8. THIS IS A RIGHT TO WORK MINE. NO SOLICITATION. NO PRIESTS!
While Li was still reading, the swing shift surfaced in a swearing, stinking wave of bodies. Their backs were bent by the punishing labor at the cutting wall, but their faces shone with greasy pit dust and the relief of finishing out another shift safely. Haas looked like a giant next to them. It was hard to imagine someone could be so clean all over, stand up so straight, smile so broadly.
“Daahl,” he said to a blue-eyed whippet of a man that Li guessed must be the departing crew’s foreman. “How’s the cutting?”
“Twenty gross behind in the Wilkes-Barre North 5,” Daahl answered. He glanced furtively at Haas, as if he wanted to gauge the station exec’s temper before delivering more bad news. “Not the men’s fault. The ventilation’s still fouled up from the flooding. We spent half the shift just trying to pump air past the South 2 brattices.”
A swift glance passed between Haas and one of the geologists.
“How’s the water level in the Trinidad?” the geologist asked.
“Not going down as fast as it should be,” Daahl answered. “We’ve cleared the upper drifts, but the downslope chambers and the whole bottom level are still flooded. But we’ll get it cleared and make the shortfall up soon enough.”
“Sure, Daahl.” Haas shrugged easily. “You always do, don’t you?” He nodded to the silent, watching miners and stepped into the breakerhouse.
Li followed him.
Security was tight, going in and coming out. As they arrived a guard was picking miners out of the departing line and waving them into uncurtained privacy cubicles for random strip searches. Li stepped into line behind Haas, thinking more about the miners coming out than about the questions the guards were asking her.
“Do you have any Bose-Einstein equipment with you?” one of them said.
She stopped. “Of course.”
Haas turned around, looking irritated. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said. “You can’t take crystals down there. Whatever it is, you’ll have to leave it.”
“She can’t,” the witch said. “It’s in her head.”
She hadn’t opened her mouth all the way down in the shuttle, but now she spoke as offhandedly as if Li’s embedded comm gear were visible to the naked eye. Her voice was low, husky, and she had the formal turn of phrase that Li associated with the Syndicates’ high-series constructs. Li stared, wondering whether the woman’s silence was shyness or just camouflage.
“Oh. Right.” Haas laughed. “Don’t let on to that in public, Major. A one-carat piece of communications-grade condensate sells for more on the black market than most miners get paid in a year. There’s plenty around here’d be happy to take your head apart for that kind of money.”
The shaft lay at the back of the headframe, past the muffled rattle of coal falling through breakerhouse screens, below the creaking rigging of the ventilation stacks. The cage stank of diesel, sweat, and mildew, and it shot them down the vertical shaft at near free-fall speed. Someone had removed the inspection log from the scratched metal frame bolted onto the wall above the control switch and replaced it with a high-resolution holo of a spinmag centerfold wearing nothing but big hair and a spanking new miner’s kit.
Li eyed the holo while they plummeted toward pit bottom and wondered if anyone’s nipples actually looked like that. Men had the strangest taste in women sometimes.
Pit bottom smelled like a war zone. Diesel fumes hung in the air, mingling with the reek of coal dust and axle grease. Eardrums throbbed to the muffled thud of force pumps and Vulcan fans, and the ventilators brought no fresh air—only the acrid stink of cordite and snuffed fuses rolling up from the work faces.
There were no horizons, no sight lines in the hanging coal dust. Clogged miners burst out of the smog, clattered across the slate-strewn floor, headlamps swinging like beacons, then vanished as abruptly as they appeared. And from the depths, like the sound of combat drifting back over the supply lines, came the shudder and boom of blasting, the rush of newly dropped coal streaming down the chutes.
The fire boss’s badge said, “YOUR SAFETY IS OUR BUSINESS,” but his blank eyes suggested that he had more pressing business elsewhere, and he delivered his safety lecture in the tone of a man passing on a rumor he didn’t personally believe in.
They trooped past him one by one to sign the pit bottom log and check out their Davy lamps. When Li reached the front of the line, he scribbled her lamp number in the logbook and pushed the coal-smudged pit log toward her without even looking up. Li started to put her hand to where the scan plate should have been, then realized the log wasn’t even smart fiche. She signed it laboriously.
The new shift was coming on-clock as Haas’s crew rigged up. The coal haulers came down first, as always. Some were jumping off the cage as Li stepped out of the fire office. Others, brought down in the last trip, were already preparing their carts and sorting their traces. They moved nimbly, with the light-limbed agility of children—which was exactly what they were.
They’d been called pit ponies when Li was their age, even though no pony had set hoof on this planet or any other in two centuries. A few of the incoming shift’s ponies had pit dogs with them: heavy-boned, coal-stained mongrels strong enough to pull the coal carts. The rest would hook up to the draw chains and drag the heavy coal carts themselves. They worked in a world of man, child, and animal power. A world where it took a whole family to earn a living and sweat cost less than diesel fuel.
“Don’t get foggy-eyed about them,” Haas said, coming up behind her. “I started out carting when I was their age. Day I turned ten. They’ve got their chance, same as the rest of us.”
“Sure,” Li said, though she didn’t know if she believed it or not.
A pit pony from the outgoing shift passed by, hauling a carefully packed flat of live-cut condensate. He had a string of pearls—a long row of coal scars that came from scraping bare backbones on ceiling joists day after day and having blue coal dust ground into the cuts. But Li barely noticed it; she was looking at the crystals.
They gleamed like distant stars under their heavy coating of coal dust. They looked like crystals—the miners even called them crystals—but Li knew they’d light up a quantum scan like no mere rock. They were quantum-level anomalies, an unheard of, unimagined substance that every physical law said couldn’t exist above zero Kelvin, or in an atmosphere, or in a minable, transportable, usable form. They were impossible, and they were the daily miracle that the UN worlds lived on.
But they were notoriously fragile. Blasting cracked them. Power tools damaged them. Even a hot mine fire could destroy them—though another fire, unpredictably, might burn the coal out around the crystals and leave whole subterranean cathedral vaults of them standing. It was all a skilled miner could do, working with wedges, picks, and hard-earned handicraft, to cut a strike out of the coal without ruining it. “Getting them out live,” Li’s father called it.
She reached out and brushed her fingers along the smooth upper facet of the nearest condensate as the cart passed. It felt warm as flesh. The miner, somewhere down there in the choking darkness, had gotten it out live.
Sharifi’s site lay in the newly opened Trinidad—the deeper and richer of the Anaconda’s two coal veins. It was six kilometers from Pit 3 as the crow flies, eight or more along the mine’s twisting and dipping underground passages.
They rode the first four kilometers in a squat, neon green mine truck, rattling around like dry beans in a pot and choking on diesel exhaust. At first they drove along three-meter-by-three-meter main gangways, echoing with the metal wheels of coal carts and the ringing blows of miners’ hammers. Soon they passed into increasingly narrow drifts, cutting chambers slanting up twenty feet above their heads along near-vertical coal seams. As they moved away from the pithead, the wiring grew scantier and the lights farther apart until there was only the swinging arc of the truck’s headlights and an occasional eerie glimpse of Davy lamps gleaming above glittering eyes and coal-smudged faces.