food from seemingly nothing. He knew almost nothing about the synthetic sugars and fats, or rock butter and rock juice as the miners had taken to calling them, other than that they required extensive processing steps and a lot of heat and pressure. One of their other backup plans, should the Reardistrict run low on food, was to convert their clothing and any other fabric into a sugar solution. That, at least, had fewer steps, and ones he mostly remembered. All he needed was sulfuric acid and something to quench it after the reaction was over. As for fabric, they had plenty. The miners had left behind nearly everything, but it all needed extensive washing before he dared convert it into something edible. The thought nearly made him gag, drawing Cassi’s attention.
“Any luck?” she asked.
He smoothed his features and smiled.
“Depends. Do you know how to make sulfuric acid?”
She raised an eyebrow and looked distantly for a moment. Then her eyes focused.
“Why make it, when we have liters of the stuff?”
Turning from his place on the sleeping mat, he followed her gaze. Stacked in the corner with the other supplies they had liberated from the second basecamp were dozens of batteries and several electric headlamps.
Corun experimented over the next few hours. After washing a spare blanket several times, he submerged a strip of it into battery acid, making sure the battery was fully charged so the concentration of sulfuric acid was at its highest.
It took minutes for anything noticeable to happen. Corun eventually moved the glass container to the top of the RTG, hoping heat would speed up the process. Little by little, the fabric dissolved, leaving behind a semitranslucent yellow-brown slurry. It looked far from appetizing. He kept adding strips of cloth until they no longer dissolved and then searched for something to neutralize the acid.
That was when he noticed the other headlamps in the room, the type he’d used his entire mining career. Opening one of the carbide lamps, he was happy to find a heap of spent calcium carbide in the bottom chamber. He added a bit more water to make sure the reaction was complete and that nothing but calcium hydroxide remained, then added a pinch of the white powder to the sugar solution. It bubbled slightly but gave no other indication that it was working. He added more and more until the solution was entirely opaque. It looked surprisingly like a cup of orzo with an overabundance of barley milk, and it took no small amount of self-control not to taste it.
Taking one of their few water filters containing activated carbon, zeolite, and several fine mesh screens, he passed the solution through the filter several times, following with a bit of water to rinse it clean. What emerged was a mostly transparent solution with an amber tinge. A hesitant taste confirmed two things; it was no longer acidic, and it was sickeningly sweet. Cassi, who had spent the last few hours sorting their supplies, was less than impressed, at least until he estimated its caloric content. With all the fabric they had lying around and liters of sulfuric acid, they could create enough sugar to keep them alive for several more weeks. By their calculations, they had three months, should nothing unexpected occur during that time. After that, it was anyone’s guess what would ultimately spell their demise.
That grim realization had at least one positive outcome. That night, Cassi and Corun lay close for warmth, and their chaste kisses quickly transitioned to ones of longing. On their thick pile of sleeping mats and blankets, his lips traveled from her lips to her neck. Before they could meet the collar of her shirt, it was gone, Cassi’s fingers working quickly to remove it. And so he explored the rest of her body in the same fashion. The thrill of discovery that mining brought him was nothing compared to this. It was warm, soft, and gentle, and he idly wondered if their time might be better spent doing nothing else.
And so, through unspoken agreement, they took another day to rest, while doing very little in the way of resting.
It was at the end of their third day, the naked length of Cassi pressing along his side, that Corun knew it had to come to an end. If he wanted to be truly happy, he had to have hope. And that meant taking up his pickaxe once again. He silently cursed whatever fates had conspired to make his happiest days his last.
The next morning, he ascended the mineshaft on his own. When he reached the top, he was dismayed to discover the extent of the cave-in. Several metric tons of rock and dust had tumbled in from the ceiling. He could still see the footprints of the frantic miners as they’d dug Bari out from beneath the rubble.
Corun proceeded to use Rhyo’s shovel to scoop the rock into the central shaft, sending it plummeting over a kilometer to reach the cavern below. Cassi was down there somewhere, hauling up the remaining ice they needed.
He had never been more alone, over a kilometer away from anyone. His entire life had been spent within a few dozen meters from the nearest miner or neighbor. The silence was unnerving, but not absolute. He thought he could hear the sounds of his own shallow breaths and the beating of his heart echoing back at him from the cold stone walls.
And so he did something he was always too self-conscious to do in the presence of others, excluding the few times he’d been drunk enough. Over the course of the next few hours, he sang every song he could remember from his mother’s collection and even cycled through some mining songs. He felt foolish at first, but when he finally accepted the stone walls were his only audience, he sang all the louder. It did him no favors in catching his breath, but it was a distraction from the work, the cold, and his imminent death.
Cassi joined him the next day, startling him by adding her voice to his. Recovering quickly, he smiled at her as they sang together like they had the night at the bar, the sound of their picks keeping the beat.
The days turned into weeks, and singing became a much rarer occurrence as their disappointment mounted. They had failed to breach another cavern, and every breath seemed thinner than the last. Yet their air troubles were only just beginning.
“We have nothing else to put it in,” Cassi said one evening as they sat around the RTG, warming up after a long day of digging.
Corun considered the two hydrogen tanks, each full to its limit with the gas. They had been using it sparingly to cook their dwindling supply of frozen quail meat, but Corun had otherwise paid them no mind.
“Then turn off the oxygen generator. There’s got to be more than enough oxygen in the air to keep us going for a while.”
“That’s the problem. It’s been off for days. I only turn it on to keep the pressure in the mineshaft steady. But the pressure is dropping, which means our oxygen is too. I need to turn it on again, but there’s nowhere to store the hydrogen.”
Corun took in their repurposed timekeeper. With just the two of them, they no longer needed to keep track of shifts. Sometime during their first week alone, Cassi had turned the timekeeper upside down in a bucket, trapping half of its water inside the narrow glass tube. The makeshift barometer allowed the water to rise into the tube if the room’s air pressure rose and fall if the pressure dropped. The markings that had once depicted the number of hours remaining in the shift now had a different meaning altogether.
“Could we rig up a hydrogen reduction furnace? The hydrogen will bond with some of the oxygen in the ore instead of the air.”
“In what containment vessel and with what heat source? The RTG doesn’t produce nearly enough heat for that. Even if you got it working, the amount of oxides in the ore would barely make a dent in our hydrogen problem.”
“What about Merrill’s method of producing fats? She used hydrogen and carbon monoxide if I’m not mistaken.”
“I, for one, have no idea how she manages it. Do you? But I know it requires heat and a lot of pressure. We just don’t have the knowledge or resources to make any of it work.”
It was a troubling admission from Cassi, a person who knew nearly everything, or so he once thought. But if she already knew the answer, she wouldn’t be bringing this to him. That was even more troubling.
“Do we need the tanks at all? Why not let it mix with the air? It will help with the pressure problem.”
Cassi considered it for a long minute.
“A couple problems with that. First, it’s rather explosive. If we let it mix with the oxygen, it could ignite with the smallest spark, and it’s lighter than oxygen, so it will all rise to the top of the mineshaft, displacing all the oxygen there. You can’t mine if you can’t breathe.”
“You had a solution to that problem before we were trapped up here, remember? Oxygen masks. We could fill the hydrogen tanks with oxygen instead and run some tubing to our nose and mouth. We could be surrounded by hydrogen and still be able to breathe, right? The displaced oxygen at the top of the mineshaft should also prevent any explosions.”
“That’s beyond dangerous. If the oxygen stops flowing, you won’t know it’s happening, you’ll just asphyxiate.”
“Then we keep an eye on each other and make sure that doesn’t happen.”
When Corun returned from digging the next day, Cassi presented him with an oxygen mask. It was a clunky thing made from the metal of an old canteen, beaten into a shape that fit over his nose and mouth. A piece of silicone tubing hung from its center all the way down to his knees. After a few adjustments and the addition of some cloth padding along the sharp metal edge, she declared it usable. All they needed were the oxygen tanks.
Corun helped her carry the meter-tall tanks up a few turns in the stairwell before opening them and retreating to a safe distance. In less than an hour, all the hydrogen contained within had vented, rising to the uppermost reaches of the mineshaft. They spent the next day running the oxygen generator at full blast. They had to switch some tubing around, but soon the tanks were being filled with oxygen as the hydrogen vented from another tube just outside their basecamp.
After modifying a few backpacks to carry the tanks and lining them with padding, they were ready.
“I don’t like this, Corun,” Cassi said, her voice muffled by the cone of dented metal strapped over her mouth and nose. “We have carbon dioxide building up below us and hydrogen above. Eventually, one of them is going to give us problems.”
“It bought us time. That’s what matters most.”
She said nothing more as they made their spiraling way up to the top of the mineshaft. Corun suspected she was thinking about her parents, who had died from asphyxiation many years ago while working third shift in the Air Handlers.
It did buy them time. They worked for three weeks straight, sticking to a schedule they didn’t like, but one from which they couldn’t afford to deviate. They slept for just long enough for their oxygen tanks to refill and only ate a quick bite of food in the morning and evening. The rest of their time was spent in the mineshaft, swinging their pickaxes at the cold, dry rock.
It would’ve been difficult work even under normal circumstances, but the heavy tank on his back made every muscle and joint protest. At least the oxygen mask doubled as a dust mask and kept the moisture of his breath from escaping into the surrounding air.
They did notice one concerning feature of the hydrogen-rich air. Occasionally a spark from their pickaxes would fall to their feet and terminate in a bright flash of light. Cassi suspected it was due to the oxygen escaping their masks. So far, the small explosions had yet to cause them any harm, and so they paid them no mind. Of more concern was the danger of their tanks running empty without their notice. They had to keep an ear out for the persistent hissing of the oxygen as it entered their masks. It was far too easy to tune out the sound, however, and so they kept an eye on each other too. But even that small safety measure was taken from them eventually.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“No repairing that,” Cassi said as she fingered the centimeter-long crack in the base of the oxygen tank.
Corun was far more worried about the blood welling from the abrasion on her cheek and the palms of her hands. Without her gloves and helmet, she might not have survived her tumble down the stairs.
