by Ben Wolf
Vanessa gasped and began to examine herself, and Etya stepped out.
There wasn’t actually a stain on Vanessa’s blouse, but it gave Etya something to revel in as she stormed toward the admin grav lift.
Monday morning came too quickly for Justin. He made it to the showers, to breakfast, and to Sector 13 in plenty of time, but instead of Keontae’s electric attitude and demeanor, solemn silence accompanied Justin’s every footstep.
At the front of Sector 13, near the access door, Harry and Shannon had gathered everyone around. As soon as the clock struck 0600, Harry started talking, but Justin barely paid attention.
He looked at the spot where it had happened. Familiar blue filling now sealed the crevice he’d helped to carve into the floor. A group of freestanding posts emanating streams of red light into each other formed a wide perimeter around the spot—caution posts, designed to screech if anything breached their perimeter.
“So let’s get to work,” Harry concluded. “And remember, safety is paramount.”
Sure it is. Justin shook his head. Sure it is.
He glanced up at the science office. Dr. Stielbard stood up there like a scarecrow/android hybrid, staring down at them again. Light illuminated her face and body this time, and Justin met her eyes.
In that moment, they shared the camaraderie of loss thanks to this mine. He understood a part of her, and perhaps she understood part of him. Death had touched them both, and they had both evaded it.
Dr. Stielbard looked away.
Justin headed over to the hand-lasers.
The day crawled by. His muscles performed well, and he hadn’t managed to exhaust himself by lunchtime. Though not hungry, Justin ate while Connie yammered and Candy listened. He made eye contact with Shannon once, but like Dr. Stielbard, she looked away after just a moment.
Back in the mine, the work continued to progress, but every time Justin walked past or even looked at that spot on the floor, his heart broke all over again.
He blasted the rock with his hand-laser, following protocol, working it at a productive speed neither too fast nor too slow. Thus far, he’d made good progress.
But his laser sputtered out, and he couldn’t get it to work again. He hadn’t overheated it—he’d taken extra care to not even get close. It just stopped functioning, and he didn’t know why.
“Barclay,” a voice called from across the cavern.
Justin turned.
Harry stood watching him with his hands on his hips. “Why aren’t you working?”
Why aren’t you? Justin wanted to ask, but he restrained himself. This time. “Laser’s broken, or something.”
“We’ve got twenty more.” Harry nodded toward the rack of hand-laser apparatuses. “Log it for maintenance, replace it, and get back at it.”
“Yes, sir,” Justin said.
He headed over to the rack, unlatched the one wrapped around his torso, and hung it back in its spot on the rack, then he swiped his card and logged the laser as malfunctioning.
Then Justin donned another one and activated it. It worked just fine, so he traipsed back to his workspace. He used the laser for another five minutes or so, and then it, too, petered out on him.
What the hell? He shook it, smacked it, tried to deactivate and reactivate it, but it didn’t respond to anything. Justin looked up for Harry, or preferably Shannon, to let her know.
Instead, he saw the man from Sector 6, wreathed in glowing green light. A familiar jagged scar ran down the right side of his face, and he still wore miner’s clothing. The man scowled at Justin, and his eyebrows arched down.
Justin recoiled a step and blinked. When his eyes opened again, the man was gone.
He glanced around—left and right, up and down. He turned and looked behind himself, but he found nothing.
Had he been imagining it? It couldn’t have just been a coincidence.
“What’s your problem, Barclay?” Harry said from behind him.
Justin whirled around. “Nothing. I thought I saw—” He bit his tongue. “This hand-laser’s malfunctioning, too.”
“Bring it here.” Harry worked with it a bit and got no result. “You messing with the equipment or something, Barclay?”
“No,” Justin shook his head. “It’s not me.”
Harry toggled the on-off mechanism, and it sprung back to life. “There. A little know-how goes a long way.”
“Yeah, I tried that. It didn’t work.”
Harry shrugged. “I guess that’s why I’m foreman, and you’re not.”
Justin rolled his eyes and turned away. “Yeah. I’m sure that’s it.”
“Hey.”
Justin turned back.
“A little respect goes a long way.”
“I completely agree,” Justin countered.
Harry scowled at him like the glowing green guy had. “Get back to work.”
As soon as Justin turned back, the hand-laser died again. He called back to Harry. “Got any more of that foreman-only magic?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. What are you doing to these things?”
“I said I’m not doing anything.”
“Hey, Foreman?” A guy called from half the cavern away. “We got a problem with some of the equipment.”
“Over here, too. Mechs ain’t workin’ right.” Connie motioned toward Ralph Williams, who stood in his mech, frozen. She held up her hand-laser. “This ain’t workin’ neither.”
Justin and Harry looked around. Mechs everywhere slowed to a stop with their users still locked inside. Others wielding hand-lasers, scoopers, and other light machinery stopped and shook their tools, smacked them, tried to restart them. Production ground to a halt throughout the entire sector.
“What in the galaxy is going on?” Harry asked.
“Told you it wasn’t me.”
Overhead, the turbines stopped whirring, and the work lights extinguished. A blare ripped through the cavern from above, and alarm lights began flashing.
Justin’s heart stuttered. Not again.
“Everyone, stay calm,” Harry shouted. “We’ve got protocols to follow.”
Protocols, my ass. Justin unfastened the hand-laser apparatus from his body and let it drop to the floor.
Harry turned toward him, scowling. “Easy on the equipment, Barclay. That unit costs—”
“It’s already broken, and I don’t want to be trapped in here.” Justin glanced at the science office, but he couldn’t see Dr. Stielbard. Perhaps she was already ahead of him, trying to escape rather than getting caught in another accident.
He started toward the cavern door, which was still open.
Someone loosed a hellish scream behind him.
Justin whirled back.
A beam of yellow light streamed from the right arm of the mech nearest Justin, and a man, a miner Justin recognized but didn’t know, lay in front of it, sawn in two. The cut, clean and cauterized, had severed him across his stomach.
The man’s torso lay there, and his eyes bulged as his blood, his intestines, and his life spilled onto the cavern floor.
This time from the worker in the mech shouted. It was Ralph. “Get out of the way! I don’t know what’s happening—move! Get away!”
The laser bounced and maneuvered in countless directions, and Ralph’s mech turned side-to-side at its waist, but its legs didn’t move. Miners scrambled for cover to escape its erratic beams.
“What the hell did you do, Ralph?” Harry ducked under the laser and ran toward the downed man, but it was far too late to help him.
Streams of miners fleeing the cavern flowed past Harry on both sides.
“I’m not doing this! I can’t control it anymore!” Ralph’s voice cracked with strain. “It’s not me, I swear!”
The laser rose to the cavern ceiling then began to lower toward Harry, but he didn’t see it. Justin pushed through the miners running toward him and tackled Harry out of the laser’s path. It carved a fresh line of molten purple into the floor where h
e’d just been standing.
He glared at Justin at first, but realization hit him fast. “Thank you.”
Justin didn’t reply. Several feet away, the lights on his hand-laser were glowing again. He ran to it, donned it as quickly as he could, and hurried toward Ralph.
“Get away, Barclay!” Ralph yelled. Tears streaked down his cheeks. There was no way Ralph was doing this.
“Get your arm out of the mech!” Justin yelled. “I’m gonna try to cut the laser off.”
Ralph nodded and slid his arm free of the mech arm.
Justin sidestepped the mech’s free-moving laser and hurried around behind it in the other direction. He wouldn’t be able to see Ralph’s face, but as long as he cut the mech’s arm and not its torso, Ralph would be fine.
From only five feet away, Justin aimed his laser at the mech’s arm and waited for it to rotate toward him again. It did, and he squeezed the hand-laser trigger hard.
His own yellow beam shot forward, and it knifed through the mech’s shoulder joint. The metal arm dropped to the ground, still spewing a yellow beam, but it sputtered and blinked off a few seconds later.
Justin rounded the mech again so he could face Ralph. “Are you alright?”
“My god, Barclay—what have I done?” Ralph covered his mouth with his free hand, and his mech kept swiveling side-to-side at its waist with Ralph still in it.
Justin stepped back in case the scoop unit on the mech’s other arm swung toward him. “It wasn’t you, Ralph. It did it on its own. I saw it. Everyone saw it. Now let’s get you out of there.”
Ralph nodded, sniffled, and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He reached for his left arm to pull it free.
The mech’s torso jerked hard to the right, and a sickening crunch split Justin’s ears.
Ralph shrieked and clutched at his back, then he went silent and passed out—or died. Justin didn’t know for sure.
The mech had snapped Ralph’s spine.
“Get a doctor in here, now!” Justin hollered. He disconnected the hand-laser from his body and hurried over to get Ralph out of the mech. He raised the safety glass, unfastened the harness holding Ralph to the mech, and set to work on his arm and legs next.
Ralph slumped out of the mech, and Justin caught him and carried him over his shoulder until Harry approached to help.
“Is the doctor coming?” Justin asked.
“Shannon—Foreman Davis called for help.” Harry hooked one of Ralph’s arms around his shoulders, and Justin held the other one. They headed away from the mech, which kept rotating on its own.
“His back is broken, if not worse.”
“I saw,” Harry said. “Mechs aren’t supposed to turn like that. There are programming safeguards in place to prevent the mech from turning that far at the waist.”
“They’re not supposed to shoot lasers at random, either.”
More shouts sounded throughout the cavern. Another mech, occupied by a woman, also fired its laser freely into the walls, floor, and ceiling—it followed no specific pattern. It just kept shooting.
“Get the rest of the mech operators out of their mechs,” Justin said as he helped Harry lay Ralph on his back near the cavern door.
By now, most of the miners had fled the cavern and now filled the corridor instead, but a group of a dozen or so miners lingered in the back, hiding behind mounds of blue rock and stacks of equipment and other machinery. The mech’s lasers were cutting off their escape.
“And someone needs to tell IT to cut the mechs’ access to the network or something,” Justin said.
“That’ll mess up their connections,” a new voice said.
Justin turned toward it.
Shannon stood near them, strain etched on her face. “We’d have to recalibrate their uplink protocols if we do a hard cut.”
In the distance, two more mechs, now both devoid of operators, sprang to life and spewed yellow lasers everywhere. A group of miners trapped near the back of the cavern called for help.
“Those lasers will cut far more than their uplink protocols if we don’t do something.”
“That recalibration would take days. This isn’t your call to make,” Harry said.
Justin shook his head. “I don’t believe this. Four of the mechs just got turned into death machines, and you’re worried about lost productivity? You can go fu—”
“Watch out!” Shannon shouted.
A laser whipped at them, and they dove for cover. It knifed through the wall where their heads had been.
“Make the damned call!” Justin yelled at them.
Shannon and Harry glanced at each other, then Shannon nodded. “I’m on it.”
Justin turned back toward the hand-laser he’d left near Ralph’s malfunctioning mech.
Harry grabbed his wrist. “Where are you going?”
“To stop this.”
“The hell you are. You’ve done enough. Shannon’s calling about the network now.”
Justin yanked free of his grasp. “You take care of Ralph. I’m gonna handle these mechs before anyone else gets hurt.”
Though Harry yelled at him from behind, Justin kept going. He snatched up the hand-laser, donned the apparatus, and hobbled forward as he fastened it to himself.
He avoided the lasers and dodged occasional falling debris from the cavern ceiling as he ran at the nearest unoccupied mech. Then he took aim at the mech and squeezed the trigger.
A hot blast of yellow light severed the mech’s laser from its arm. Because of the angle, the laser also cut the mech’s torso in half. Its laser stopped firing, but it kept swiveling at its hips.
Justin didn’t care. Better a mech than someone else.
The next mech was the one piloted by the woman, so he couldn’t just shred it. He instructed the woman to unstrap and try to get out. Unlike Ralph, she managed to wriggle free on her own, and she ducked between the mech’s legs and ran behind it to stay clear of the laser’s path.
Then Justin felled the mech with his hand-laser. Three mechs down, one to go.
The last one repeatedly swung its laser toward the group of miners hiding beyond the mounds of discarded rock they’d piled up since starting work in the cavern. Thus far, the mound hadn’t crumbled, but the laser would cut through it eventually, and then loads of blue rocks would tumble down on the miners hiding behind it.
Justin ran past another dead mech, now slumped over at its waist. It hadn’t tried to shoot anyone or given any indication it might go haywire. He eyed it just the same and considered cutting it down, but he didn’t.
The active mech ahead fired a laser into the mound, and the mound’s crown tumbled down its slopes and crashed to a halt at the mech’s feet. If Justin left it there long enough, it would probably bury itself, but it might take the rest of the miners with it.
So he aimed at the mech and cut it down with a full-powered laser blast. It fell into a heap, and its laser extinguished.
“Come on out,” he called to the miners. “Hurry. That mound doesn’t look stable.”
About thirty of them rounded the sides of the mound and scurried toward the cavern exit. Among them, Justin saw Candy, to whom he nodded, and Dirk, who glared at him as he passed.
“Look out!” someone yelled. “It’s alive!”
Justin whirled around. The mech he had passed now moved autonomously, legs and all. It fired its laser into the fleeing miners, and they wailed and shrieked and scattered, but none got hit from what Justin could see.
Justin swore, planted his feet, and raised his laser. As he squeezed the trigger, the mech whipped toward him, laser first.
Justin sidestepped the beam, and it only missed his head by inches.
White-hot pain burrowed into Justin’s right shoulder, and he grunted.
He tried to pull the trigger to fire back, but nothing happened.
Justin looked down and saw his right arm lying on the cavern floor, his hand still clutching the hand-laser.
19
The hand
-laser apparatus fell off of Justin’s back, no longer attached to the hand-laser itself. Justin gasped and patted where his shoulder should have been.
His fingers found charred flesh instead.
The mech’s laser whipped back toward him, but he couldn’t move. His feet remained fixed to the floor, defiant against the reality of his severed arm and his imminent fate.
A bulldozer hit him from the side, and the laser sizzled over his head. He hit the cavern floor hard, and his shoulder ignited with a fresh burst of pain.
Justin hollered, but the force kept him down. He looked and found Candy holding him in place.
Beyond her, Dirk reached down, shook Justin’s severed arm free of the hand-laser, and hefted the hand-laser up to his hip. Hand-lasers weighed north of 200 pounds each, hence the reason they came equipped with support harnesses, but Dirk anchored it against his thigh, his arm muscles bulging, and activated the laser.
The beam skewed high at first, then Dirk lowered it and eviscerated the mech. He let the hand-laser drop to the floor with a heavy clank, then he ran over to Justin and Candy.
“Move out of the way, dyke. I’m gonna carry him.”
Candy eyed him for a moment, but she complied.
Am I hallucinating from the pain? Justin marveled as Dirk hauled him up, curled him over his shoulders, and started jogging toward the cavern exit.
The pain in his shoulder spiked anew with each of Dirk’s labored steps, and Justin passed out before they made it to the door.
“Sir, at approximately 1430 hours today, Sector 13 of ACM-1134 experienced a massive sub-network breach and multiple malfunctions throughout the sector’s mining machinery. Three miners died, and two others sustained critical injuries.” Bartholomew Morgan again took up the wall in Carl Andridge’s office. “You requested to be notified, so—”
“Who or what breached the sub-network? And was the breach connected to the machinery malfunction?” Carl calculated the cost of the damage in his head. The monetary expense was insignificant, as was the loss of life. He could always hire more workers.
Public relations concerns and managing shareholders’ expectations, though, were a different story. Employee death and injury benefits and damaged or faulty machinery rarely amounted to much. But buying and preserving his company’s and his own reputation always cost far more.