Chris Moriarty - Spin State

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 voices, 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.”