Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Li shook her head. “Forget it. I’ll go.”

“No way,” he said, tugging at a stubborn buckle.

Li put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to prove anything, Leo.”

He stopped and gave her an incredulous half-angry stare. Then he grabbed the end of the cord and clipped it onto his belt. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m trying to get those people out safely.”

Li felt her face heat up. “If that’s what you want, you’ll let me go. I’m smaller, stronger. And I can get by without my rebreather if I have to. Wherever they are, I’ve got a better chance of getting to them, and that’s God’s truth.”

She took the cord out of his hands, tugging a little to free it from his clenched fingers. As she unclipped it from his belt and attached it to her own she kept her eyes fixed on his. “Just feed me rope and come dig me out if the roof falls on me,” she said. “All right?”

As if in response to her words, the roof boomed and cracked—the sound of a mountain’s weight of coal and rock shifting above them, seeking a new equilibrium now that the ribs had been burned out of the deep tunnels.

“Don’t worry,” Ramirez said grimly. “I’ll be here.”

The tunnel behind the rockfall was dark but not too smoky. Li guessed that the roof had caved in so quickly that not much smoke-tainted air had made it into this section.

She crept forward through air so close and hot that her infrared gave her only a blurred sketch of the path before her. The tunnel was relatively clear once she was past the rockfall; it was just a matter of squirming around the rubble that had been ripped off the walls and ceiling when the fire had come through.

The posts and lagging littering her path were more than inconveniences, of course. They were what had been holding up the ceiling before the fire. And now that they had come down it was only a matter of time until the mountain took the tunnel back.

The trick, of course, was not to be there when that happened.

She was ten meters down the passage when she heard the roof crack again. A sound like tearing paper rippled through the dark toward her. Rocks pummeled the ground a few meters ahead. She crouched in the partial shelter of a fallen timber and waited.

“Okay?” Ramirez called when everything but the roiling dust had subsided.

“Okay,” she called, as loud as she dared. She pushed her hard hat down on her head, waited a few moments to make sure the fault wasn’t spreading, then pushed forward.

Just as she started forward, the noise started again. This time it was a scratchy rasping sound, not like anything she had heard before. She dove back under the shelter, expecting more roof fall. The noise stopped, then started again, repeating at regular intervals. It wasn’t the roof shifting at all, she realized; it sounded more like a switch turning.

She tracked it to the drift’s far wall, behind a twisted piece of lagging that had once been pressure-bolted into the ceiling. She didn’t dare move the lagging; even her ceramsteel-reinforced muscles and tendons couldn’t hold the immense metal plate if its few remaining bolts came loose. She ran her hands up behind it, trying to find the source of the noise. Finally her fingers touched what she had not allowed herself to hope for: a phone box.

It had been bent by the weight of the fallen lagging, its speaker half-crushed. She had to make her way back down the corridor and pull a metal rod out of the rubble to pry it open and get her hands on the receiver. When she put it to her ear, it had already stopped ringing, and she got nothing but the rough static of a damaged line.

“Christ,” she whispered. She twisted around to get her arm farther under the lagging and felt something pull and strain in her shoulder. Finally, she got her hand on the cradle and held it down, keeping the receiver in her other hand. It was three painful minutes by her internals before the phone rang again.

“Hello?” she said, jerking her hand off the cradle and pressing the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said a disembodied voice over the crackle and whine of the wire.

“Where are you?” Li said.

“Where the hell do you think I am?” the voice asked.

Li shivered. “Who is this?”

“Come on, Katie.”

“Cartwright?” she said. “Cartwright?”

But the line had gone dead.

“Let’s get you up top,” Ramirez said when she told him about Cartwright. Even in the lamplight, she could see he was looking at her like she was crazy.

“No. I’m telling you. I talked to him. He’s in the glory hole.”

“That’s nonsense. We’re nowhere near there.”

“Yes we are.” Li shook her head stubbornly. “I’ve got the wiring charts for this pit pulled up. I’m looking at them. The phone line they laid in for Sharifi runs down this drift and into a borehole that connects to the Trinidad just south of the glory hole. That’s how we heard their voices: through the boreholes the wiring team ran down from this level.”

“Let’s just call it into pit bottom and let a closer team handle it,” Ramirez said.

And that was when she figured it out.

It wasn’t that Ramirez didn’t believe her. He believed Cartwright was down there, all right; he wasn’t even surprised to hear it. He just didn’t want her to know about it.

“You crazy bastards,” she said. “What the hell have you done?”

“Come on. We need to go up.”

“How does it feel to kill a few hundred people, Leo?”

“It’s AMC that’s killing them, not Cartwright.”

Li turned and started walking toward the slant down to the Trinidad.

“Where are you going?” Ramirez asked.

“To find that son of a bitch and beat the truth out of him.”

“No, wait.” Ramirez was chasing after her, stumbling in his haste to catch up to her. “It’s not what you think. I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you everything you want. But please, please let Daahl handle this. It’s for him to handle. And if you tell anyone, it’ll only get more people killed. It’ll only mean they all died for nothing, for AMC’s damned bottom line!”

Later, she wished she had insisted. Wished she had gone straight down to the glory hole, no matter what Ramirez had said or how reasonable it had sounded. But later was too late, because when they went up to find Daahl they got more than they bargained for.

“That doesn’t look good,” Ramirez said as they stepped out of the pithead office.

Li followed his glance to the triage area where Sharpe and the other medics had been. It was deserted. The wounded had been evacuated while she was underground, and the medics with them. All they had left behind was a fluttering trash field of steriwipes and used IVs and torn burn wrappings.

She looked toward the helipads and saw a group of company employees clustered nervously around the single station shuttle still on the helipad. Everything else was a sea of coveralled miners and ragged Shantytowners.

Daahl greeted Ramirez’s news without even pretending to be surprised by it. He sent Ramirez off to gather a group of rescuers—though it looked to Li like Daahl didn’t much think Cartwright needed rescuing.

“Get on the shuttle,” he told Li when that was done. “You can’t do anything else here, and this doesn’t concern you.”

Li stood her ground. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“Like I said, nothing that concerns you.”

“Bullshit! Cartwright’s messing with live crystals, and you’re standing around chatting on top of a mine that’s already blown once!”

“Cartwright knows what he’s doing, Katie. He doesn’t need your help.”