Spin State - Chris Moriarty [130]
As the rescuers started pulling up the maps and putting the pieces together, they faced a critical situation. Over six hundred miners had gone into Pits 3 and 4 at the start of first shift. Seventy-odd miners, many of them badly injured, were huddled in Pit 4’s 3400 loading bay waiting for the spreading smoke to catch up with them. Hundreds more were scattered through the long miles of unventilated drifts and gangways that were rapidly filling with smoke. And the only way in or out of the mine was Pit 4’s excruciatingly slow emergency cage.
Now it was a simple matter of mathematics. The cage’s eight-man capacity meant that eight rescuers could go down each trip and send eight injured miners back up to the surface in their place. Nothing anyone did now could change that—any more than it could stop the fire ripping through the drifts and galleys.
But even with the disaster staring them in the face, Li couldn’t help wondering about the now-forgotten flash fire down in the Trinidad that had started it all.
They set down on the Pit 9 helipad, over six kilometers from the fire. Even so, they made their final descent through a solid curtain of smoke, and the touchdown, when it came, was as sudden as stepping off an unexpected stair flat-footed.
Li spotted Sharpe in the lee of the breakerhouse, surrounded by a half dozen still-unloaded trucks of medical equipment. She grabbed the strap of the medic’s kit he flung at her and followed him.
She counted almost eighty injured miners lying on stretchers lined up in haphazard rows around the trucks. One of Sharpe’s interns was moving down the rows already, tagging them. Green for mildly wounded victims whose treatment could wait until the first crush was over. Red for urgent cases. White for hopeless ones. There was a lot of white out there already—and the rescuers wouldn’t gain access to the immediate area of the explosion for hours, possibly even days.
“At least it looks like they’re getting them up fast,” Li said.
Sharpe gave her a grim tight-mouthed look. “They’ve only brought two loads up so far. The rest of these are above-ground injuries.”
“Oh God.”
“Haven’t you been listening to the pit priests, Major? We’re out of God’s jurisdiction.”
Li lost track of time after that. The underground cases came in slowly at first. Then the rescuers started rappelling down the Pit 4 shaft and hauling the injured up by hand. Within minutes, the triage unit was overwhelmed. Li’s oracle loaded its med praxis, and she sank into a long dark automatic tunnel of bending, cutting, injecting, bandaging.
At some point, the stretchers got short. Rescue crews started raiding the lines of wounded, checking for white tags, then pulses, pulling stretchers out from under the already dead.
“Hey!” Li shouted when a young miner dumped a white-tagged burn victim off a stretcher near her.
“No time,” the rescuer said. He sounded young, and furious. On the ground between them, the burn victim woke briefly, called out someone’s name, and died. “Christ Almighty, I thought he was dead already,” the rescuer said, then turned aside and vomited.
Li watched him for a moment, then wiped her face on her sleeve and went back to work.
“Hey!” someone said behind her, she wasn’t sure how much later. She felt the weight of a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Ramirez, barely recognizable under a mask of caked coal dust, blood, diesel oil.
“We could use you downstairs,” he said.
Li looked around for Sharpe and saw him talking to the newly arrived Helena medics. “How shorthanded are you?” she asked.
“What we’re short of is equipment. Rebreathers, mainly. Can’t recharge the ones we have fast enough to keep up with the rescue teams.” He hesitated, then went on, speaking quickly. “And the mine blew on the graveyard shift.”
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