Spin State - Chris Moriarty [33]
They’d been called pit ponies when Li was their age, even though no pony had set hoof on this planet or any other in two centuries. A few of the incoming shift’s ponies had pit dogs with them: heavy-boned, coal-stained mongrels strong enough to pull the coal carts. The rest would hook up to the draw chains and drag the heavy coal carts themselves. They worked in a world of man, child, and animal power. A world where it took a whole family to earn a living and sweat cost less than diesel fuel.
“Don’t get foggy-eyed about them,” Haas said, coming up behind her. “I started out carting when I was their age. Day I turned ten. They’ve got their chance, same as the rest of us.”
“Sure,” Li said, though she didn’t know if she believed it or not.
A pit pony from the outgoing shift passed by, hauling a carefully packed flat of live-cut condensate. He had a string of pearls—a long row of coal scars that came from scraping bare backbones on ceiling joists day after day and having blue coal dust ground into the cuts. But Li barely noticed it; she was looking at the crystals.
They gleamed like distant stars under their heavy coating of coal dust. They looked like crystals—the miners even called them crystals—but Li knew they’d light up a quantum scan like no mere rock. They were quantum-level anomalies, an unheard of, unimagined substance that every physical law said couldn’t exist above zero Kelvin, or in an atmosphere, or in a minable, transportable, usable form. They were impossible, and they were the daily miracle that the UN worlds lived on.
But they were notoriously fragile. Blasting cracked them. Power tools damaged them. Even a hot mine fire could destroy them—though another fire, unpredictably, might burn the coal out around the crystals and leave whole subterranean cathedral vaults of them standing. It was all a skilled miner could do, working with wedges, picks, and hard-earned handicraft, to cut a strike out of the coal without ruining it. “Getting them out live,” Li’s father called it.
She reached out and brushed her fingers along the smooth upper facet of the nearest condensate as the cart passed. It felt warm as flesh. The miner, somewhere down there in the choking darkness, had gotten it out live.
Sharifi’s site lay in the newly opened Trinidad—the deeper and richer of the Anaconda’s two coal veins. It was six kilometers from Pit 3 as the crow flies, eight or more along the mine’s twisting and dipping underground passages.
They rode the first four kilometers in a squat, neon green mine truck, rattling around like dry beans in a pot and choking on diesel exhaust. At first they drove along three-meter-by-three-meter main gangways, echoing with the metal wheels of coal carts and the ringing blows of miners’ hammers. Soon they passed into increasingly narrow drifts, cutting chambers slanting up twenty feet above their heads along near-vertical coal seams. As they moved away from the pithead, the wiring grew scantier and the lights farther apart until there was only the swinging arc of the truck’s headlights and an occasional eerie glimpse of Davy lamps gleaming above glittering eyes and coal-smudged faces.
They left the truck at the top of a long, slimy flight of stairs barricaded by a closed check door. The battered black-and-orange sign on the check door said, FIRE DANGER—NO-IGNITION ZONE.
The safety officer sat down on the truck’s bumper and started pulling on a pair of desert camouflage waders that looked like they’d seen hard using. “Trinidad’s a wet vein,” he said. “Underground river runs right through the fault. Pumps go out, and it takes a day, two at the most, for the whole vein to fill.”
“The water’s out, mostly,” Haas said. He grinned, a bright