They left the truck at the top of a long, slimy flight of stairs barricaded by a closed check door. The battered black-and-orange sign on the check door said, FIRE DANGER —NO-IGNITION ZONE.
The safety officer sat down on the truck’s bumper and started pulling on a pair of desert camouflage waders that looked like they’d seen hard using. “Trinidad’s a wet vein,” he said. “Underground river runs right through the fault. Pumps go out, and it takes a day, two at the most, for the whole vein to fill.”
“The water’s out, mostly,” Haas said. He grinned, a bright glistening flash of white in the gloom. “Hope you don’t mind the smell, though. Rats. And plenty of other things.”
The engineers who drove the stairs had taken advantage of a dip in the terrain where the Wilkes-Barre dropped abruptly toward the Trinidad, shaving the intervening layers of bedrock to their narrowest point. The stairs dropped twenty meters between dripping walls of bedrock, hit a low, relatively flat passageway, then dropped another twelve meters and broke through into the Trinidad.
This was a very different kind of coal vein. The Wilkes-Barre was friendly; broad and not too canted, big enough to cut wide, tall gangways through. The Trinidad was rough, twisting, and so narrow that even Li was soon bending almost double to avoid the coal-smelted steel cribbing.
“Hot, huh?” Haas said when he saw her wiping her brow. “Temperature rises one and a half degrees for every hundred feet below grade. Reckon it’s, oh, a hundred and two or so.”
“One-oh-three-point-two, actually.”
Haas snorted. “That what the Assembly’s blowing our tax dollars on these days? Thermometers?”
Li had forgotten what it was to travel underground. In the first ten meters, she banged her head, scraped her spine, and tripped over a pile of loose slate. Then she slipped back into the distantly remembered miner’s gait, bent at knees and waist, one hand skimming the roof to scout out the low parts before she hit them. The ease with which her body twisted itself back into that shape frightened her.
The flood had left stagnant pools of water in every dip and hollow of the vein. Tea-colored water sheeted down the walls, so steeped in sulfur that it stung the skin like acid. The bodies had been cleared away, but the sick-sweet smell of death remained, fueled by the litter of drowned rats that lay in sodden clots everywhere. Each little twist and outcropping of rock seemed to harbor some left-behind piece of life before the explosion. A lunch pail. A hat. A shattered Davy lamp.
As they walked, the safety officer kept up a breathless monologue documenting the special safety measures AMC had implemented in the Trinidad. He spoke in a nervous singsong, quivering under Haas’s eye like an eager student. Li couldn’t begin to guess whether he believed any of what he was saying. She listened, sucking rhythmically at the filter mask of her rebreather, and tried not to think about the fact that her life now depended on the creaking, straining ceiling bolts and the ability of six hundred paid-by-the-ton miners to keep a reasonable safety margin at the cutting face.
The work site itself was anticlimactic. “This is it,” Haas said, and there it was: a stretch of shored-up, rubble-littered tunnel, ending in a chamber whose flanking pillars were little more than boulder piles.
“So what happened?” Li asked the safety officer.
Haas answered. “You never know with a flash fire. One guy takes out a ton and a half of prime crystal and goes home to his wife and kids without blinking. The next guy over barely taps a vein and the whole mine comes down on top of him. Every miner has his theories—and don’t get me started on the damn pit priests—but it’s all just guesswork, really.”
“And you’re sure this was a flash fire, not just a regular coal fire?”
“As sure as we are about anything.”
The chamber was wide, perhaps twelve meters across, though it was hard to tell through the wreckage of pillars and timbering. It looked like a single mining breast had been opened out to give Sharifi’s team more room to work. Or like a particularly rich crystal deposit had lured the miners into robbing a central pillar and turning two separate chambers into one despite the well-known risks of pillar-robbing.
The fire had burned the top layer of coal off the walls, baring the long edges of condensate beds, smoother and more crystalline than the coal around them. Li touched an outcropping of condensate. Felt its glassy polish, the warmth that radiated from it like body heat, the faint, familiar tugging at the back of her skull.
She turned back to Haas and the safety officer. “Anything else I should see?” she asked, watching Haas in infrared.
“That’s it,” he said. She saw his pulse spike on the words.
“What about you?” she asked, turning to the safety officer.
He delivered up the goods with a single glance toward the unlit depths of the chamber.
Li walked back to the corner he’d glanced at and saw what she should have seen before: a large battered sheet of aluminum finished in safety-sign orange. It was the only spot of color in the chamber, the only thing that wasn’t caked black with coal smoke. Obviously, it had been put there since the fire.
“Who put this here?” she asked, bending down to shove the heavy plate aside.
“We did,” Haas answered. “So no one would fall down that.”
Li looked at the place where the plate had been—and found herself staring down a well shaft.
It was less than a meter wide. Ropy bundles of unmarked electrical cables curved over the lip and dropped into the darkness. The water started six meters below the lip of the hole, and it was as black as only mine water can be.
“Anything else you’d like to tell me about this?”
“No,” Haas said. “Sharifi dug it. I assume. She didn’t bother to get permission.” He sounded irritated that he hadn’t caught her at it while she was still alive.
Li scrabbled around on the floor until she found a scorched length of wire long enough to reach the water table. Then she dipped it in, pulled it out, and wiped it along the bare skin of her arm. Her skinbots flared briefly, swirling around the droplets, then subsided. Nothing too nasty in there, apparently. “Okay then,” she said, and started unlacing her boots.
The safety officer figured out what she was doing before Haas did. “You really don’t want to go down there, ma’am.”
“Humor me.”
“No fucking way!” Haas said.
He reached out and jerked her back from the hole by one arm. Li wrapped her free hand around his and squeezed just hard enough to remind him she was wired.
“I appreciate your concern for my safety,” she said. “But I really will be fine. Or was there another reason you didn’t want me to go down there?”
He backed off fast at that.
“Lend me your goggles,” she told the safety officer when she’d stripped to her shorts and T-shirt and tightened her rebreather’s harness. He handed her the goggles with a dazed expression on his face. She gave them a spit and a rub, put them on, and pressed them into her eye sockets to get good suction.
“Okay,” she said around the mouthpiece. “Back in ten and counting. Unless I do something stupid. In which case you’ve got an hour and forty minutes to get a rescue team down here and fish me out.”