Spin State - Chris Moriarty [133]
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