Alliance Marines: The Road To War

by John Mierau

  “Yes, sir,” Lee responded, swallowing the distaste he felt for his self-aggrandizing, corporate climber of a boss.

  Lee needed this job he hated: this job that made him wear a suit jacket over his mine worksuit, that earned him the scorn of the miners he’d come up with…that took him away from his farm and his family.

  His smarts and hard work had earned him a scholarship to an engineering degree. The degree had gotten him out of the mines and a supervisory position in Caran’s mining division. Wearing a suit and tie wasn’t Lee’s ambition in life, but his brother and his wife still worked their fingers to the bone to hold onto the farm all three shared as stakeholders. He couldn’t get back to the farm soon enough.

  Farmers barely held on, and he didn’t want that for the children he and Maggie wanted to bring into the world.

  So after Lee had served out his original contract to Caran, and the school loans that went with it, he signed on again. And again. He was well into his third five-year contract now, and finally the end was in site: by the end of this tour, they’d own the farm free and clear. When that day came he’d become a full-time farmer…not the flunky of a corporate climber who wasn’t nearly as concerned about what was happening at the bottom of his mine as he was securing his path to promotion.

  Stick with the bullet points, Helman said. As if this was just another day at the mine, another small detail of engineering Lee was pestering Helman with… and not lives on the line.

  Helman reached back and batted Lee’s shoulder as Hiram Dhawal finally started down the ramp. The short balding man’s large eyes were almost bulging out of his face, and Lee very nearly laughed out loud. The man had sent two suit-and-tie wearing assistants and two uniformed Caran Corp security officers out ahead of him like canaries in a coal mine, to see if the air really was breathable, before dragging his own posterior out into Reach’s thin air. His hands pressed frantically to the thin plastic tubes beneath his nose and poked them farther up his nostrils.

  Lee felt his lip curl in disgust at what passed as a corporate overlord. He idly wondered if Administrator Helman would insist Dhawal remove the cannulas once inside the facility, but shook his head. Unlikely, given that would probably amount to career suicide.

  “Let’s go!” VP Dhawal said, his voice muffled by the hand he held over his mouth. He rushed past Helman and Lee, hell-bent on getting a door between himself and the thin atmosphere of Reach.

  The vice president’s entourage had to hold each of his arms as Hiram Dhawal stumbled once, then twice, on the way to the mine.

  Lee and Administrator Helman watched as Dhawal took more heaving breaths, his nostrils pinching shut around the air tubes with every intake of breath.

  Yes, Reach’s atmosphere was thin, Lee thought to himself, but this was ridiculous. Usable oxygen content was low—even after two hundred-plus years of terraforming, first by machines and then by the colonists who arrived later on—but any healthy person could walk a few dozen steps without a cannula, and any of this sort of drama.

  They had to stop again, halfway up the ramp from the landing tarmac to the Facility’s main passenger airlock, for Dhawal to get—what looked to Lee like panic attack—under control.

  The pressure was over 600 millibars for Pete’s sake; there were humans on Earth that lived in half of that! Of course, places like Everest or high-altitude Tibetan communities still had slightly more available oxygen than Reach, Lee admitted. Even so, TUC without physical strain was ten to fifteen minutes for healthy adults. But Lee sometimes wondered whether TUC, or ‘Time of Useful Consciousness,’ applied at all to Corporate Executives.

  Finally, the group made it inside the surface structure. Lee watched, incredulous, as the main vehicle doors to the facility ground down and sealed shut, along with the small-group airlocks.

  Mercifully, they didn’t try to over-pressurize the work area with a breathable mix. Apparently, the placebo effect of closing the doors was enough to revive Dhawal: as soon as the doors came down, the man straightened and sighed with relief.

  “Honestly, how anyone survives on this rock,” he muttered, adopting a regal walking pattern and heading for the elevator with no further need of an elbow to clutch.

  “Welcome to Facility 12, Mister Vice President!” Administrator Helman began as the elevator doors hushed shut behind the group, in a voice full of admiration and gushingly fake respect.

  Dhawal waved him silent. “Skip the speech, Administrator—” He paused leaning towards the man on his right, who whispered Louis’s last name. “Helman,” Dhawal repeated. “I don’t plan to be here long enough for the tour, just long enough to authorize a solution to your ugly little mess.”

  “Yes, of—of course, sir.”

  Administrator Helman wasn’t destined to make it much farther up the corporate ladder, Lee guessed, by the trouble he was having synthesizing a realistic ass-kissing demeanor for the VP.

  “The mine is divided into two fourteen-and-a-half-hour shifts, matching up with Reach’s 29-hour day. Yesterday’s day-shift was the first run under the new quota guidelines that just came down, and they had…unexpected difficulties.” Helman’s voice petered out. An uncomfortable silence stretched. Helman seemed unable to say the words to VP Dhawal’s face.

  “We got everyone out, but the night shift went on strike near the start of their shift,” Lee finally answered for the man. “They shut topside out of systems control, effectively barricading themselves at the bottom of the mine shaft until their grievances are heard.”

  Dhawal’s comically big eyes and drooping, red-rimmed lids expressed disbelief as they swung from Lee to the administrator’s face. Dhawal’s entourage studied handheld screens, studiously avoiding an outburst Lee could predict was brewing inside their boss.

  “This is my Chief Engineer, Lehu Zhang,” Helman said, running the words together in a low, breathy voice.

  He hadn’t quite finished the introduction when Dhawal exploded. “The platinum-group metals and rare earth elements your men are mining today were guaranteed to our clients months ago!” He whipped a finger into Administrator Helman’s face. “You gave them a job, and now they threaten job action? Fire them! Fire the entire crew! And know that this delay will be reflected in your annual review!”

  “He can’t fire them,” Lee said, his anger and frustration overwhelming his sense of place. “And you can’t easily replace them if you don’t meet their demands.”

  Lee’s stomach danced in his belly from more than the elevator jerking to a stop, as the doors opened onto the operations level of Facility 12. The scent of lemon balm and curry plants rushed in, carried by a warm breeze.

  VP Dhawal stayed where he was, his eyes fixed on Lee’s. The rest of the group waited on Dhawal. “Why can’t I fire them? And what are these demands?”

  Lee’s eyes flicked to Helman’s and the man answered for him. “A return to the original per-miner shift load.”

  Dhawal snorted, his big eyes growing larger. “You mean a complete reversal of the quota increase we just ratified with Earth Gov, don’t you?” He swept past Helman, out into the rock-hewn expanse beyond. “Not an option.”

  Lee stared at Dhawal, not believing his ears. Yes, Caran Corp was all about business; yes, they were tough negotiators and hard on their employees; yes, they’d recently signed an unprecedented—some would say impossible—new quota for delivery to Earth. None of that mattered in the face of the reality that was unfolding in the mine.

  “They’re making it an option!” Lee shouted after the VP, his helplessness bubbling to the surface. The entourage followed Dhawal out into the brightly lit cavern. Helman went next, glaring back at Lee.

  Lee cared less about what the man thought with every passing moment. He’d hoped a VP arriving onsite would cool things down a notch. Even businessmen should understand a concrete reality like the one he was about to show Dhawal, but somehow Lee couldn’t shake the feeling things had just taken a frightening turn for the worse.

  O
perations Level was a massive space, carved into Reach’s crust a kilometre beneath the surface, and the surface elevators opened onto its best feature. Once, the space had been filled by a massive vein of copper, rich in noble metal components. Those metals had been cleared out generations ago and in its place Caran Corp had built housing, R&D and administrative facilities, and something a little special. In the center of the facility, the elevators opened onto The Green: a massive clearing retrofitted as an underground park for its off-duty staff, which also provided on-site, rotating food crops for facility personnel.

  Solar-equivalent lighting panels covered the roof, covered in gauzy layers that usually tricked Lee’s mind into seeing clouds instead of wafers of plastic. The illusion was ruined at the moment, due to the dozens of stretchers that covered the grass. Each containing a groaning, screaming miner.

  The Day Shift.

  “That replacement team you have trained and ready to go?” Lee growled at Dhawal surveyed the scene. “They’re spoken for. All of them.”

  “The day shift reported unexpected stratification in the vein,” Helman explained. He waved in Lee’s direction. “Chief Engineer Zhang advised a work stop, but as it was the first shift of the new quota, I assumed he was posturing on behalf of the minors. He’s colony-born,” the man whispered towards Dhawal. “And,” Helman hastened to add, “I had a risk analysis on file that backed my call.”

  Lee bristled, hearing the administrator finally admit he had ignored his warning because Lee was ‘colony-born’ and therefore somehow lazy, or twisting his findings to make things easier for the miners who Helman gauged equally lazy.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. The exploding quotas Caran’s head orifice kept demanding made sure there was no room for laziness in the mines. Money mattered more than miners, and everyone in the business knew it. Hell, everyone on Reach knew it.

  “There are pockets of gas sandwiched inside the ‘unexpected stratification’,” Lee said, louder now. “Some of it exploded during the day shift, bringing a chain reaction of shrapnel down through the entirety of Tunnel 1. We lost two miners, and most of the shift will be out for weeks or months, recovery time. Your trained backup team will have its hands full replacing them. That’s why you have to negotiate with the night shift: you still need them.”

  Lee stepped forward, meeting Dhawal’s eyes. “Mister Vice President. This new quota cannot be met. In fact, the last quota was not sustainable; the speed of work head ori…uh, head office requires is part of the reason we didn’t detect the gas pockets that caused this explosion. We can’t meet the new quotas without risking more lives!”

  Dhawal scowled at Lee and walked over to the closest stretcher, staring down at a miner with blood-soaked bandages covering her right shoulder. Her eyes were dull from whatever the med-techs had given the woman for her pain.

  “Get me a line to the miners,” Dhawal said, reaching his hand back. “The quotas can’t change. You’ll all just have to adapt your mining practices. We can talk about danger pay, I suppose.”

  “Danger pay?” Lee asked, incredulous. He took a step forward to say more, but Heller warned him back with angry eyes and raised palms.

  Heller held a slate out to Dhawal. The man made no move to grab it, just stared at it and began to speak. “This is Vice President Hiram Dhawal, who am I speaking to?”

  The other end came to life with a crackle of interference. Someone was coughing in the background. “This is Carmen Morales, Shift 2 Crew Chief. We’ve been looking forward to talking to you Vice Pres—”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care what you thought you were doing stopping production. I don’t care why you think I’d be sympathetic to your demands. I don’t care about anything you have to say until you tell me you’re restoring remote access to the mines and doing your goddamned job! Then, maybe, we can keep this off your permanent record.” Dhawal waved his hands around. “And perhaps we might talk about danger pay to meet your new quota.”

  “Are you kidding me, Mister Vice President? Have you seen all the stretchers on The Green? My guys have been charting the gas pockets down here and let me tell you, you picked the wrong time to up the quotas. Talk to Chief Engineer Zhang, he’ll tell you! We can’t even meet the old quotas without fragging more of my people, so you can stuff your ‘danger pay’ up your nose, I can’t spend it if I’m dead!”

  VP Dhawal screwed his palms into the sockets of his large eyes. “You seem resolved,” he sighed. “Let me see what can be done from here to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.”

  Dhawal made a slicing motion at his neck and Helman cut the line. “This doesn’t sound promising. Let’s talk about…contingency plans.”

  The vice president wove his way between the stretchers, down The Green towards the Operations Center. His people, and Helman and Lee, followed in his wake.

  Lee stopped at the bottom of the slight hill while everyone else funnelled inside the Operations Center. He turned and stared. The Green was a mass of white stretchers. It was a miracle they’d only lost two lives so far.

  Contingency plans, Dhawal had said.

  More were going to do die now, Lee was sure of it.

  VP Dhawal would have some trick up his sleeve to staff the mines; maybe a scramjet was already on its way from another facility with a mining crew ready to be sacrificed to Facility 12’s new quota.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  Could he?

  Taking a stand would cost him his life. Best case scenario, defying Caran would get him fired, and financially ruin his life, and his children’s lives, for untold generations.

  Lee scratched at the dirt on his face, ashamed at his thoughts.

  Here he was, worried about money.

  He half-expected purple spots were growing on his face, as he turned his back on the field of stretchers and followed Dhawal inside.

  Lee saw the group clustered around the long table in the middle of the operations center. Two rows of workstations lined either side of the long table, with doors on either end. The workstations were empty. Caran Vice President Dhawal and Facility 12 Administrator Helman stared down at the table lit up with a 2-D model of the mine.

  Moving closer, Lee saw the little dots that represented each of the miners at the bottom of the shaft.

  Unless he did something, those dots would wink out soon, or the dots that replaced them at the start of the next shift.

  Caran Corp wanted their mine working, or people would die.

  How could he stop it from happening?

  As Chief Engineer, he could shut the factory down, but if he did, Dhawal could replace him overnight. If people kept working the mines, sooner or later, those dots on the screen would read as lifeless as the Reach soil. More lifeless: the terraforming was taking hold: there was algae, lichen, even scrub brush in some parts of the planet.

  So? Lee asked himself. How do you stop him?

  If he said ‘no’ to whatever VP Dhawal suggested, his career, maybe his life, would be a radioactive cinder.

  Two more years, and he’d be out of here.

  Two more years, and he’d own his life free and clear, and no one could ever claim him or his children in indentured servitude again.

  It was an impossible choice…but he was an engineer. He’d do the impossible.

  Lee walked around the table to stand between Helman and VP Dhawal.

  Dhawal tapped his fingers on the table, flipping through a series of outlines for each level of the mineshaft until a set of icons representing heat signatures, biometric readouts, and motion sensors depicted what was happening at the very bottom of the shaft.

  Green lights flashed over shafts 2 through 5, while yellow and red outlined shaft 1: the location of the explosion that had killed two and injured almost every other person on the day shift. Lee and his team had worked frantically to get the day shift up safely, without any more loss of life…and then Helman had sent the night shift right back down again.

  Lee had been i
n Ops, madly reviewing scans of the mines to find out what had gone so terribly wrong, when the central and backup elevator shafts had both winked offline. He could not grasp how both elevators had failed—until someone had passed him a handheld and Carmen Morales was on the other end of the line, calling up from the pit. She was more than ready to explain it to him.

  Lee couldn’t fault her for calling the work stoppage. The shift chief had signed her own pink slip with the action—likely everybody working under her down there would find themselves unemployed soon—but Carmen was making the gutsy call, the right call. She’d spent her first half hour down the hole—every last minute of discretionary time the corporation allowed a crew chief in the mines—to scan and collate data about the explosion. She’d sent that data on to Lee, who double-checked and verified what Carmen had seen: similar gas pockets to the one that had taken Shaft 1 offline extended below Shaft 2 and 3. There was every chance the pockets extended below the other shafts too. How thirty years of passive scans and drilling had missed the pockets wasn’t the issue. The issue was how to make Caran Corp deal with it, instead of ignoring it, now they knew it was there.

  Dhawal tapped the screen with both index fingers, and chipmunked his cheeks with a deep breath that he slowly let out on a loud sigh.

  “The gas pockets all scan only a few dozen metres deep?”

  “That’s the good news,” Lee said, leaning over the table. At almost six feet, Lee was tall for a native Reacher. He ignored VP Dhawal’s cocked eyebrow as he reached almost clear across the table to pull up one of the last tests he’d performed. He dragged the icon for the file all the way across and dropped it a blank part of the display right in front of the VP.

  “The entire mine is built on a kilometres-deep shield of solid rock. These anomalous gas pockets were trapped millennia ago when the planet cooled. An incredible, total fluke. But we’ve compared these new studies and the original surveys.” Lee tapped the red dots on the screen.