by Max Carver
Eric's fists were already balled up tight. He punched the reinforced particle-plastic wall beside him. It hurt. His knuckles stung. It felt good. He did it again, then again, pounding his frustration and confusion into the wall, feeling suddenly lost, suddenly unsure of his direction. All he knew was that he wanted to get his hands on that Chet guy and pound him bloody.
“Cut it out!” someone shouted from the next apartment over.
Eric stopped punching the wall. His knuckles were swollen and battered. It wasn't nearly enough. He could've kept punching that wall all night, could have challenged his unseen neighbor to fight outside. His emotions were all violent.
He sat in the dark and seethed. He couldn't sleep. He just hoped there was plenty of solid rock for him destroy when he headed back down into the mine the next morning.
Chapter Five
Bartley picked Eric up well before daybreak. Bartley seemed reasonably conscious despite his late night. He'd probably taken a hangover pill. They eroded the human liver and kidneys, but Bartley ate them like popcorn.
“Good times last night, huh?” Bartley asked, as though unaware how quickly Eric had left. “Did you check out that brunette with the broad shoulders? Lots of guys aren't into the muscular mine-worker chicks, but that's just more pie for me to slice, is what I say...”
Eric tuned him out. News of Bartley's tryst in the bathroom of a bar made him think of Suzette back home. She was the only girl he'd ever dated, and they hadn't done quite everything together, either. She'd been saving certain things for marriage. He hoped she was saving them still.
They bounced up the dusty, bumpy, steep, narrow roads of the canyon. The dark sky overhead grew less gloomy as the sun rose, backlighting the gray volcanic smog.
“...told her I wanted a turn on top, but she just pinned me down and tightened the handcuffs...what the jimmy-jack is going on?”
Bartley stopped in view of the mine entrance. The gate was already open. Malvolio stood just inside, on his own crimson-slippered feet for once instead of perched atop his unicycle. He was stiff, arms crossed, imitating the stance of a gruff cop or armed security guard who took his duties very seriously.
The reason for Malvolio's extra-professional stance sat on a rocky shelf nearby. A compact black scouting helicopter parked there, a light, thin four-seater designed for rapid flying in narrow spaces like cities, canyons, and mountain passes. The Exoplanet Resource Development logo, a glittering-gold XRD, was stamped on the side.
“Uh-oh,” Bartley whispered, parking alongside a few other personal vehicles and killing the engine. “She's here. Don't forget to cover your balls.”
Eric stepped down from the truck, staring at the black-tinted glass of the helicopter, unable to tell whether she was still inside or not. Alanna Li-Whitward, it was rumored, had once grabbed a male employee by the balls and squeezed until he'd been hospitalized for a ruptured testicle. Alanna's mother, Candace Whitward, had been a famous model and movie star a generation ago, and was now the fourth wife of trillionaire Li-Jianyu, who was invested in virtually every major industry. He owned companies on multiple planets, including their employer, XRD.
“Mister Reamer and Miss Li-Whitward have arrived,” Malvolio told Eric and Bartley, opening the gate to the mine as they approached. “So have Frank and Naomi. You're to go down and join them the moment you arrive.”
“We aren't late, are we?” Eric asked.
“We're not that late,” Bartley said.
“If you're later than the boss, you're late,” Malvolio said. He lowered his head, shifted his eyes from side to side, and said in a whispering, mock-gangster voice: “And the boss don't like it when you're late. The boss might just decide you'll sleep with the fishes tonight.”
“Don't quit your day job, bro,” Bartley said as he and Eric hurried to their exoskeletons.
“Entertaining was my day job.” Malvolio slumped, sounding pained. “For the first eighty years of my existence.”
The loader drove by, folded up on the front end of the dump truck, taking out another payload of broken rock slag from the previous day. The arm of a climber hung out one side of the heap, its suction-cup fingers limp, dripping black blood.
“Unloading,” the robot said, by way of greeting.
“Unloading,” Eric replied solemnly. He waved one giant industrial arm at the loader, while opening and closing the clamp hand.
The loader bot halted the truck and rotated its boxy head to regard Eric with its big round camera-ball eyes, set just above the boxy protrusion that housed its mouth speaker.
“Unloading,” the loader finally replied, then swiveled its head to face forward again. It drove on out the gate, destined for the older, dead-end shafts that now served as slag disposal pits.
“Okay, then,” Bartley said. They started rolling down the shaft single-file, gunning the tracks of their exoskeletons as fast as they would go down the squarish spiral of the decline, racing down deep under the surface. Eric fought to keep his balance—he'd never driven the exoskeleton so fast, but they couldn't afford to keep the bosses waiting. They'd just made some kind of hugely significant find. It was a bad time to get fired over something stupid like tardiness, but it could happen. The company would probably love to find some last-minute technicality to cut out any of the workers' contractual share of the profits.
They reached the main tunnel and braked as quickly as they could when they saw three layers of supervisors and bosses waiting ahead. Naomi stood there, arms folded, scowling under her mining helmet as Bartley and Eric's braking treads kicked up a cloud of black volcanic dust from the floor.
The dust drifted forward, slowly but inevitably coating the coveralls worn by the balding, diminutive general manager, Burt Reamer, who bore more than a passing resemblance to the video game character Mario. Reamer closed his eyes and turned away as the black dust cloud flowed over him.
It also struck a chubby man in an expensive croc-skin suit, with shimmering golden rings and precious gems adorning his ears, eyebrows, and lips. Next to that man stood the president of XRD, representing the owners, who happened to be her own family.
Alanna Li-Whitward looked even more out of place in the grungy, dusty mine than the man beside her. She wore a muted gray designer suit jacket full of unnecessary buckles over a black knee-length business skirt. Her knee-high boots were reasonably practical—the materials were probably too expensive and delicate for the rough, filthy environment, but at least they weren't high heels.
Alanna had platinum-blond hair, coiled into elaborate braids at the back as though she'd just left a fancy dress ball before stepping into the helicopter. She wore dark glasses, which seemed inexplicable underground, but they probably had nightvision and other features.
“What are you two hambones doing?” Reamer shouted, stalking toward them. “Look at this mess you stirred up.”
“Malvolio said you wanted us down here as fast as possible,” Bartley said.
“He was very dramatic about it,” Eric added.
“He's programmed to be dramatic!” Reamer shook his head. “You're both three minutes late. I should initiate termination procedures on both of you. Claw back your shares—”
“Please, Burt,” Alanna spoke up, her voice strong but measured, polished but firm. She was in her middle or late twenties, the seventeenth child of her famous and powerful father. Her father had been just over a hundred when she was born, Eric had heard. And he remained alive today.
Alanna looked at Eric and Bartley. “Who found the concealed chamber?”
“That would be me, ma'am,” Bartley hurried to raise one hand. “Used this hammer right here.”
“Dexter.” Alanna gestured at the jeweled man in the croc-skin suit. He removed a digital tablet from a pack strapped to his side.
“I'm Dexter Prentice, attorney for Miss Li-Whitward,” the man said. He looked to be in his mid-forties. “I need to verify that neither of you have spoken to anyone else about this matter.”
&nb
sp; “Uh...” Bartley scratched his head. There was no way he could remember all of his conversations at the bar the night before.
“We haven't,” Eric said, answering for both of them before Bartley stumbled into saying something that got him in trouble or fired. “We worked late last night. I caught a ride home with Bartley. Straight to bed for me. Pretty sure for him, too.”
“Oh, yeah.” Bartley nodded quickly, following Eric's lead. “My grandma always said, late to sleep, early to weep. And also that a hill witch would kidnap and eat children who made too much noise after bedtime.”
“You'll need to sign nondisclosure agreements,” Prentice said, approaching them with a light pen. “You cannot speak of this find without express written consent of Exoplanet Resource Development, LLC—consent which, I assure you, will not be forthcoming anytime soon.” The chubby jeweled man chuckled to himself as though he'd made a clever joke. “But seriously. Sign these now.”
Eric shrugged and signed. So did Bartley. The lawyer smiled and shook their hands.
“They called us in early,” Naomi said, pointing to the new side tunnel where all the action had happened the day before. “Hagen's almost done.”
Finally, Eric was able to roll forward and look into the smaller tunnel. Bartley hopped out of his exoskeleton's seat to check it out on foot.
The loader bot had cleared the remaining debris and climber bodies. Hagen had driven meters-long steel bolts into the sides and roof of the cave to secure them. Now he was wrapping up, spraying everything with a layer of quick-drying concrete. The graying, fiftyish man nodded when he saw Eric and Bartley had arrived. He stood at the mouth of the narrow tunnel, operating a rolling sprayer unit connected by hose to the cement truck in the main tunnel.
He hadn't sprayed any concrete on the back wall, where the open fissure led into the mysterious crystalline room beyond.
“Any more problems with the climbers?” Eric asked Naomi.
“Not this morning. I'm ready if they come back.” She touched a small tank of the bug poison clamped to her belt.
“Rowan!” Reamer shouted, and Eric turned to see the manager approaching him, looking surly. “Switch that clamp for a roadheader attachment. Flynn, put a chisel head on your hammer. Be delicate with your tools today, like you're sewing a silk flower onto your grandma's favorite pair of panties.”
Bartley opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but couldn't quite put together a rejoinder to that.
“The word of the day is careful,” Alanna said. “If there are...strange artifacts in there, something rare, we don't want to destroy them.”
“I still think it's just some weirdo stuff built by the first wave of miners,” Naomi said. “The people who built Money City built this. Nobody else has ever lived on this planet, except some really gross animals. That's what the geologists say, right?”
“We...might have been wrong about that.” The voice was so small that Eric wouldn't have heard it if Hagen hadn't just shut down his cement-pumping hose, which now retracted slowly toward the mixer truck, like a fat boa constrictor creeping across the floor.
Eric turned to see who had spoken. The woman was short, with quick, dark eyes and long, glossy blue-black hair spilling out from beneath her mining helmet. She wore the same kinds of coveralls as the mine workers, but the patches on her sleeves showed a pair of crossed rock picks, which meant she was a geologist.
“These images are...unlike anything I've seen.” The small woman held up a tablet displaying the final transmission from their scouting robot: the face sculpted from quartz, the one Bartley had quickly identified as belonging to the gray space goblins of myth and lore. She seemed at a loss for words. Her voice remained soft. Eric had no idea where she'd emerged from—maybe another side tunnel, maybe the shadows beyond the cement truck and the parked scouter.
“This is Iris Zander,” Reamer said. He wasn't much taller than the slight woman. “Supposed to be one of the best in the biz.”
“I only hire the best people,” Alanna said. She removed her sunglasses, revealing eyes rimmed with bright gold, either cosmetic contacts or surgically tinted. It was a startling effect in person, either way. Eric had only seen eyes like that on models and celebrities. “And I expect the best work in return. And I expect it fast. I'm bored with standing around already.” She snapped two fingers at Prentice. He scrambled to retrieve a jeweled cigarette case from his suit pocket. He handed her a long pink cigarette and lit it for her.
“Uh, ma'am,” Reamer said. “There's no smoking in the mines. It's a safety hazard.”
“Oh, go whine to my lawyer. That's what he's for. Are we ready to go in yet or not?”
“The shotcrete's almost dry,” Hagen said. He peeled off his disposable, shotcrete-spattered gloves. They thudded to the ground like stone hands that had been lopped off a statue.
“So we can go in?” Alanna asked.
“When the cement hardens, Naomi's going to use some very light explosives to get us most of the way through that wall. Then we'll clear the rest of the way with Bartley's chisel and Eric's roadheader.” Hagen nodded at Eric's exoskeleton.
Eric was already replacing his drill with the roadheader, a vicious-looking rotating drum studded with dozens of steel cutting teeth. The tool was for tunneling through solid rock, whenever drill and blast was too risky, or to widen and neaten after initial blasting.
“Then get to it!” Alanna snapped. “I didn't rush down here this morning just sit on my butt all day.”
“Miss Li-Whitward has a tight schedule,” added Prentice. The lawyer adjusted his tie and looked bored.
“Double-time, people!” Reamer clapped his small, hairy hands.
“Make it triple,” Alanna said. She sighed and began to lean back against Naomi's scouting vehicle, parked nearby, then grimaced at its dust and dirt and stood up straight again, brushing off the back of her business skirt. Her lawyer reached over as if he meant to help brush off her skirt, too, but she bared her teeth and he backed away.
Eric and his team worked as fast as they could, though it quickly became apparent they'd never be fast enough to satisfy the constantly complaining Alanna.
Naomi used glowing green paint to mark spots on the wall, and Hagen double-checked their positioning for safety. Reamer made a show of giving them an extra examination himself, clearly trying to look useful in front of the owner.
Eric drilled holes at the marked spots, using his smallest bit, then rolled back out of the tunnel. Naomi packed each of the new little holes with explosive gum.
“Blast shield!” she barked as she emerged from the short tunnel.
“Finally,” Alanna said, looking furious at how long she'd waited already. “Then we can go in.”
“Not quite, ma'am,” Reamer said. “There will be more clearing, and then—”
“I should've gone to the spa this morning!” Alanna snapped. “Not that there's anyplace on this planet to get a decent facial and massage.”
“I know a good massage parlor—” Bartley began, but Hagen wisely cut him off, jabbing his elbow into Bartley's gut.
“We happen to have an old entertainment bot on gate security,” Hagen said. “If you like—”
“Call it down here!” Alanna said.
“I have to warn you, he's a little old, and most of us find him pretty annoying—”
“Send him now!”
Hagen opened the bright yellow box on the wall of the main tunnel, near the area where they parked their vehicles. A fiber-optic cable connected it to the front gate, since radio communication deep underground was far from reliable. “Malvolio! Secure the front, then come down and entertain Miss Li-Whitward. Do a...song or something.”
The drama-bot's mustached face appeared on the screen inside the yellow box. He appeared to be beaming. He touched his heart. “Truly, this is the greatest order you have given me, my liege—”
“Shut up and get down here.”
Soon Malvolio arrived on his unicycle, and i
mmediately began belting out in a soaring soprano voice a song that, judging by its refrain, must have been called “That's What Friends Are For.” Alanna and Prentice watched the performance, looking nonplussed by it.
The loader bot returned from dropping off the last load of slag and unfolded from its spot at the front of the dump truck.
“Raise the blast shield, loader,” Naomi told it.
“Loading,” the loader bot said as it raised the collapsible blast shield for her. It was made of leaves of tungsten that could be unfolded and fitted to the irregular edges of a freshly hacked tunnel. This made it a solid barrier against explosions, but also impossibly heavy for a human being to set up alone. The loader used its excavator-bucket hands for the bulk of the work, then extended a slender, flexible third arm from its back to fire anchor bolts into place. “Loaded,” the loader announced.
Naomi and Hagen quickly checked the robot's work, making sure the shield was anchored and would hold. Reamer re-checked, again for the benefit of the boss watching him. It would probably be the smallest explosion Eric had witnessed during all his time in the mines, just enough to crack up the wall.
“Fire in the hole,” Naomi announced, then clicked the detonator control in her hand.
A light thump sounded against the opposite side of the blast shield, as if a salesman had politely knocked on it. Small puffs of dust curled out around the edges of the shield and faded out of sight.
“Didn't it work?” Alanna asked.
“Loader, take down the shield,” Naomi said.
“Unloading.” The quiet, hulking robot removed the anchor bolts and folded down the blast shield.
In the small tunnel, a thick cloud of dust filled the air, and large chunks of rock littered the floor, glittering with freshly exposed quartz and fool's gold. Much of the back wall looked broken up and scooped out now; it was a tribute to Naomi's blasting skills that she'd tore it open so deep without penetrating all the way to the chamber beyond, where there could be valuable artifacts.