Spin State - Chris Moriarty [32]
A swift glance passed between Haas and one of the geologists.
“How’s the water level in the Trinidad?” the geologist asked.
“Not going down as fast as it should be,” Daahl answered. “We’ve cleared the upper drifts, but the downslope chambers and the whole bottom level are still flooded. But we’ll get it cleared and make the shortfall up soon enough.”
“Sure, Daahl.” Haas shrugged easily. “You always do, don’t you?” He nodded to the silent, watching miners and stepped into the breakerhouse.
Li followed him.
Security was tight, going in and coming out. As they arrived a guard was picking miners out of the departing line and waving them into uncurtained privacy cubicles for random strip searches. Li stepped into line behind Haas, thinking more about the miners coming out than about the questions the guards were asking her.
“Do you have any Bose-Einstein equipment with you?” one of them said.
She stopped. “Of course.”
Haas turned around, looking irritated. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said. “You can’t take crystals down there. Whatever it is, you’ll have to leave it.”
“She can’t,” the witch said. “It’s in her head.”
She hadn’t opened her mouth all the way down in the shuttle, but now she spoke as offhandedly as if Li’s embedded comm gear were visible to the naked eye. Her voice was low, husky, and she had the formal turn of phrase that Li associated with the Syndicates’ high-series constructs. Li stared, wondering whether the woman’s silence was shyness or just camouflage.
“Oh. Right.” Haas laughed. “Don’t let on to that in public, Major. A one-carat piece of communications-grade condensate sells for more on the black market than most miners get paid in a year. There’s plenty around here’d be happy to take your head apart for that kind of money.”
The shaft lay at the back of the headframe, past the muffled rattle of coal falling through breakerhouse screens, below the creaking rigging of the ventilation stacks. The cage stank of diesel, sweat, and mildew, and it shot them down the vertical shaft at near free-fall speed. Someone had removed the inspection log from the scratched metal frame bolted onto the wall above the control switch and replaced it with a high-resolution holo of a spinmag centerfold wearing nothing but big hair and a spanking new miner’s kit.
Li eyed the holo while they plummeted toward pit bottom and wondered if anyone’s nipples actually looked like that. Men had the strangest taste in women sometimes.
Pit bottom smelled like a war zone. Diesel fumes hung in the air, mingling with the reek of coal dust and axle grease. Eardrums throbbed to the muffled thud of force pumps and Vulcan fans, and the ventilators brought no fresh air—only the acrid stink of cordite and snuffed fuses rolling up from the work faces.
There were no horizons, no sight lines in the hanging coal dust. Clogged miners burst out of the smog, clattered across the slate-strewn floor, headlamps swinging like beacons, then vanished as abruptly as they appeared. And from the depths, like the sound of combat drifting back over the supply lines, came the shudder and boom of blasting, the rush of newly dropped coal streaming down the chutes.
The fire boss’s badge said, “YOUR SAFETY IS OUR BUSINESS,” but his blank eyes suggested that he had more pressing business elsewhere, and he delivered his safety lecture in the tone of a man passing on a rumor he didn’t personally believe in.
They trooped past him one by one to sign the pit bottom log and check out their Davy lamps. When Li reached the front of the line, he scribbled her lamp number in the logbook and pushed the coal-smudged pit log toward her without even looking up. Li started to put her hand to where the scan plate should have been, then realized the log wasn’t even smart fiche. She signed it laboriously.
The new