by Britt Ringel
“Our leadless fearer has spoken,” Deke joked as he rose from the bench. “The cooks’ll clean up for us, Kat. Leave your plate here.”
“Yeah,” Tick muttered as she bounced up from the table. “You really don’t want to see where they put the leftovers.”
“George,” Sadler said, “I’ll bring Kat down to Spur Twenty-nine after we go through the dryman’s orientation up top.” He looked at Deke. “Keep the dryman’s equipment you picked up this morning and have Kat shadow you for the rest of the afternoon once we’re down there. You can turn in your backpack at the end of the day.”
Deke nodded and Sadler and Kat watched George’s crew saunter back to a mine entrance.
From the now empty table, Kat said, “Tabitha seems nice. She’s pretty.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. I’m not interested in her,” Sadler answered at once.
Kat felt her face light up at the news and she smiled at her sudden urge to flirt. “So what does interest you, Mr. Wess?”
Sadler stood from the table. “Right now? Getting my Johnny Newcomer dryman trained up. Let’s get your gear requisitioned, come back here and go through everything. The mine’s a treacherous place but a good dryman can make it a little less dangerous.”
Chapter 15
The cacophony inside the mine rattled Kat to her core. Despite the hearing protection built into her hardhat, two hours spent inside the mine already had her ears ringing like bells. As George’s large, 35-ton grinder tore strips of coal away from the forward wall in Spur Twenty-nine, the vibrations made Kat’s entire body shake. Even after dousing the wall thoroughly with coal dust suppressant from the spray nozzle connected to her backpack, black powder shrouded the end of the spur in a thick, hazy cloud.
She adjusted her miner’s mask, specially issued equipment that provided both eye protection and air filtration. Its seal seemed tight against her cheeks yet, during every short break, she wiped at the coal dust that managed to leak in and cover her sweat-soaked face.
She felt two taps on her shoulder and discovered Deke standing behind her. He pointed underneath the leading edge of the conveyor system behind the grinder. The chattering machine’s gears and pulleys worked in bone-jarring symphony to ferry the extracted minerals spewing behind George’s machine to the main tunnel. On either side of it, Reece and Shannon were shoveling coal that had fallen off the conveyor back on top of the belt.
Kat gave a quick salute and crawled under the first conveyor section. A beam of light from her hardhat cut through the veil of black dust. She oriented the tip of her nozzle at the bearings in the corners of the belt system and squeezed the trigger. Compressed air blew from the nozzle to clean the mechanism. Her thumb flicked a switch and the spray transformed into a gout of pressurized mist that coated the gears with a coal dust inhibitor and lubricant. She cautiously slid farther to her left to treat the opposite corner of the conveyor system with the same procedure. Eight spots to a single conveyor section, she counted. Sixteen sections to the main tunnel. Her responsibilities ended there.
She pushed herself forward on knee and elbow pads made from a ceramic-synthetic fiber mixture that stood up well to the abuse. The crunching from the grinder’s teeth against the forward wall sang chorus with the ear-splitting clatter of the conveyor gears. Dust flew out behind the grinder, peppering Kat with a black film and small chunks of coal. Ironically, she thought to herself as she scooted to the next spray spot, Porter Enterprises isn’t even that interested in the coal.
During her orientation with Sadler, she had learned that Porter’s real aim was to acid-wash the extracted coal in the slurry pits to recover rare earth elements, or “REEs.” The mine contained one of the highest concentrations of terbium in the entire region, an element vital to the production of the advanced technologies used in the more civilized parts of the world. It was critical in the manufacturing of computers, batteries, and fuel cells in addition to having significant roles in the health and defense industries.
The teeth of George’s grinder lifted from the forward coal wall and the thought-shattering racket in the spur dwindled to merely deafening levels. The coal is almost an afterthought, Kat recognized. Sure, they ship some by mag-rail to settlements that use coal-fired power plants and even sell smaller amounts to Shantytown vendors, but most of it is used up in the REE extraction process.
She backed out from under the conveyor section and stood. George was off his machine, screaming to Shannon. The pair walked around to the front of the grinder and Deke motioned for Kat to follow them.
She turned the corner to the front of the fearsome machine. George looked at her and screamed over the noise, “Clean here!” while pointing to a spot where two grinding discs interlocked. Kat stuck her nozzle to the small section and released a jet of air. She then drenched the battered metal in dust suppressant and lubricant and stepped back.
George stuck his hand between the discs and shouted, “It’s coming loose again! I can feel it as soon as I put pressure on it.” He glanced at Kat and waved her away as Shannon performed her own inspection of the machine. “Tell the crew to take five!”
Kat gave him a thumbs up and moved behind the machine again. Deke and Reece were shoveling coal onto the belt. Tick had been mostly absent all afternoon. Kat assumed even the rats were smart enough not to be this close to the end of the working spur. “George says take five,” she shouted through her miner’s mask.
The laborers and Kat walked up the spur together. Spur Twenty-nine currently stretched eighty-one meters and slowly grew each hour the grinder chewed on its end. The tunnel would continue to extend for as long as the leading edge produced good coal. Kat stepped carefully along the side of the narrow passage dominated by the conveyor system. Once the final length of the extractable coal arm in the spur was determined, the crew would turn its attention to the side walls and grind out cavernous rooms, leaving large, natural pillars to support the ceiling. After the rooms gave up their coal, the miners would perform the even more dangerous task of taking from the pillars, or robbing out the spur, until it was suicidal to continue.
Currently the spur was only a little wider than the face of the grinder itself. Halfway between the spur’s end and the main tunnel, Kat saw her first rat in over an hour. Beady eyes reflected in her headlamp as the rat sat immobile until Kat was nearly a footstep from it. It then scurried up the spur in front of her companions.
The noise from the conveyors didn’t subside but a shouting conversation was possible. When they approached the water tank at the junction between the main tunnel and their spur, Reece slapped Kat on the back with a gloved hand. Even wearing all of his gear, his slight frame made him resemble a scarecrow more than a man. “You’re doing fine,” he complimented. “You’re a hell of a lot more nimble than I am.”
Deke swiveled his miner’s mask upward from the joint connecting it to his hardhat. His face was darker than a night sky. “Just keep an eye on your suppressant level. They don’t care how much air you use but the suppressant is expensive and they’ll start asking questions if you can’t go a twelve-hour shift on one tank.”
Kat immediately checked her gauge. The fifteen-pound tank read seven pounds. She pulled at the backpack straps that dug into her shoulders. The tank had weighed nearly twenty pounds when full and her back already ached from only an afternoon’s work. She raised her mask and sweat dripped from her chin. “Thanks for all the advice, you guys. I was worried about how I’d be treated but the whole crew has been great.”
During the afternoon, Kat had been relieved to find that her new team worked well together and generally got along. The comradery felt like a contrast to her old life. While specifics were elusive, Kat sensed that she had not been well-liked at her old job, somewhere in her past. Glimpses at hints of memories stubbornly remained shielded from her mind’s eye but she swore that people she couldn’t remember had been frustrated with her or perhaps even jealous of her. Flashes of clean office rooms and manicured hands kept tea
sing her thoughts.
She fished a plastic, collapsible cup from inside her overalls, standard equipment for workers in the mines. After filling the cup with water from the tank, she began to drink.
“Why are you not working?” a loud voice behind her raged. Kat choked slightly on the water as she turned to face the man she knew only as “Daniel.”
“Our Equipment Operator told us to take five, Mr. Lambert,” Deke replied meekly. “He’s working on a disc.”
“What crew are you?” the foreman demanded.
“Four, from Wess, sir,” Deke answered.
Lambert looked over the group and thrust a finger into Deke’s chest. “You play dryman for the rest of the afternoon, muckman.” he ordered. He looked between Deke and Reece and commanded, “Now get back to work!”
Kat began to turn with her crewmates but Lambert grabbed her arm and spun her back around to face him. “Not you! I got something different for you this afternoon.” He watched the men escape down the narrow tunnel. When they were gone, he stared at her for several, uncomfortable moments before assigning her a new task. An expired spur was going to be closed during the night and she was to ensure all of Porter’s equipment had been removed from the side tunnel.
Lambert let his eyes drop lower as he finished assigning her the job and threatened, “If you don’t want your first day to be your last, you’ll move that fine ass over there and clear out the shit in the spur up to the junction at the main tunnel. A groundhog’s going through there tonight and I don’t want it running over any equipment that’s been left behind.”
Kat felt the foreman’s eyes linger over her body once again before he stomped off. She looked behind her but her crew was long out of sight. She recalled that the side tunnels running to the left of the main tunnel were odd-numbered while even numbers designated the spurs to the right. She was standing at the junction to Spur Twenty-nine. She began to walk toward the mine’s entrance, counting backwards as she went.
When she reached what she thought was Spur Fifteen, she looked in vain for someone to verify her location. No markers on the walls confirmed the number and the older spurs in the mine had been played out and deserted. She stepped over a trio of rats to enter the narrow corridor. It emptied quickly into a large room, easily twenty meters wide as light dimly reflected off the distant walls. She continued to walk deeper down the spur and it narrowed once more before reopening into a second chamber. This chamber wasn’t as wide and Kat could see dozens of red eyes along the walls curiously questioning her presence. Further into the spur she walked, past three additional, empty rooms before coming to the end of the tunnel. Metal tracks ran down the middle of the spur from its terminus to the main junction. She had seen mechanized carts, called groundhogs, which used the tracks as a guide.
Starting from the dead end she retraced her path, meticulously searching every abandoned room for mining equipment. The narrow passages were empty except for the tracks although the large rooms contained an unexpected amount of gear. Much of what she found was broken but Kat retrieved everything, unsure if the equipment would be recycled. Echoes of noise and the dust that shook loose with muted vibrations were little more than bothersome this far from the active parts of the mine. The rats were her only companions. They were everywhere yet nowhere at the same time, insatiably curious monitors that remained just on the periphery of her sweat-stung vision.
Kat diligently stacked every piece of equipment she encountered along the side of the main tunnel. Finished, she performed a final visual inspection to ensure the tracks leading down the long spur were clear. Aided by only the light from her headlamp, it had taken her over an hour to clear the entire spur. Early in the job, she had removed her dryman’s backpack and left it in the first played out chamber.
She had just returned to the backpack and was tightening its straps when Sadler entered the forsaken room at a frantic pace. He nearly collided with her but Kat pivoted out of the way at the last moment. Skidding to a stop, his eyebrows furrowed behind his mask’s visor.
“There you are!” he shouted a little too loudly, his voice echoing in the comparatively quiet room. He turned away from her and walked a short distance down the spur while pulling off his hardhat. “Son of a bitch, bastard!”
“What’d I do?” Kat asked desperately.
Sadler spun toward her, his face creased with a fury that only slightly faded when he looked at her. “Not you. Goddamned Daniel Lambert. He sent you in here, right?”
“It’s okay, Mr. Wess,” Kat squeaked out near the furious man. “I’m a dryman. I clean.” She lifted her mask and smiled warmly at him in an attempt to disarm his frightening mood. White teeth contrasted her black-smudged face.
Sadler winced slightly before recovering. He looked at Kat with a different kind of intensity. “You,” he acknowledged quietly before smiling and stepping closer to her. His voice was under control again. “Daniel is the foreman, so he can order any of us around but the next time he tells you to clean a robbed-out spur alone, you come and find me first, alright?”
Kat’s eyes widened as she remembered their verbal exchange in the hospital courtyard. She looked around the room. “This is robbed out?”
“Yes,” Sadler answered. “You’d see big, thick coal pillars supporting the roof in the rooms if they weren’t. In fact, we’re going to collapse the entrances to a couple of played out spurs tonight precisely so people don’t wander in them and get themselves crushed.”
“I didn’t know,” Kat said while looking away shyly.
“I wouldn’t expect you to know but Lambert sure as hell knows better.” He exhaled slowly before saying, “It’s nearly quitting time. Can you find your way back to Spur Twenty-nine?”
She nodded docilely.
“Good. Get back to your crew and finish your day, Kat. I’ve got someone I want to chat with.”
Kat offered him a jaunty salute as she beamed with new enthusiasm. The reaction on the man’s face made her heart flutter.
Before she could turn away, Sadler quickly added, “And Kat… I’m glad you’re on my team.”
The rest of the day passed quietly. Kat followed her crew above ground and to the trailers at the end of the shift. She dunked her head completely into the clean waters of the washing trough and gave her hair a thorough rinsing along with her face and hands. By the time the miners stepped away from the basin, a thick film covered the murky water.
After hanging her gear in her locker, she donned her thin gown-overcoat over her only set of clothes and caught the mag-rail for Waytown. Buses again were waiting for the miners but this time the corp-sec guards seemed far more attentive, assuring no Trodden slipped into the settlement. At Eastpoint, Kat shuffled with the herd into Shantytown.
She would be paid Friday, at the end of the day, and she looked forward to buying better-fitting clothes at the market on the weekend. Until then, she would mostly spend her draining reserves on food, water and rent. She thought her remaining two large and three smalls would hold out for the week if she was frugal. Fortunately, her lunch at the mine had been so large compared to her usual meals that Kat planned to buy only a stick of murine from a vendor each day and eat it for breakfast during her morning walks to Eastpoint.
The one item that couldn’t wait until next week, however, was socks. Although Porter provided sturdy leather boots, she didn’t have socks to wear with them. Her feet had rubbed against the unyielding boots until she had developed several blisters over the course of her first day. Once back in Shantytown, on her way through the market to buy tomorrow’s breakfast, she also shopped for a pair of thick socks.
Cotton socks were difficult to find, and expensive. She begrudgingly traded two smalls for a single hand-patched pair after searching futilely for a better deal. Kat immediately put them on and found that they made her canvas shoes a little tight.
It was dark by the time Kat entered her alley. The fire crew was already in full swing and she could tell by the boisterous banter that
several members were well on their way to drunkenness. Kat curled up on her side of the alley and tucked her hands underneath her head. Having spent the entire day outside Shantytown, the smells of the alley were a full assault on her senses. The rotting garbage and stench of sweat mixed with decay roiled her stomach. She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax.
Chapter 16
A crunch of glass roused Kat. She lay still and listened to the sounds of the street, unsure who or what had made the noise or where. Another crunch from the alley’s mouth caused her to open her eyes. A figure stood in the center of the alley, a few meters in. Backlighting from the street beyond concealed the intruder in his own shadow. The neighborhood was cool and silent and Kat judged the time as somewhere in the small hours of morning. The figure took tentative steps deeper into the alley, just a few meters from Kat’s feet.
She slowly slipped her trembling left hand to the trash piled against the brick wall, reaching for a hunting knife.
“Get out of here, you no good thief!” screamed Rat from the opposite wall. He banged his cane repeatedly against the side of the fire barrel. “I’ll shoot you dead if you don’t get!”
The figure stumbled back a step and looked around in a seeming panic. He then turned completely, ran down the alley and disappeared around the corner.
“Keep running!” Rat carried on in a threatening tone. “I see you sniffing in my alley again and you’ll be dead!” He banged on the barrel several more times for good measure.
Sitting up now, Kat held the knife unsteadily in front of her with both hands. Despite the passing danger, her breaths came in short, panicked bursts. Since her first night, she had always slept closer to the street than the back of the alley. She had been more afraid of Rat and Starlet than the denizens beyond. Tomorrow night, she resolved while trying to calm herself, I’m moving farther back. She looked behind her to the right and saw Rat was already laying back down. “Thanks, Rat,” she said in the new quiet. “I didn’t hear him until he was right on me.”