Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “What did you expect?” Li asked.

  She waited, but Bella didn’t turn around, and only the slight tremor in her shoulders told Li she was crying again.

  “Hannah didn’t go to Korchow about the crystals,” Bella said finally. “And there was nothing illegal about it. She was going to buy my contract, with her own money.”

  Li stood speechless for a moment, unable to muster a response. “She couldn’t have bought your contract, Bella. She couldn’t have afforded it.”

  “She was rich,” Bella insisted, with the blind certainty of someone who didn’t understand what the word meant, what money meant.

  “Not that rich.”

  “You’re wrong. She was going to. She promised.”

  “So what went wrong, Bella? What happened to the happy ending?”

  “She changed,” Bella said after a long silence. “She found something that made her happier than I could.”

  * * *

  Halfway back to her quarters Li realized she wasn’t even close to sleep and turned aside to catch the next surface-bound shuttle.

  The pithead guards knew her by now; they searched her perfunctorily, almost apologetically. Twenty minutes later, just as the graveyard shift was turning, she climbed down the ladder into the glory hole.

  The crystals were in full voice, overloading her internals, wreaking havoc on her scan systems. By the time she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder her infrared and quantum scans had cut out completely. She could have lit her lantern, but she didn’t want to. There was something terrible about the smallness of a light in this ancient airless darkness. She sat in the dark with her back against the ladder and retraced the twisting course of the investigation.

  She saw no straight sight lines, no clear cause and effect, nothing but blind corners and dead drops. Had she accomplished anything at all here? Or was she just stuck in rewind, projecting her own ghosts onto Sharifi, dredging the sterile runoff of a dead girl’s pathetic memories?

  Ask yourself who the players are, Cohen had said, and what they want. Well, what did they want?

  Daahl and Ramirez wanted what the union always wanted. To wrest control of the mines away from the UN defense contractors, to build their workers’ paradise—a paradise that Li didn’t want any part of but that would probably be no worse than anyone else’s misguided little piece of heaven on earth.

  Cartwright’s goals were tangential to the union’s, as Korchow would say. But he’d stand with the union —if only because the union was most likely to protect his precious crystals. If Daahl and Cartwright had to take Li down to get what they wanted, they would. Otherwise, they’d stay clear of her, if only because of their loyalty to the family she barely remembered.

  Haas wanted to keep the mine running. And, when he thought he could get away with it, he’d wanted to keep Li out of the glory hole. Why? To avoid drawing the miners’ attention to it? No; they already knew, thanks to Cartwright and the wagging tongues of the miners Sharifi had paid union scale to dig it out for her. Was it simply the fierce multiplanetary’s drive to prevent a slowdown and protect profits? Or was it something more personal? Hiding his embezzling? Avenging himself for Bella’s betrayal?

  Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?

  And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.

  Bella was the wild card, of course. Did she know about Korchow? Was she working for him? What was there really between her and Haas? What had Voyt done to make her hate him so much? And what was the cold calculation Li had seen in her eyes? Grief over Sharifi, or something deeper, older, darker?

  Something moved in the darkness.

  Li’s eyes snapped open. Nothing.

  Then she heard the faint but unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She slid a hand into her coverall and eased the Beretta out of its holster. She flicked the safety off, inching the lever back with agonizing slowness in order to muffle the dry little click of the catch snapping open.

  “You’re not going to shoot me, Katie,” said a familiar voice.

  A match flared. Li smelled sulfur, saw a monstrous shadow loom across the vault high above her. The shadow bent, shifted. A rusty pin squeaked, and a Davy lamp flared into life. “Hello,” Cartwright said from where he sat cross-legged on the gleaming floor. “So you heard them too, did you?”

  “Heard who?” Li asked breathlessly.

  “The saints, Katie. Her children.” He smiled. “Rejoice, for we know the hour and the day of Her Coming. It’s beginning.”

  “Save the sermons for your sheep, Cartwright. It has nothing to do with me.”

  Something drew her eyes into the inky shadows behind the priest. Some movement, so faint that she felt rather than saw it. But when the voice spoke out of the darkness she felt so little surprise that she realized she’d known Daahl would be here.

  “If it has nothing to do with you,” he asked, “then why are you down here?”

  “Just doing my job, that’s all.”

  “There are a lot of people who are wondering just what that job is. A lot of people who’d like to know which side you’re on.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Cartwright began scratching at a patch of dry skin on his wrist, and something about the movement—the sound of fingernails on flesh, the dead skin flaking off and glittering in the lamplight—made her feel ill. He’s crazy, she thought. He always was crazy.

  “Well, Katie,” Daahl asked, “don’t you have any answer at all for me?”

  Li rubbed a clammy hand across her face.

  “I’m going to show you something,” Daahl said. “I may regret showing it to you. A lot of people have told me I will, in fact. But I think you have a right to see it. I think you have a right to know what’s on the table here.”

  Li saw the UNSC seal on the letter before he’d finished handing it to her. “This is a classified internal memo,” she said. “Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”

  “Just read it.”

  It took several reads for the sense of the thing to come through to her—and even then she wasn’t sure what the cautious, bureaucratically vague words really meant. Someone else had been sure though. Some other reader had been there before her, had scored through the critical lines with a strong confident hand:

  In conclusion, the presence of live Bose-Einstein strata on Compson’s World is both an internal and external security threat. It is vital, both in relation to Syndicate industrial espionage activities and for reasons of political stability (vis-à-vis the IWW and other outside agitators) to transfer the production of transport and communications-grade condensate off the planet and into a controlled laboratory setting. This goal presents a compelling reason, in and of itself, for supporting Dr. Sharifi’s research.

  “You understand what that means, don’t you?” Daahl asked. “They’re saying that the very presence of live crystal on-planet is a security risk. That as soon as they can manufacture it off-planet they’ll destroy the deposits that are left in the ground here.”

  “This memo doesn’t say anything like that, Daahl.”

  “Doesn’t it? Then what does that mean, ‘the presence of live strata is a security risk’?”

  “It means nothing. Some paper pusher producing overblown verbiage for a departmental meeting. And anyway, you have no guarantee this thing is genuine.”

  “My source was too good for it to be anything els
e.”

  “If you want me to take that claim seriously, you’d better tell me who this ‘source’ was and let me make up my own mind.”

  “You know, Katie. Think about it.”

  Li stared at the sooty fiche, her mind spinning through the possibilities. Station security. Mine personnel. TechComm itself. But almost by definition no one cleared to see this kind of document could have come from a place like Compson’s World, let alone cared enough about it to risk their job and freedom for it.

  “Who?” she asked, looking up to see Cartwright and Daahl both watching her. “Who was it?”

  Daahl smiled. He took the memo back, pulling it from her fingers so gently that she hardly realized she’d let go of it, and folded it carefully away into his shirt pocket.

  “Hannah,” he said. “Hannah Sharifi.”

  AMC Station: 23.10.48.

  Li woke to the sound of people running down the corridor outside, banging on its alloy walls hard enough to set them echoing: the universal spacer’s manual alarm system.

  She rolled out of bed just as the station lit up her livewall and started talking to her. Her first thought was that there’d been a blowout, but as the calm automated voice droned on she realized it was calling all rescue and medical personnel to the shuttle bays. Whoever was in trouble, they were on the planet below.

  She reached over to her cabin’s one chair and started pulling on the uniform she’d flung over it a few short hours ago. She was just lacing her boots up when the station put up a planet-side call for her.

  Sharpe.

  “You have medical training, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.

  He was in his office at the hospital, and he looked as if he’d been hauled out of bed by the same crisis that had the stationers running for the shuttle bays. A mournful keening rose and fell on his end of the line like the Doppler-distorted navigational beacon of a drive ship pushing lightspeed.

  “Just the usual,” she said. “CPR. Trauma response. My oracle has a combat med praxis it can load. What’s happened?”

  “The Anaconda blew again.”

  Suddenly Li recognized the wail coming over the line behind Sharpe’s voice for what it was: the pit whistle.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “Pit 3’s gone. And 4’s burning. The above-ground foreman told me he’s got four hundred and twenty miners on the logs, all but seventy still underground. The closest doctor besides me is in Helena, three hours from here. More, if the weather doesn’t clear. If you can open a burn wrap and find a vein, I need you.”

  Li stood up, realized she still had one boot left to lace, sat down again. “When’s the next open shuttle seat?”

  “Gate 18. And hurry. They’re holding it for you.”

  * * *

  As the shuttle plunged toward the planet, the copilot scanned the surface channels for news of the fire.

  No one they could raise had time to talk to them, but little by little they began to piece together the long slide through miscommunication and mischance to disaster.

  The first step was the breakdown of the Pit 4 chippy lift. With a ten-meter-square lift floor that took up half the breadth of the main shaft, the chippy lift was the only way in and out of Pit 4 for every one of the miners who worked her two-hundred-odd cutting faces. With its chippy out of action, Pit 4 had to fall back on the double drum lift—a heavy-duty lift built to carry muck, ore, and waste rock, not miners. Eager to keep cutting, management stopped pulling waste up on the double drum and swapped in the eight-man emergency evac bucket.

  That was the first link in the chain: four hundred miners underground with a lift that carried only eight men per trip instead of the chippy lift’s forty-eight.

  The first shift foreman then made a decision that, only a week ago, would have been the right one. He consulted the airflow maps and rerouted Pit 4 evac through Pit 5’s main shaft, two and a quarter miles southeast of the Pit 4 headframe. What he didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that the maps he was looking at were four days out of date because of a glitch in the AMC data system. And two days ago, a work crew had closed off the 642 crosscut to Pit 5 in an attempt to fix the ventilation problems that had contributed to the last fire.

  Haas knew about the closures, of course. He would have known the maps were out of date, would have been able to put the pieces together and turn things around if he’d been there. But Haas was at a Mine Safety Commission hearing in Helena. And with Haas gone, no single person on-site was in a position to see what was coming.

  And that was the second link in the chain: an entire shift sent downshaft with evac instructions that dead-ended thirty-two hundred meters underground in front of two locked-down steel ventilation louvers.

  Meanwhile, Pit 4’s double drum lift was still being used to haul miners—and all the coal, waste rock, and condensates those miners were hacking out of the ground had to go somewhere. The miners began routing their carts through the 531 crosscut to Pit 3’s still-operable double drum lift. Coal and waste carts began piling up in Pit 3’s central gangway, directly under the main air intake, whose Vulcan fan pumped forty-two hundred cubic meters of air per minute through the entire active workings of Pits 3 and 4.

  That underground traffic jam was the third link in the chain. That, and a simple physical fact: coal is a rock that burns.

  At 3A.M. a flash fire flickered through the 4100 level of the Trinidad, almost six kilometers from the Pit 3 headframe as the crow flies. The fire crew suited up and went down, but they couldn’t find a point of origin—and though they shut down the nearby brattices, air was still coming in from somewhere. They called up to the Pit 3 fanhouse to report the fire. The fan operator checked his maps, saw that the fire was on Pit 3’s main ventilation circuit, logged the time, and flipped the safety shutoff on his fan, cutting all forced-air ventilation to Pits 3 and 4.

  On any other day, the shutoff would have been the right thing to do. It would have given the fire crew additional time to find the flash fire’s source, and it would have stopped the big fans from pumping suffocating smoke through the rest of the mine until they got the crystals under control.

  But today wasn’t any other day. Today there was a freight-train-sized traffic jam of coal and refuse carts lined up down the length of the 3100 gangway just below the intake shaft.

  As long as the fans were running, the fresh air flowed through the gangway fast enough to catch the highly flammable coal dust rising off the carts and blow it out the Pit 4 outtake before it could stagnate and become volatile. When the fans shut off, however, the dust began to thicken in the unventilated gangway and climb toward ignition temperature. All that was missing now was a spark. A spark, and fresh air to feed the fire the spark would start.

  At 3:42A.M. by the clock in the Pit 3 fanhouse, the fire crew called up top to report that the fire in the Trinidad was out.

  At 3:47 the above-ground foreman ordered the fans back on.

  At 3:49 the Anaconda crossed the line that every mine crosses sooner or later: the line where only the dead know what really happened.

  All the living knew was that at ten to four a shock wave rippled through the coalfield, breaking windows and knocking people off their feet in the streets of Shantytown. People ran out of bars and flophouses, still half-asleep, and saw lightning over the coalfield, followed by a black billowing thunderhead of smoke that could only mean one thing: the mine was burning.

  As the rescuers started pulling up the maps and putting the pieces together, they faced a critical situation. Over six hundred miners had gone into Pits 3 and 4 at the start of first shift. Seventy-odd miners, many of them badly injured, were huddled in Pit 4’s 3400 loading bay waiting for the spreading smoke to catch up with them. Hundreds more were scattered through the long miles of unventilated drifts and gangways that were rapidly filling with smoke. And the only way in or out of the mine was Pit 4’s excruciatingly slow emergency cage.

  Now it was a simple matter of mathematics. The cage’s eight-man
capacity meant that eight rescuers could go down each trip and send eight injured miners back up to the surface in their place. Nothing anyone did now could change that—any more than it could stop the fire ripping through the drifts and galleys.

  But even with the disaster staring them in the face, Li couldn’t help wondering about the now-forgotten flash fire down in the Trinidad that had started it all.

  * * *

  They set down on the Pit 9 helipad, over six kilometers from the fire. Even so, they made their final descent through a solid curtain of smoke, and the touchdown, when it came, was as sudden as stepping off an unexpected stair flat-footed.

  Li spotted Sharpe in the lee of the breakerhouse, surrounded by a half dozen still-unloaded trucks of medical equipment. She grabbed the strap of the medic’s kit he flung at her and followed him.

  She counted almost eighty injured miners lying on stretchers lined up in haphazard rows around the trucks. One of Sharpe’s interns was moving down the rows already, tagging them. Green for mildly wounded victims whose treatment could wait until the first crush was over. Red for urgent cases. White for hopeless ones. There was a lot of white out there already—and the rescuers wouldn’t gain access to the immediate area of the explosion for hours, possibly even days.

  “At least it looks like they’re getting them up fast,” Li said.

  Sharpe gave her a grim tight-mouthed look. “They’ve only brought two loads up so far. The rest of these are above-ground injuries.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the pit priests, Major? We’re out of God’s jurisdiction.”

  Li lost track of time after that. The underground cases came in slowly at first. Then the rescuers started rappelling down the Pit 4 shaft and hauling the injured up by hand. Within minutes, the triage unit was overwhelmed. Li’s oracle loaded its med praxis, and she sank into a long dark automatic tunnel of bending, cutting, injecting, bandaging.