Spin 01 - Spin State (39 page)

Li hit her own point of diminishing returns somewhere in Anaconda’s 3700 level, creeping down a shattered drift with a pulse locator that hadn’t spiked on a live person in fourteen hours. Even Ramirez had started to at least talk about packing it up.

Then, finally, they got the hit they almost stopped believing would come: a locator beacon in a relatively undamaged section of corridor well off the main circulation paths—and, they hoped, out of the worst smoke. But when they reached it, they found only empty corridor running away into the darkness.

“What the hell?” Li said, her locator still blipping at something that clearly wasn’t there.

McCuen pried a piece of lagging away from the wall and pulled the beacon out of a niche in the wall.

“Bootleggers,” he said, his voice muffled by his rebreather mouthpiece. “If they’re still alive, they’ll have been working within shouting distance of it.”

The three of them stared at each other, hardly breathing. Then they started shouting.

When the reply finally came, Li thought it was an echo. She forced her pickup to maximum and heard it again. It was shouting, although it sounded too faint to be anywhere near them—certainly too faint for unenhanced ears to hear.

“Sshh!” she said.

Ramirez and McCuen stopped shouting and looked at her. “What?” McCuen whispered.

She heard it again. Two voices, muffled by rock and dropped coal, but voices all the same. And above the shouting, a second sound. A buzzing, vibrating sound that came from much closer.

They tracked the sound along the corridor and up a rough side tunnel that ended in a roof fall. And when they called out there, even McCuen and Ramirez thought they heard it.

As soon as they heard it, they went crazy. McCuen ran back toward the main gangway to get help and spread news of possible survivors. Li and Ramirez began a furious race to collect all the timber and lagging they could find within carrying distance and start shoring up the roof and chipping their way into the rubble pile.

“Right, then,” Ramirez said when they had cleared a passage through the first big blockage. He unbuckled his kit and started stripping off his bulky safety gear. “I’ll go take a look around.”

Li shook her head. “Forget it. I’ll go.”

“No way,” he said, tugging at a stubborn buckle.

Li put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to prove anything, Leo.”

He stopped and gave her an incredulous half-angry stare. Then he grabbed the end of the cord and clipped it onto his belt. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m trying to get those people out safely.”

Li felt her face heat up. “If that’s what you want, you’ll let me go. I’m smaller, stronger. And I can get by without my rebreather if I have to. Wherever they are, I’ve got a better chance of getting to them, and that’s God’s truth.”

She took the cord out of his hands, tugging a little to free it from his clenched fingers. As she unclipped it from his belt and attached it to her own she kept her eyes fixed on his. “Just feed me rope and come dig me out if the roof falls on me,” she said. “All right?”

As if in response to her words, the roof boomed and cracked—the sound of a mountain’s weight of coal and rock shifting above them, seeking a new equilibrium now that the ribs had been burned out of the deep tunnels.

“Don’t worry,” Ramirez said grimly. “I’ll be here.”

The tunnel behind the rockfall was dark but not too smoky. Li guessed that the roof had caved in so quickly that not much smoke-tainted air had made it into this section.

She crept forward through air so close and hot that her infrared gave her only a blurred sketch of the path before her. The tunnel was relatively clear once she was past the rockfall; it was just a matter of squirming around the rubble that had been ripped off the walls and ceiling when the fire had come through.

The posts and lagging littering her path were more than inconveniences, of course. They were what had been holding up the ceiling before the fire. And now that they had come down it was only a matter of time until the mountain took the tunnel back.

The trick, of course, was not to be there when that happened.

She was ten meters down the passage when she heard the roof crack again. A sound like tearing paper rippled through the dark toward her. Rocks pummeled the ground a few meters ahead. She crouched in the partial shelter of a fallen timber and waited.

“Okay?” Ramirez called when everything but the roiling dust had subsided.

“Okay,” she called, as loud as she dared. She pushed her hard hat down on her head, waited a few moments to make sure the fault wasn’t spreading, then pushed forward.

Just as she started forward, the noise started again. This time it was a scratchy rasping sound, not like anything she had heard before. She dove back under the shelter, expecting more roof fall. The noise stopped, then started again, repeating at regular intervals. It wasn’t the roof shifting at all, she realized; it sounded more like a switch turning.

She tracked it to the drift’s far wall, behind a twisted piece of lagging that had once been pressure-bolted into the ceiling. She didn’t dare move the lagging; even her ceramsteel-reinforced muscles and tendons couldn’t hold the immense metal plate if its few remaining bolts came loose. She ran her hands up behind it, trying to find the source of the noise. Finally her fingers touched what she had not allowed herself to hope for: a phone box.

It had been bent by the weight of the fallen lagging, its speaker half-crushed. She had to make her way back down the corridor and pull a metal rod out of the rubble to pry it open and get her hands on the receiver. When she put it to her ear, it had already stopped ringing, and she got nothing but the rough static of a damaged line.

“Christ,” she whispered. She twisted around to get her arm farther under the lagging and felt something pull and strain in her shoulder. Finally, she got her hand on the cradle and held it down, keeping the receiver in her other hand. It was three painful minutes by her internals before the phone rang again.

“Hello?” she said, jerking her hand off the cradle and pressing the receiver to her ear. “Hello?” “Hello,” said a disembodied voice over the crackle and whine of the wire.

“Where are you?” Li said.

“Where the hell do you think I am?” the voice asked.

Li shivered. “Who is this?” “Come on, Katie.”

“Cartwright?” she said. “Cartwright?”

But the line had gone dead.

* * *

“Let’s get you up top,” Ramirez said when she told him about Cartwright. Even in the lamplight, she could see he was looking at her like she was crazy.

“No. I’m telling you. I talked to him. He’s in the glory hole.” “That’s nonsense. We’re nowhere near there.”

“Yes we are.” Li shook her head stubbornly. “I’ve got the wiring charts for this pit pulled up. I’m looking at them. The phone line they laid in for Sharifi runs down this drift and into a borehole that connects to the Trinidad just south of the glory hole. That’s how we heard their voices: through the boreholes the wiring team ran down from this level.”

“Let’s just call it into pit bottom and let a closer team handle it,” Ramirez said. And that was when she figured it out.

It wasn’t that Ramirez didn’t believe her. He believed Cartwright was down there, all right; he wasn’t even surprised to hear it. He just didn’t want her to know about it.

“You crazy bastards,” she said. “What the hell have you done?” “Come on. We need to go up.”

“How does it feel to kill a few hundred people, Leo?”

“It’s AMC that’s killing them, not Cartwright.”

Li turned and started walking toward the slant down to the Trinidad.

“Where are you going?” Ramirez asked.

“To find that son of a bitch and beat the truth out of him.”

“No, wait.” Ramirez was chasing after her, stumbling in his haste to catch up to her. “It’s not what you think. I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you everything you want. But please, please let Daahl handle this. It’s for him to handle. And if you tell anyone, it’ll only get more people killed. It’ll only mean they all died for nothing, for AMC’s damned bottom line!”

* * *

Later, she wished she had insisted. Wished she had gone straight down to the glory hole, no matter what Ramirez had said or how reasonable it had sounded. But later was too late, because when they went up to find Daahl they got more than they bargained for.

“That doesn’t look good,” Ramirez said as they stepped out of the pithead office.

Li followed his glance to the triage area where Sharpe and the other medics had been. It was deserted. The wounded had been evacuated while she was underground, and the medics with them. All they had left behind was a fluttering trash field of steriwipes and used IVs and torn burn wrappings.

She looked toward the helipads and saw a group of company employees clustered nervously around the single station shuttle still on the helipad. Everything else was a sea of coveralled miners and ragged Shantytowners.

Daahl greeted Ramirez’s news without even pretending to be surprised by it. He sent Ramirez off to gather a group of rescuers—though it looked to Li like Daahl didn’t much think Cartwright needed rescuing.

“Get on the shuttle,” he told Li when that was done. “You can’t do anything else here, and this doesn’t concern you.”

Li stood her ground. “What the hell’s going on here?” “Like I said, nothing that concerns you.”

“Bullshit! Cartwright’s messing with live crystals, and you’re standing around chatting on top of a mine that’s already blown once!”

“Cartwright knows what he’s doing, Katie. He doesn’t need your help.”

“Help wasn’t what I had in mind, Daahl. I don’t know what little game you two are playing but—”

Daahl met someone’s eyes over Li’s shoulder, froze for a split second, then relaxed again as if he’d made a conscious effort to look natural. Li turned to see who he was looking at and found herself staring into a pair of ceramsteel-cold blue eyes set in the face of a tough-looking woman in EMT gear.

The woman nodded to Daahl, gave Li a measuring look, then just stood, hands thrust into her overall pockets, sharp eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.

Li looked at Daahl, then glanced at the woman, hesitating. Should she know her? She shook her head and turned back to Daahl.

“Go ahead,” he said, without introducing the woman. “No secrets here.”

“No secrets?” Li snorted. “You must be joking. I can’t walk a step without tripping over one.” “Just because something’s none of your business doesn’t mean it’s a secret.”

“None of my business? People are dying down there.”

“People have been dying down there every day since you left here,” Daahl said, his voice as hard as Shantytown’s gypsum flats in August. “I haven’t noticed that you cared until now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” “You can’t fight in two armies, Katie.” “I—”

“I’m not laying blame. Hell, I’m proud of you, of what you’ve accomplished. But in a few days there’ll be UN troops dropping in here. And they’ll be aiming at us. So don’t ask me to trust you because of some little girl I knew way back when. She’s dead. You killed her the day you enlisted.”

That brought her up short. She looked at the unnamed woman and saw ice-blue eyes staring back at her. She looked back at Daahl and saw the same pale eyes, the same cold mistrustful look.
He despises you
, she thought. The words floated to the surface of her mind before she could suppress them.
He despises you, and he’s right to. When did you become such a hypocrite?

She shoved the thought down savagely. “You make it sound like war,” she said. “It is war. And you chose your side fifteen years ago.”

She looked out the window toward the helipad and saw a group of guards clotted around the perimeter.

No. Not a group. A line. Behind the line stood the white-and-orange coveralls of company techs, the blue of pit management. This side of the line there was only a roiling tide of miners and Shantytowners.

They stood, heads down, shoulders hunched, not quite facing the company men. A low buzz rose from their mouths, a sound as subtle and menacing as a wasp’s nest waking to a careless footfall.

Li knew that sound. It was the sound of a mob getting ready to hurt someone. The strike had begun. “Go!” Daahl said.

As she walked away, she felt the two pairs of pale eyes boring into her back, as if they could see right through skin and ceramsteel to the coward she had somehow become.

* * *

She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.

When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.

She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.

Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.

“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.

He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water. “Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”

Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.

The knock came at her door
well after two in the morning station time.

“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.