2056A.D., Haven
1. (65:15, Workday-3) Last Chance Valley, South End.
The crawler moved slowly across the valley floor, bumping and jolting over rocks, roots, and drillbit burrows. In its wake a thin, dry wisp of dust drew a straight yellow line, pulled by the thin, dry, eternal wind. Two more plumes rose behind it, each moving as slowly as the first, each marking the passage of one third of the remnants of Haven MineSearch Incorporated, SA.
Jonnie Johnson clung to the top of the crawler and his walkaround bottle, cursing as a brief earthquake caused the overloaded suspension system to bottom out. He and the other survivors from the two abandoned crawlers took turns clinging to the roof rack and breathing from the bottle when the thin air started to make them sick. A steep-sided valley stretched flat in front of them, the floor covered with the scrub plants that passed for tropical savannah here on Haven. Anywhere else it would be called boreal forest. Anywhere but on this damned misbegotten frozen-ass moon of a gas giant that hadn’t quite made it as a brown dwarf.
Ahead was their goal, just visible now they had turned the final corner at the south end of the valley. It was a lava field fronting on a dormant volcano. The big cone was just visible, brooding in the red light from Cat’s Eye, a cloud drifting off the top. If their luck held... if their luck changed to something worth talking about, the lava flows would yield enough shimmer stones to make them all rich. If not, then Haven MineSearch would be as broke as the two crawlers they left behind at the valley entrance.
Johnson looked around. This was the clearest patch of ground they had crossed in hours. Probably their last chance for a secure camping spot this workday. He banged on the roof of the cab, and hung over the edge. After just enough delay to be irritating, Jim Ditter retracted the window.
“Don’t tell me you think it’s time to rotate outsiders already, Johnson. You must be getting soft if the cold is getting to you this quick.”
“No, Jim, but I think this clear area will be our best spot for a sleep stop.”
“Yeah? Well that ain’t your call. I’ll have to check with Damson.” He pulled his massive shoulders back inside and ran the window closed, as if afraid the heat would get out and help warm his top deck passenger. Johnson shrugged and rolled back on top. Ditter would probably check with Sam Nordon too, just to make sure his real boss stayed in the loop. You would think that five years of shared hardships would do away with petty bickering and politics. Oh, well.
2. (84:00, Workday-4) Last Chance Valley, South End.
Johnson, Frank Damson, and Sam Nordon sat crowded together in the cramped “office space” of Crawler One. On the narrow desk in front of them floated the highest quality survey images the government was willing to sell them. Each man was seeking something different in the multicolor, multispectral, multidimensional glow. Johnson was mentally tracing out the search patterns necessary to find the dikes and intrusions where shimmer stones were likely to be. Nordon was looking for places they could run their grinder, if they ever got it out of the river and could start mining operations. And grizzled old Frank Damson, expedition leader because neither of the other two could corner the votes, squinted his one good eye and wondered where to put the latrines.
The imagery showed the old lava flow which filled the south end of the valley. One lone cinder cone crouched darkly at the edge of the flow, hunched into the corner between the wall of lava and the riftwall. The cinder cone held a clear blue lake. The lava, with any luck, held drillbit teeth, buried when the animals were overtaken by an earlier eruption tens of millions of years ago, heated, compressed, metamorphosed into shimmer stones, and now brought back to the surface by the more recent event. One tooth could renew their grubstake, two would pay off their debts, and three could make them well-to-do. If they found any. Of course, imagery does not show everything. Not even multicolor, multispectral, multidimensional imagery. But how were they to know?
Johnson pointed at the display. “I have an idea, Sam. See where the lava has overtopped that last cinder cone? That might be an easy way to the top of the flow. Up the crater wall and around the rim to the edge of the lava. If the water stays clear through the winter, it may be warm enough to wash in, or use to heat the camp. Too bad the sides are so steep. It might be nice to camp next to the lake itself.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet you a credit to a tenth you can’t make that water drinkable. It’s got some sort of dissolved gas that tastes terrible.” Nordon did not like Johnson. Everyone else was from the mining sites owned by Great Lakes Iron and Steel, every working mine between Mesabi and Sudbury. All of them had been picked up during the strike and revolt of’45. Johnson had been in the technical management section of Great Lakes, not a real miner at all. Nordon thought the CoDo Marines had probably scooped him up by mistake, or maybe he was a Company spy.
Nordon was like that. He had been a shift foreman back at Sudbury, ten strikes, one revolt, and a thousand years ago. Now, he was like the rest of them. A perpetual exile. Homeless, no family, only stubborn anger keeping him alive for the last ten years. “We are not going to be here that long anyway, Johnson. Not without the grinder.”
“You’re probably right, Nord,” Johnson said. “All sorts of dissolved minerals, too. Still, I’ll run some tests on it when I test the lava. But speaking of the grinder, I think I know how to do without it for a while. Look, there’s two ways to find shimmer stones. You can walk the edges of the exposure, looking for places where the frost has cracked the basalt. That’s what the singletons, the old sourdoughs do.
Or you can strip-mine the flow, grind it into powder, and sieve the powder for shimmer stones.”
“Yeah Johnson, everybody knows that. That’s what we wanted to do, until you let Snuffy run the grinder into the river. Bastard. I hope it took him a long time to drown. You know what our chances are of findin’ a shimmer stone by walking that lava wall?”
Johnson grimaced, ignoring the jab. He had been riding in the cab with Snuffy when Snuf had tried to run a gravel bar like a dirt road. He had nearly drowned, himself, when the bar ended in deep water and the crawler and grinder had plunged to the bottom of the river. Nordon still held a grudge against anyone who was on that crawler that day.
“I know how low they are, Nord. The point is, what everybody knows is not everything. There is another way to do it.” Now he had their attention.
“How is that, Jon?” This from Damson.
“Placer mining of the downslope talus.”
Nordon swore, spat on the heater bar, and poured another cup of synthetic coffee.
“Another wild-assed Johnson idea! You think people haven’t thought of that? Mick Meagher’s crew went bust try’n over north of Trinity last summer. Those lava fields are as dry as a bone, and to do placer mining you need a good source of water...”
He paused, “...lots of it... “ His voice trailed off, then came back, softly. “Son of a bitch!” His fist hit the table. “Of course, the lake!” Then he paused again, grudgingly. “Yeah, but where do we get the pipe and the high pressure pumps and hoses? What do we build the sluice chutes from? You thought of any of that?”
“Sure, Nord,” Johnson said. “You know we don’t have to have a big rig. This is untouched earthen, and we are not going to be washing away hardpack, at least not yet.”
He turned to Damson. “All we need is enough to float the dirt away so we can screen the rest.” Frank nodded.
“Well, then,” Johnsons continued. “We just use some of the spare cargo canisters and make a puddle tub. It’s like a giant version of the pan the old miners used to go after gold with. We can set it up easy, and it won’t need much water. The Australians used puddlers back in the 1800’s, before they piped water to the gold fields. Then we can cannibalize some of the other systems and use the stainless steel piping and low pressure pumps from the abandoned crawlers.”
That set off another argument. Could they risk tearing up one of their remaining crawlers or sending one back alone? Was ther
e enough piping to get water over the lip of the crater? How much pressure did they need to move fine basalt talus?
What size riffles did they need on the sluice chutes? By the time Byers’ Star dragged itself over the edge of the world they had a plan, and a chance.
3. (116:27, Workday-5): Last Chance Camp.
Once again Johnson found himself jammed into the office space of a crawler. This time it was Crawler 2, and the space had been converted into a combined medical/geological/electronics maintenance lab. Lightly built as he was, Johnson still had to sit turned sideways, his back to the Medical cabinet, his elbow resting on the Electronics workbench, and his attention devoted to the spectrometer in geology.
Johnson swore and unzipped his second shirt. The crawler was hot and stank of burned magma. And the numbers looked all wrong. Maybe the laser was out of alignment. Well, even if the numbers were bad, perhaps the ratios were still good. Even if the zero point drifted, the shapes of the lines should still be the same. He pulled the data chip from the spec and stuck it in the desk.
The desk clucked and twittered to let him know it was working, then beeped and lit the display. He looked at it with puzzlement and dawning apprehension. No basalt. Low silicates. And what the hell was carbonatite? He had never heard of it. Neither had the desk.
Johnson sighed and stepped out into the mid-afternoon warmth. The sky was clear and the now-smokeless volcano was etched a sharp grey against the pale blue.
Frank was not going to like this at all.
Damson was in the break tent when Johnson came in. Most of the men were there, taking a long break before preparations for truenight. Johnson handed him the printout.
“Here are the results of my tests, Frank. That stuff we’ve been working on isn’t basalt at all. I’m not sure it will have any shimmer stones in it.”
The room got very quiet. No shimmer stones meant ruin, meant loss of life savings, meant default on loans. That meant death here on unforgiving Haven.
“What is this carbonatite stuff, anyway?”
“I’m not sure, Frank. Our library does not have much on it. It is a carbonate rock. Not much silica. Melts at a much lower temperature than basalt. I think that with Haven’s small, cool core and limited radioactives this stuff ought to be more common on Haven than on Earth. But I never heard of it before. And what I don’t know is what effect carbonatite chemistry has on shimmer stones.”
“What’s the problem Frank?” That was Parker, loud across the now silent room.
Damson turned to face the faces. “We’re not sure, Fred. Johnson’s tests show this lava field isn’t basalt after all.”
There was a surge of conversation. Damson held up his hand.
“Right now we don’t know what that means as far as shimmer stones go. The big thing is, we don’t know if this carbonatite stuff is hot enough or has the right chemical composition to turn drillbit teeth into shimmer stones. Until we find out, we continue as if nothing happened. Maybe we will find evidence one way or the other. Maybe we’ll find some basalt lava. When Johnson or I find out anything more, we’ll let you know. Any questions?”
Ditter was on his feet at once. “Johnson, you’re the guy that suggested we come down south here. Why the hell didn’t you find this out in Hellza?”
“Yeah, and what happens if this stuff don’t have no shimmer stones in it? I sunk everything I had in this company. What’ll I tell the sharks back at Hellza, that the rocks wasn’t hot enough? You know what our chances are of gettin’ away with that?” Rasmussen was one of the few men with a family on Haven, and was deeper in debt than most.
Damson ignored Ditter. “I don’t know George, but we’ll think of something. Maybe move around to the next valley and try there. Don’t let’s borrow trouble before we have to. I know we’re all stretched thin on this thing. We just have to take it one day at a time.”
That discouraged the men even more than the initial announcement. Or perhaps the initial announcement was just sinking in. Hands clutched at cups stiffly, knuckles white. Over in one corner, Jim Ditter and his friends conferred sourly. Nordon would hear of this within minutes. Elsewhere in the room, conversation rumbled quietly.
It was the first time since they had all been loaded onto the CoDominium transports that Johnson had seen the men despair. Even at the end of the Great Lakes Iron Revolt, when the CoDo Marines were breaking into the barricaded works, the men had an air of “you can beat me but you can’t defeat me.” That was gone, and despair took its place.
The door opened and Arne Elstrom limped in. Big Arne, too tall and too loud at the best of times, stood canted onto his good leg with one hand in the pocket of his half-open parka, looking at the other occupants of the tent.
“Well, I thought I would find you all sitting around, drinking synthetics and trying to decide whether to pick your nose or pick your ass! This your idea of fun? Sit on your backsides and have a bitch contest?”
Damson told him the news. Elstrom tugged at his bushy blond beard with his free hand and looked at Johnson. “Is that right Jonnie?”
Johnson nodded.
“I found out this afternoon and came right over to tell everybody. You and Pete and Grit were up at the lake.”
Elstrom looked solemn. “I’m glad you told everybody here, Jonnie. Too bad you didn’t get a chance to stop by and tell the drillbits that.”
Johnson was confused. “What?”
Elstrom was grinning now. “The giant drillbits, Jonnie. Nobody ever told them not to cook their teeth in this stuff.”
He pulled his hand from his pocket and tossed a small, glowing nugget across the room. It went through Johnson’s slow reacting hands and he slapped them both to his chest to hold it there.
He pulled his hands down and looked at the object. It was small, conical, and multicolored. A shimmer stone. Not a big one, but big enough, with a coloring subtly different from previous stones he had seen.
“That there’s a 5 carat shimmer stone. One more like that and this company starts operating in the black. I washed it out of the talus at the foot of the lava flow up by the lake. Pete and Grit are still up there, packing up for truenight, but they thought you might want to get the news early. I’m glad I got here before you guys made any silly decisions.”
The room grew silent. After so many turns of fortune, no one knew how to react. It was as if each was waiting for his neighbor to take the lead. Damson looked at Arne, turned, and walked over to the drunk tank, opened it and pulled out a bottle.
“I’ll drink to that!”
That’s when the cheering started.
4. (128:00, Workday-6): Crater Lake.
The Haven day-night cycle was now completely out of step with the Earth work-rest cycle. After a long party and a short night the camp forced itself awake for four hours of frenzied activity before Byers’ Star sank too low behind the western hills. This was the onset of truenight, the only time it became truly dark, and truly cold. Byers’ was setting and Cat’s Eye was on the other side of the planet. Beyer’s long, slow drift down the sky left everything sunk in long-shadowed gloom.
The early crews were still out, working as pairs and singletons, most on the cliff face. The camp crews rose later and spent their time preparing for the oncoming night, their jobs and their hangovers complicated by another of Haven’s brief earthquakes.
Already the sky overhead was deep purple and the wind cold. The cinder cone sat black against the sky, smoking quietly.
Damson and Nordon were in the office tent, trying to hammer out a rotation schedule when Barry Iverson stuck his shaggy head in through the coldlock. “You better get up to the lake real quick Frank! Jim Ditter’s been killed.”
Two minutes later they had unhooked Crawler 1 from the camp power grid and were on their way into the gathering gloom, leaving the cook wondering how he was going to get enough electricity to the stove to finish cooking the post-sunset midday meal.
Ditter lay on his back at the edge of the greenery, two
meters above the lake. Hentges and Rasmussen were kneeling beside him with an oxy rig from one of the trikes on the ground between them. Damson and Nordon climbed down from the crawler cab. It was dark enough in the crater that they stopped and picked up a pair of work-lights. The rest of the men from camp filed out of the back, coughing at the stink of the lake. Hentges looked up as they arrived.
“We found him in the lake when we came up on the trikes, Frank. Floating face down. No telling how long he was there. Long enough to get cold anyways. Nothin’ I could do for him.”
“What the hell was he doing in the lake with his clothes on? Could he swim?”
Rasmussen laughed. He and Ditter shared a cubical in the sleep tent. “Hell, Frank, he was the only guy I know who actually enjoyed swimming in the ice water they got here on Haven. Not with his clothes on though. This had to be some kind of accident.”
Nordon looked up from where he was kneeling on the other side of the body. “I don’t think it was an accident, Frank.”
He tilted the light. “Look at his face.”
They looked. A half-dozen nicks and scratches marked the right side. There was a cut on Ditter’s lip, and another on his right forehead. The water had washed away any blood, and the marks were not immediately obvious.
“I think he got in a fight with somebody, an they shut him down an’ threw him in the lake to make it look like it was an accident.”
Hentges looked startled, then thoughtful. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get much water out of him. He was half dead when he went in.”
Nordon looked thoughtful. “Then maybe somebody killed him.”
Wavinak was incredulous. “Killed? Who would have done that? We’ve all been together since Great Lakes Iron. Nobody would do that, Nord, not even for a shimmer stone.”
“Well then you tell me how Ditter got in that lake with all his clothes on an’ his face all beat up an’ him half dead into the bargain.”
War World: Discovery Page 38