Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Sharifi had found herself a glory hole.

Something brushed Li’s arm, and she whirled around just in time to glimpse a VR glove floating past her on a slow underground current, contact wires trailing. There was other equipment, some floating, some strewn across the cavern floor in a tangled skein of power lines and input/output wires. She recognized seismic meters, Geiger counters, quantum monitors. There was no way she could take all this in one shot, let alone underwater. She laid out a mental grid pattern and swam back and forth, recording everything as best she could. At least that way she’d know if someone moved something between now and her next visit—and she’d know what they’d been worried enough about to bother moving.

“That’ll do,” she said as she hauled herself up the ladder. “You’ll need to keep this section closed until you get that drained out and I can take a closer look.”

Haas’s eyes glinted where the lamp beam cut across them. “I’ve got a start-work order on this level waiting for the inspector’s signature. The electricians come through tomorrow, and we start cutting as soon as they lay clean line. Your authority stops at ground level, and you just hit the end of my cooperation.”

“Oh,” Li said. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to log the safety violations down here.” She pointed at the corridor’s props and collars, groaning under the weight of the roof, but still standing. “Those props are three meters apart. UNMSC regs require 2.5. Also, there are ungrounded electrical wires at junctions South 2, South 8, and South 11. I’ll download a complete list of code violations for you when we get back. I’m sure you’ll want to get right on top of them.”

It was pure bluff, of course; Haas knew as well as she did that no UN site team was ever going to give AMC more than a slap on the wrist for those violations. But Li was the only UN official on-site, and if she logged an official complaint all the paperwork he had to do to get the mine reopened would pass across her desk—or rather sit on her desk until she got around to signing it.

Haas could go over her head, of course. But that took time. And it was an implicit admission that there really were safety violations. Li didn’t think he’d risk it. Not in the aftermath of a bloody and well-publicized mining disaster. Not with Sharifi’s body still lying in the Shantytown morgue a few miles away.

“Fine,” Haas said, shrugging. “Sniff around all you want. You’re only going to find out Sharifi was a fool.”

When they got back up to the Wilkes-Barre vein, the second shift was in full swing. Most of the miners worked half-naked, bodies gleaming like marble in the sweltering heat two miles below the surface. They worked fast, taking few precautions. Coal-cutting time wasn’t quite dead time, but it was halfway there, and it didn’t pay to spend an unnecessary minute at it.

Few of the men, women, and children underground wore rebreathers, and the ones who did only used them during their rare breaks. The rest of the time, the face masks with their tangle of oxygen lines dangled loosely around sweat-slicked necks. It took all the air a body could breathe to work at speed, hunched over in badly ventilated tunnels, and rebreathers were the first thing to go when time got short.

Without thinking, Li started to unhook her own rebreather.

“Don’t,” said the safety officer. “Mutagens.”

She looked at the miners. The safety officer caught her questioning glance and shrugged. “Genetics.”

A flash of soft memory set Li’s stomach churning. Her father, bending over the kitchen sink, coughing, complaining about the price of filters at the pithead supply house. Her mother boiling water on the stovetop and handing him a dish towel to put over his head so he could cough up a little more coal dust.

“Are you all right?” asked the safety officer. “Sometimes even the filters won’t keep the dust out.”

She nodded and put her head between her knees.

When she looked up again the truck had stopped. Oddly shaped boxes and canisters littered the roadway. Workers bustled in front of them, men and women who moved across the rough ground with the assurance of habit but were too thin, too clean to be miners. Li looked closer and recognized several of the geologists she’d shuttled down with.

Only one person in the visible section of the drift remained seated. A slight, silent figure, curled into a rock outcropping just outside the action, eyes closed, face solemn and lovely as a statue’s.

The witch.

When the preparations were complete, she rose, approached the freshly cut face, closed her eyes, and put her hands to the stone. Li had seen crystals witched before, but mostly in poor bootleg deposits, not company claims. And the witches of her childhood had been Shantytown dwellers. They’d witched for food, or a share of the strikes they found, or a little winter fuel. Their talent had been the fruit of a genetic fluke, not a carefully manufactured commodity.

The witch passed back and forth along the face, stopping now and then, head cocked as though she were listening for something. Her pale skin shone against the uncut coal. The light from her Davy lamp hung about her like a halo.

The surveyors and geologists hovered tensely. Immense amounts of money were at stake. Turn away from a cut too soon and you lost millions without ever knowing it. Cut too boldly and you’d be left with cartloads of dead crystal, worthless as quartz. Miners had tried every technology there was: radio imaging, X rays, random core sampling. Witching was still the only real way to locate live, viable crystal. And the annual profit margins of entire multiplanetary corporations rose and fell on the choices a witch made at the cutting face.

The witch stopped at a perfectly ordinary spot along the face and pressed both hands to the coal face. They came away wet, stained bloodred with sulfur water. “There,” she said.

The surveyors surged past her as if drawn by an undertow. They attached sensors, hooked up feedback circuits, safety cutoffs. Li watched, fascinated, as the cutters bored into the coal face. When she glanced at Haas, the intent, hungry look on his face reminded her of the old songs miners sang after the whiskey had passed around a few too many times, songs about men whose blood ran with coal, who lusted for the mine like dope fiends.

Everyone in the gangway fell silent as the first crystal came into sight, pale, gleaming, unmistakable. A geologist leaned into the face, holding his breath, and put his hand on it.

“Well?” Haas said.

The geologist removed his hand, wiped it on his coverall front, touched his forehead as if he were taking his own temperature, and put his hand back to the condensate again. He shook his head.

“Dead,” someone muttered at the edge of the lamplight.

The witch had retreated when the surveyors moved in, shrinking into herself like an actor slipping out of character. She barely reacted to the news of the dead crystal.

“Come here,” Haas said to her.

She turned obediently, but her gaze slipped past Haas and fixed on Li as unerringly as a compass needle locking on to magnetic north. The violet eyes looked dark underground, each iris shaved down to a narrow line around an immense pupil. And beyond the pupil nothing, as if you were staring straight into the black pit of the woman’s skull.

Holes in the universe , Li thought, and the shiver that ran down her spine had nothing to do with cold.

By the time they surfaced, the storm had hit. The headframe whined and rattled under its assault. Scraps of viruflex and jagged sheets of aluminum siding skittered past as if all the contents of the valley were being stirred by an invisible hand.