Trinity

by Patrick Morgan

  ‘Are they expecting us?’ asked Ira, more out of interest than concern.

  ‘Absolutely,’ JT reassured him. ‘As far as anyone’s aware, this is all routine.’

  Their boots thumped dully down the metal ramp and out onto the dirt. Being slightly west of Skala, the sun hung a little higher in the clear blue sky. The heat was dry and parched but about the same intensity as it was within the city. The surrounding mountains limited the breeze but there was enough to cool the skin, albeit with the abrasiveness of fresh, dry dust. They had taken only a few steps towards the office before a door opened, banging unrestrained against a cladded exterior. A short, stocky man emerged, his face sweaty and red.

  ‘You’re from Hellinar Research?’ he asked in a gravelly and altogether unfriendly tone.

  ‘That’s right,’ said JT.

  ‘And what is it you want exactly?’

  JT put on his warmest smile. ‘We’ve come to check on some of our equipment. MineVision has had it on loan, we just want to check on its condition and that it’s still required. Just routine.’

  The man reached them and halted, eyeing the pair closely and apparently not liking what he saw. ‘What do you know about mining?’ He narrowed his eyes and spat at the dirt to emphasise his displeasure.

  ‘Not much, Mr…?’

  ‘Farkus. Mitch Farkus. Now you listen here, anything we got, you gave us and we’re keeping. You’re not taking anything away, you hear?’

  ‘We’re not here to take anything away, Mr Farkus. We’re merely going to check on the equipment, make sure it’s still in place and the maintenance has been kept to schedule.’

  Farkus wrinkled his nose and scowled at them with one withering eye. It was such a deliberate gesture, JT wondered if the other eye worked. ‘You’re joking, right? Maintenance out here? You’ve got more chance maintaining an ornamental aquatic lily farm than mining kit out here. Where in the name of the Matriarch would we get the parts?’

  ‘Well, from us if you need them, Mr Farkus,’ said JT deprecatingly.

  Farkus glowered again. ‘Your lot give us squat. You might as well get back in that clapped-out turbine truck and run back to your comfy little air-con office.’ When neither JT nor Ira moved he followed up with, ‘Be gone you arseholes.’

  ‘Mr Farkus,’ JT began again, but was interrupted by Ira.

  ‘Listen, you fat old shit. We’ve come to look at the stuff and no more than that. Either you show us and we go merrily on our way, or we go merrily on our way and ten more like us turn up next shift. Now, what’ll it be?’

  JT, though startled, was impressed by the reaction this outburst elicited. Farkus scrunched his nose and gave a long, disgustingly dry sniff. ‘What are you looking for? Exactly what are you looking for?’

  JT sensed it was a guarded question, but had his answer ready. Farkus, of course, didn’t know it mattered little what they saw. JT reached into his jumpsuit and brought out a wad of paper, most of it blank. He made to rifle through it until he apparently found what he wanted.

  ‘We’re looking for a drill rig, two jumbos, three boggers and an LV.’ In truth, JT had only the faintest idea what any of this meant although he had figured out an LV was a light vehicle.

  Farkus began to laugh, a rasping sound from deep in his belly, but it was at least a laugh of genuine humour.

  ‘Do you know how long an LV lasts in a mine?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said JT. ‘Probably not long?’

  Farkus’ laugh quickly became a wracking cough. Between convulsions he managed to get out, ‘About four bloody cycles, that’s how long. Bloody things get run over regularly.’

  ‘Run over?’ asked JT with a frown.

  ‘Yeah, run over. Crushed. Have you seen a tram truck before?’

  Thinking back to his last mine visit, JT got his point. ‘Two storeys high, three-metre wheels, usually yellow? Is that a tram truck?’

  ‘Usually yellow, ha! That’s a good one. Will have to remember that one for the girls and boys,’ Farkus roared. ‘So you’ve been to a mine before?’

  ‘It was half a decade ago, Mr Farkus, but yes.’

  Farkus seemed to be pacified a little by this. ‘You go down?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You remember the prep?’

  Farkus was watching him closely, the question clearly a test. ‘Yes, I think so. Lots of water, lots of electrolyte.’

  ‘How much?’ Farkus interrupted, now paying JT his full attention.

  ‘I guess about ten litres of water, five of electrolyte for a shift. I may be out of date of course.’

  Farkus merely nodded.

  ‘I’d need to do a specific-gravity urine test and a breathalyser test.’ From beside him, he heard Ira groan.

  Farkus’ glower relented a fraction. ‘Okay, you know enough. You want to see the kit, that’s your business.’ He spat again and turned to the office. ‘You’d better come in. I’ll get you kitted out and get one of the girls to take you down. Follow me.’

  *

  A half rotation later, JT and Ira stood in the middle of the prefab, clad in hi-vis vests and hard hats. They strapped on carrier packs, filling them with as many bottles of water and electrolyte as they could hold. Small, potassium KOX kits were fastened to their belts by Farkus, whose assurance these would keep them alive for up to a rotation should the air turn bad caused Ira to roll his eyes. Next they provided urine samples and were breathalysed, a test JT was relieved Ira passed.

  They stood for a few turns while Farkus radioed for a transport, which duly pulled up in a cloud of acrid dust. The driver, a stocky middle-aged woman who exuded a kind disposition, entered with a bang of the door.

  ‘This is Beth, she’ll be your driver,’ growled Farkus. ‘She’ll take you down, show you what you want.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said JT, with as much warmth as he could muster.

  ‘Just make sure you bring the kit back once you’re done,’ said Farkus. ‘And remember, if your piss starts to smell you’re dehydrated, so take a drink. Don’t try to keep the water cool, though, or else your body’ll thermal shock. Just keep it in your packs and if anyone offers you ice don’t take it. And there are restricted areas. That means you don’t go in there for any reason. You got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said JT evenly but Farkus had already turned his attention to a shabby, wall-mounted monitor. Unimpressed by her boss’s attitude, Beth shook her head and led them into the stark sunlight outside. The two men climbed aboard a faded, long-wheelbase truck with an open bed at the rear. Ira took the front seat, hauling the door open and slamming it purposefully behind him. JT climbed into the back without protest, as Beth turned the ignition key and the engine rumbled reluctantly to life. They pulled away, leaving a plume of reddish dust behind them.

  ‘You been here long?’ asked Ira.

  ‘Ten cycles,’ replied Beth, turning onto a wide dirt roadway that led up and over the crest of an excavated mound. ‘I keep the drill rigs supplied and bring the sample slugs up to the surface, mostly.’

  The landscape was clearly machine-formed, with rises and falls of consistent gradient levelling off only where other, wider roadways intersected their path. Cresting the rise, JT leaned forward to get his first view of the vastness of the excavated caldera that lay before them. It was truly huge, almost too big to comprehend the scale. The pit was 200 metres deep and terraced to provide roadways. Dust-caked tipper trucks moved around the various levels; even from this distance they were clearly enormous.

  Beth, who saw the same sight several times a shift, concentrated on the road but noted the interest of her passengers. The roadway became bumpy as they passed a large artificial pond, which both men regarded intently.

  ‘That’s the sump. It provides water for drill coolant and dust suppression.’

  ‘Is that a problem, the dust?’ asked Ira.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Beth. ‘It’s a huge problem. You’ll get the idea, trust me.’

  They descended a series of s
teep inclines that had been cut between levels. ‘What exactly is it you want to see?’ asked Beth.

  JT retrieved his list and handed it over. Beth took a look then thrust it onto the dash. ‘You haven’t got a hope of telling one bogger from another and as to the LV,’ she gave a little laugh, ‘that’ll be long gone.’

  ‘And the jumbos?’ asked JT tentatively.

  ‘Yeah, we might be able to help you there, we only have a handful of them. Do you really need to see the specific stuff on this list or can we just say you saw a couple of jumbos and leave it at that?’

  Under normal circumstances JT would have insisted on seeing the actual items, but it was Connor he was interested in. ‘Just a couple of jumbos would be fine.’

  Ira looked back at him with appreciation, as if JT had taken his first step towards his world.

  Turning off the incline onto a lower level, they tracked the wide road around the periphery of the pit. Out in front of them they could see the mine entrance, a wide, black maw of screaming torment. Cable and pipework spilled out of it like tendrils, arching upward as if torturing the mouth in some bio-geological horror. Ira shuddered.

  Beth pulled up just short of the entrance and snapped on a hand-held radio. There was a lot of chatter, which she took a moment to assess. During a pause, she keyed the microphone and sought permission to proceed, which she was duly given. They pulled forward, crossing the threshold into darkness. It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust as the truck’s weak headlights illuminated a level dirt floor and rough rocky walls secured with steel mesh. Conduit and cabling were anchored to the walls, sagging between fixings. Bound to a hard line directly above them, a large flexible pipe writhed and pulsed like an enormous suspended earthworm.

  Catching Ira’s upward gaze, Beth said, ‘That group of pipes is called the BACS. The smaller lines supply compressed air and water, both for drilling. The big flexible pipe in the middle supplies atmospheric air. There’s electrical conduit up there as well for power and comms.’

  The tunnel began to descend to the right in a constant-radius turn. ‘We’re on the decline now. That’s de-cline emphasising the ‘e’. Ya gotta say it right,’ she said in a convincing parody of Farkus.

  ‘Got it,’ said Ira distractedly.

  ‘We were hoping to meet up with someone down here,’ ventured JT, feeling now they were in the mine he could reveal the real reason for their visit. ‘A man called Bill Connor. Do you know him?’

  ‘Yeah. Are you two brothers or something? You look nearly identical.’

  ‘No, we’ve never met,’ said JT, noting a smile of justification play across Ira’s face.

  ‘I know Connor,’ continued Beth with a sigh of resentment. ‘We’re not supposed to say he’s here but who gives a shit, right? What do you want to see him for?’

  ‘Is he here often?’

  ‘No, but you sure know about it when he is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s pretty mean. It’s his job to bully the miners and does he ever enjoy it. Shit!’ she exclaimed in sudden alarm. She stood on the brakes as a bright light approached from around the ever-descending spiral. Throwing the truck into reverse she turned and hooked an arm over the headrest of Ira’s seat. JT instinctively got out of her line of sight.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she cursed with increasing urgency. ‘The bastards are supposed to clear us when there’s a gap to at least the first drive.’

  The lights were getting bright and the sound of a diesel engine under strain reverberated around them, rapidly increasing in volume. Suddenly, the source of the light and sound became visible. It was one of the tramming trucks they had seen from across the pit but now, when it was nearly on top of them, Ira and JT at last got to put the scale into perspective. It was enormous. Only just fitting the tunnel, it dragged the edge of its huge bucket across a section of wire mesh, ripping it free from the wall as if it were tissue paper. The noise of steel against rock was audible above the diesel, as was the sound of loose rocks crashing to the ground behind it. Up in the cab, Ira could see the driver. He glanced down at the truck beneath him but only for a moment and showed no sign of slowing down for them.

  ‘Isn’t he going to stop?’ asked Ira with gruff annoyance but little sign of fear.

  ‘Nope,’ said Beth. ‘He’s got to keep to his schedule. It’s up to us to get out of the way.’

  ‘Or what?’ asked JT.

  ‘Or we’re going to leave here a damn sight thinner than we arrived,’ said Beth evenly. JT’s eyes widened, his pupils contracting in the dazzling headlights of the truck, which was virtually on top of them.

  Beth’s face assumed a look of total concentration. Without any effort to slow, she flung the steering wheel around, bringing the truck violently into a small cut-out in the wall. She stamped on the brakes, making the truck rock on its worn springs. The tailgate met the mesh-covered wall with a thud as the giant wheels passed by without contact.

  Beth got out to survey the damage, leaving JT looking wide-eyed into Ira’s unreadable features. There was a wrenching sound from outside as the twisted remains of a rear bumper were pulled away and discarded onto the tunnel floor. Climbing back into the cab, Beth slammed the door with exaggerated force.

  ‘Idiots. They’re idiots up there.’

  ‘Up where?’ asked Ira.

  ‘Control,’ she snarled. She picked up the radio and keyed it, speaking over anyone else who might be talking.

  ‘LV22 here. Who cleared us? ‘Cos we just came head-on with a tram.’ There was an incomprehensible reply followed by another bark from Beth. ‘I don’t care what your software says, we damn near got crushed. You need to check the transponder on that tram.’ Then almost as an afterthought she said, ‘So are we clear now, or no?’

  After the reply, which only Beth could understand, she threw the truck into first gear and dumped the clutch. Reaching the rocks knocked down by the tram she got back on the radio. ‘Oh, and by the way, your dumb-ass driver hit the wall before the level-one drive. You’d better get someone to repair it.’

  JT sensed she would have cheerfully tossed the radio out of the window or, at the very least, switched it off were it not their lifeline. ‘Does that happen often?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, it happens a lot. They have tracking software to follow all the trucks, it’s pretty smart but it doesn’t always work. The transponders break all the time or reset themselves to the wrong frequencies. It’s nobody’s fault really, but we lose a lot of LVs like that. It gets really messy when you get two trams head to head. That’s not pretty.’

  It wasn’t much further to level one. It wasn’t illuminated, so presumably had yielded as much ore as it was going to. As they continued to spiral down, the temperature climbed fast, as did the humidity. JT had experienced this before, but had forgotten just how oppressive the conditions could be. He was sweating already and took a swig of water.

  ‘Most of the action is down on level four,’ Beth continued. ‘They’re drilling a load of mother-and-daughter holes down there. You know, mapping out the geology to figure out where to dig next? Anyway, the drill rig will be down there, with the jumbos and boggers. Whether they’re yours is another matter, but you said you weren’t too fussed?’

  ‘I’d rather not go down any further than we have to,’ Ira agreed. ‘It’s pretty damn hot. I don’t know how you could spend more than a rotation down here.’

  Beth agreed. ‘Can you imagine having to sleep in this? No thanks.’

  There was something in her tone that made JT feel uneasy. It was a faint cadence that told him that maybe people did sleep down here and he thought back to the conversation he’d had in the Landlord’s Arms. He made a mental note but didn’t push further, choosing instead to occupy himself by following the meandering path of the pipework in the tunnel roof above.

  ‘We’ve just passed level three, you won’t have noticed ‘cos it’s been blocked off.’ She looked back to JT. ‘The stope became unstable. We couldn’t
secure it, so we abandoned it a few cycles ago.’

  ‘The what? Stope?’ he asked.

  She shot him a brief, condescending look over her shoulder then explained in a similar tone. ‘Yeah, stope. You know, the hole that’s formed after you blast the rock out?’

  ‘The cave?’ JT said, feeling it sounding dumb even as he said it.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Beth. ‘I thought you’d been in a mine before?’

  JT didn’t reply and, when Ira looked back at him with a frown, he just shrugged and said, ‘Just not a term I’d heard before.’

  It was so hot he was sipping at his water regularly and had noticed Ira doing the same. Beth, it seemed, was made of sterner stuff and had consumed barely half a litre.

  A few moments later, they swung left into a side tunnel marked ‘Level 4’ and pulled over into a large, well-lit siding. They disembarked into the abrasive, unbearably clammy atmosphere. The noise level outside the truck was astoundingly high. Diesel engines growled above the harsh grinding of drills on rock and the hiss of coolant and dust-suppression jets spraying water with abandon.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Beth, voice raised. ‘Let’s find your stuff.’

  021: Meridian

  Mal-Kas Mine, 122km Northwest of Skala

  After the dark of the decline, the cavern was incandescent with stark light. Where old-style vacuum bulbs would have bathed the space in a soft, diffused glow, LEDs struck the rock severely, casting harsh shadows across deep fissures like creases in old flesh.

  Beth led them towards one of the huge tram trucks, its bucket fed with rubble by two front-loading diggers. Rock crashed unapologetically against steel walls, battered from cycles of abuse. The dirt-encrusted yellow loaders themselves would have seemed large if not for the scale of the vehicle they were servicing, like Vespidae wasps tending to a queen.