Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  At some point, the stretchers got short. Rescue crews started raiding the lines of wounded, checking for white tags, then pulses, pulling stretchers out from under the already dead.

  “Hey!” Li shouted when a young miner dumped a white-tagged burn victim off a stretcher near her.

  “No time,” the rescuer said. He sounded young, and furious. On the ground between them, the burn victim woke briefly, called out someone’s name, and died. “Christ Almighty, I thought he was dead already,” the rescuer said, then turned aside and vomited.

  Li watched him for a moment, then wiped her face on her sleeve and went back to work.

  “Hey!” someone said behind her, she wasn’t sure how much later. She felt the weight of a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Ramirez, barely recognizable under a mask of caked coal dust, blood, diesel oil.

  “We could use you downstairs,” he said.

  Li looked around for Sharpe and saw him talking to the newly arrived Helena medics. “How shorthanded are you?” she asked.

  “What we’re short of is equipment. Rebreathers, mainly. Can’t recharge the ones we have fast enough to keep up with the rescue teams.” He hesitated, then went on, speaking quickly. “And the mine blew on the graveyard shift.”

  For a moment Li didn’t see what Ramirez was aiming at. Then she felt a chill run down her spine. Graveyard shift was the bootleggers’ shift. It was night shift, station time and planet time alike: the only shift that both started and ended under cover of darkness, and the easiest time for the independents to smuggle their cuttings out of the mine through all the unmaintained drifts and boreholes that never showed up on the company maps.

  This time of night there would be dozens, maybe hundreds of independents below ground who had never logged in or left their tags at pit bottom. The shift foremen might know where the bootleggers were, more or less—but admitting it would mean admitting they’d taken bribes in cash or condensate to keep quiet. And, bribes or no bribes, most of the shift foremen were dead anyway.

  Worst of all—and this was what Ramirez really meant—most of the constructs still working in the mines were independents. If the pit had blown on any other shift, there would have been a host of genetics among the rescue crews—experienced miners who could survive the poisoned air without rebreathers at least long enough to pull out a few survivors. Now those very miners were the ones trapped below ground waiting for rescue, and the men above ground needed rebreathers. Rebreathers that probably wouldn’t arrive in time.

  Li looked over at the Helena medics, already spreading through the triage area, bending over stretchers, setting down crates of burn bags and bandages.

  “There’s two hundred and seventy logged-in miners still unaccounted for,” Ramirez said, letting the number hang in the smoky air between them. “Maybe another hundred independents in the back tunnels.”

  “All right,” Li said. “Just give me a minute.”

  Half an hour later, she felt the bump of the cage hitting pit bottom, jerked the gate open, and stepped out into hell.

  * * *

  The rescue was an exercise in controlled chaos. Searchers surged in and out of the staging area, often returning to report not survivors but additional rescuers lost to smoke inhalation and rockfall injuries. Dogs sniffed through the stench of coal smoke and burnt electrical wiring, barking with excitement at the rare live find, whining anxiously when the bodies they discovered didn’t sit up and talk to them.

  Li spent the rest of the night working side by side with Ramirez. To her amazement, he kept up with her. More than kept up with her. And, unwired as he was, it could only be nerves and raw determination that were holding him together.

  As the night wore on she began to notice that the men at pit bottom always made sure Ramirez had a stretcher when he needed it or a fresh tank when he came back to turn in his empties. He was getting special treatment, and for good reason: he was finding people. Finding survivors and getting them out with a speed that could only mean he was taking chances the others weren’t willing to take.

  So. He was a hero—down here, anyway. Li had long gotten over being surprised by anything people did when lives were on the line. She’d seen hard-bitten veterans fall apart under fire, and she’d seen more than a few soft-looking rich kids reveal themselves as born heroes—or born killers. Some people were just wired for crunch time. So far it looked like Ramirez was one of them.

  Li herself was a survivor, not a hero. Any illusions she’d had on that score had been scorched out of her back on Gilead. But down here she didn’t need to be a hero. Down here she just needed to keep breathing. And keep breathing was exactly what she did, as night paled to smoky daylight at the top of the shaft three kilometers above them.

  She and Ramirez outlasted three different rescue teams, ran into McCuen somewhere toward dawn and kept on searching with him. They followed pointing fingers and hoarse-throated directions. They listened for the dogs’ barking. They helped dig through rockfalls and shore up dangerously loose lagging. They hefted bodies, live and dead, and carried them until they found someone to hand them off to.

  Meanwhile, Li’s internals monitored the contaminated air, beeped warnings at her—warnings she ignored—and sent out suicide armies of virucules to combat the contamination that was clogging her lungs and flooding through her body. After the first few hours of exposure, the nonceramsteel components in her internals started overheating, and her oracle shifted all nonessential systems into powersave. At four hours she started coughing up coal black chunks of phlegm loaded with dead virucules. At fourteen hours, she had to go back above ground and sit hooked up to the oxygen feed for most of an hour to catch her breath and give her systems a chance to reboot. Then she went back down, forcing herself not to think about the damage she was doing, and started the whole process over again.

  * * *

  In every rescue or battlefield cleanup Li had ever worked, there came a point of diminishing returns. It might come after only a few hours, or it might take days to arrive, but sooner or later it always did come. Then the rush of saving survivors was replaced by the grim obligation of retrieving bodies, and you started to wonder just what it was you were risking your own life for. Li always felt sorriest for the dogs when it got to that point, and this rescue was no exception. There was a shattering sincerity in their reactions: the hesitation, the doubtful whining note that slipped into their barking, the worried licking of hands and faces that were long past reviving. Even at the end, even after every human rescuer had shut down and given up inside, the dogs couldn’t stop hoping.

  Li hit her own point of diminishing returns somewhere in Anaconda’s 3700 level, creeping down a shattered drift with a pulse locator that hadn’t spiked on a live person in fourteen hours. Even Ramirez had started to at least talk about packing it up.

  Then, finally, they got the hit they almost stopped believing would come: a locator beacon in a relatively undamaged section of corridor well off the main circulation paths—and, they hoped, out of the worst smoke. But when they reached it, they found only empty corridor running away into the darkness.

  “What the hell?” Li said, her locator still blipping at something that clearly wasn’t there.

  McCuen pried a piece of lagging away from the wall and pulled the beacon out of a niche in the wall.

  “Bootleggers,” he said, his voice muffled by his rebreather mouthpiece. “If they’re still alive, they’ll have been working within shouting distance of it.”

  The three of them stared at each other, hardly breathing. Then they started shouting.

  When the reply finally came, Li thought it was an echo. She forced her pickup to maximum and heard it again. It was shouting, although it sounded too faint to be anywhere near them—certainly too faint for unenhanced ears to hear.

  “Sshh!” she said.

  Ramirez and McCuen stopped shouting and looked at her.

  “What?” McCuen whispered.

  She heard it again. Two voi
ces, muffled by rock and dropped coal, but voices all the same. And above the shouting, a second sound. A buzzing, vibrating sound that came from much closer.

  They tracked the sound along the corridor and up a rough side tunnel that ended in a roof fall. And when they called out there, even McCuen and Ramirez thought they heard it.

  As soon as they heard it, they went crazy. McCuen ran back toward the main gangway to get help and spread news of possible survivors. Li and Ramirez began a furious race to collect all the timber and lagging they could find within carrying distance and start shoring up the roof and chipping their way into the rubble pile.

  “Right, then,” Ramirez said when they had cleared a passage through the first big blockage. He unbuckled his kit and started stripping off his bulky safety gear. “I’ll go take a look around.”

  Li shook her head. “Forget it. I’ll go.”

  “No way,” he said, tugging at a stubborn buckle.

  Li put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to prove anything, Leo.”

  He stopped and gave her an incredulous half-angry stare. Then he grabbed the end of the cord and clipped it onto his belt. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m trying to get those people out safely.”

  Li felt her face heat up. “If that’s what you want, you’ll let me go. I’m smaller, stronger. And I can get by without my rebreather if I have to. Wherever they are, I’ve got a better chance of getting to them, and that’s God’s truth.”

  She took the cord out of his hands, tugging a little to free it from his clenched fingers. As she unclipped it from his belt and attached it to her own she kept her eyes fixed on his. “Just feed me rope and come dig me out if the roof falls on me,” she said. “All right?”

  As if in response to her words, the roof boomed and cracked—the sound of a mountain’s weight of coal and rock shifting above them, seeking a new equilibrium now that the ribs had been burned out of the deep tunnels.

  “Don’t worry,” Ramirez said grimly. “I’ll be here.”

  The tunnel behind the rockfall was dark but not too smoky. Li guessed that the roof had caved in so quickly that not much smoke-tainted air had made it into this section.

  She crept forward through air so close and hot that her infrared gave her only a blurred sketch of the path before her. The tunnel was relatively clear once she was past the rockfall; it was just a matter of squirming around the rubble that had been ripped off the walls and ceiling when the fire had come through.

  The posts and lagging littering her path were more than inconveniences, of course. They were what had been holding up the ceiling before the fire. And now that they had come down it was only a matter of time until the mountain took the tunnel back.

  The trick, of course, was not to be there when that happened.

  She was ten meters down the passage when she heard the roof crack again. A sound like tearing paper rippled through the dark toward her. Rocks pummeled the ground a few meters ahead. She crouched in the partial shelter of a fallen timber and waited.

  “Okay?” Ramirez called when everything but the roiling dust had subsided.

  “Okay,” she called, as loud as she dared. She pushed her hard hat down on her head, waited a few moments to make sure the fault wasn’t spreading, then pushed forward.

  Just as she started forward, the noise started again. This time it was a scratchy rasping sound, not like anything she had heard before. She dove back under the shelter, expecting more roof fall. The noise stopped, then started again, repeating at regular intervals. It wasn’t the roof shifting at all, she realized; it sounded more like a switch turning.

  She tracked it to the drift’s far wall, behind a twisted piece of lagging that had once been pressure-bolted into the ceiling. She didn’t dare move the lagging; even her ceramsteel-reinforced muscles and tendons couldn’t hold the immense metal plate if its few remaining bolts came loose. She ran her hands up behind it, trying to find the source of the noise. Finally her fingers touched what she had not allowed herself to hope for: a phone box.

  It had been bent by the weight of the fallen lagging, its speaker half-crushed. She had to make her way back down the corridor and pull a metal rod out of the rubble to pry it open and get her hands on the receiver. When she put it to her ear, it had already stopped ringing, and she got nothing but the rough static of a damaged line.

  “Christ,” she whispered. She twisted around to get her arm farther under the lagging and felt something pull and strain in her shoulder. Finally, she got her hand on the cradle and held it down, keeping the receiver in her other hand. It was three painful minutes by her internals before the phone rang again.

  “Hello?” she said, jerking her hand off the cradle and pressing the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” said a disembodied voice over the crackle and whine of the wire.

  “Where are you?” Li said.

  “Where the hell do you think I am?” the voice asked.

  Li shivered. “Who is this?”

  “Come on, Katie.”

  “Cartwright?” she said. “Cartwright?”

  But the line had gone dead.

  * * *

  “Let’s get you up top,” Ramirez said when she told him about Cartwright. Even in the lamplight, she could see he was looking at her like she was crazy.

  “No. I’m telling you. I talked to him. He’s in the glory hole.”

  “That’s nonsense. We’re nowhere near there.”

  “Yes we are.” Li shook her head stubbornly. “I’ve got the wiring charts for this pit pulled up. I’m looking at them. The phone line they laid in for Sharifi runs down this drift and into a borehole that connects to the Trinidad just south of the glory hole. That’s how we heard their voices: through the boreholes the wiring team ran down from this level.”

  “Let’s just call it into pit bottom and let a closer team handle it,” Ramirez said.

  And that was when she figured it out.

  It wasn’t that Ramirez didn’t believe her. He believed Cartwright was down there, all right; he wasn’t even surprised to hear it. He just didn’t want her to know about it.

  “You crazy bastards,” she said. “What the hell have you done?”

  “Come on. We need to go up.”

  “How does it feel to kill a few hundred people, Leo?”

  “It’s AMC that’s killing them, not Cartwright.”

  Li turned and started walking toward the slant down to the Trinidad.

  “Where are you going?” Ramirez asked.

  “To find that son of a bitch and beat the truth out of him.”

  “No, wait.” Ramirez was chasing after her, stumbling in his haste to catch up to her. “It’s not what you think. I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you everything you want. But please, please let Daahl handle this. It’s for him to handle. And if you tell anyone, it’ll only get more people killed. It’ll only mean they all died for nothing, for AMC’s damned bottom line!”

  * * *

  Later, she wished she had insisted. Wished she had gone straight down to the glory hole, no matter what Ramirez had said or how reasonable it had sounded. But later was too late, because when they went up to find Daahl they got more than they bargained for.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Ramirez said as they stepped out of the pithead office.

  Li followed his glance to the triage area where Sharpe and the other medics had been. It was deserted. The wounded had been evacuated while she was underground, and the medics with them. All they had left behind was a fluttering trash field of steriwipes and used IVs and torn burn wrappings.

  She looked toward the helipads and saw a group of company employees clustered nervously around the single station shuttle still on the helipad. Everything else was a sea of coveralled miners and ragged Shantytowners.

  Daahl greeted Ramirez’s news without even pretending to be surprised by it. He sent Ramirez off to gather a group of rescuers—though it looked to
Li like Daahl didn’t much think Cartwright needed rescuing.

  “Get on the shuttle,” he told Li when that was done. “You can’t do anything else here, and this doesn’t concern you.”

  Li stood her ground. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Like I said, nothing that concerns you.”

  “Bullshit! Cartwright’s messing with live crystals, and you’re standing around chatting on top of a mine that’s already blown once!”

  “Cartwright knows what he’s doing, Katie. He doesn’t need your help.”

  “Help wasn’t what I had in mind, Daahl. I don’t know what little game you two are playing but—”

  Daahl met someone’s eyes over Li’s shoulder, froze for a split second, then relaxed again as if he’d made a conscious effort to look natural. Li turned to see who he was looking at and found herself staring into a pair of ceramsteel-cold blue eyes set in the face of a tough-looking woman in EMT gear.

  The woman nodded to Daahl, gave Li a measuring look, then just stood, hands thrust into her overall pockets, sharp eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.

  Li looked at Daahl, then glanced at the woman, hesitating. Should she know her? She shook her head and turned back to Daahl.

  “Go ahead,” he said, without introducing the woman. “No secrets here.”

  “No secrets?” Li snorted. “You must be joking. I can’t walk a step without tripping over one.”

  “Just because something’s none of your business doesn’t mean it’s a secret.”

  “None of my business? People are dying down there.”

  “People have been dying down there every day since you left here,” Daahl said, his voice as hard as Shantytown’s gypsum flats in August. “I haven’t noticed that you cared until now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You can’t fight in two armies, Katie.”

  “I—”

  “I’m not laying blame. Hell, I’m proud of you, of what you’ve accomplished. But in a few days there’ll be UN troops dropping in here. And they’ll be aiming at us. So don’t ask me to trust you because of some little girl I knew way back when. She’s dead. You killed her the day you enlisted.”