Spin State - Chris Moriarty [35]
“That’s it,” he said. She saw his pulse spike on the words.
“What about you?” she asked, turning to the safety officer.
He delivered up the goods with a single glance toward the unlit depths of the chamber.
Li walked back to the corner he’d glanced at and saw what she should have seen before: a large battered sheet of aluminum finished in safety-sign orange. It was the only spot of color in the chamber, the only thing that wasn’t caked black with coal smoke. Obviously, it had been put there since the fire.
“Who put this here?” she asked, bending down to shove the heavy plate aside.
“We did,” Haas answered. “So no one would fall down that.”
Li looked at the place where the plate had been—and found herself staring down a well shaft.
It was less than a meter wide. Ropy bundles of unmarked electrical cables curved over the lip and dropped into the darkness. The water started six meters below the lip of the hole, and it was as black as only mine water can be.
“Anything else you’d like to tell me about this?”
“No,” Haas said. “Sharifi dug it. I assume. She didn’t bother to get permission.” He sounded irritated that he hadn’t caught her at it while she was still alive.
Li scrabbled around on the floor until she found a scorched length of wire long enough to reach the water table. Then she dipped it in, pulled it out, and wiped it along the bare skin of her arm. Her skinbots flared briefly, swirling around the droplets, then subsided. Nothing too nasty in there, apparently. “Okay then,” she said, and started unlacing her boots.
The safety officer figured out what she was doing before Haas did. “You really don’t want to go down there, ma’am.”
“Humor me.”
“No fucking way!” Haas said.
He reached out and jerked her back from the hole by one arm. Li wrapped her free hand around his and squeezed just hard enough to remind him she was wired.
“I appreciate your concern for my safety,” she said. “But I really will be fine. Or was there another reason you didn’t want me to go down there?”
He backed off fast at that.
“Lend me your goggles,” she told the safety officer when she’d stripped to her shorts and T-shirt and tightened her rebreather’s harness. He handed her the goggles with a dazed expression on his face. She gave them a spit and a rub, put them on, and pressed them into her eye sockets to get good suction.
“Okay,” she said around the mouthpiece. “Back in ten and counting. Unless I do something stupid. In which case you’ve got an hour and forty minutes to get a rescue team down here and fish me out.”
“You assume a lot,” Haas said.
“If I don’t come back,” she said, all sweet reasonableness, “they’ll just have to send someone else out. And you’ll have to wait to open the mine until they get here, won’t you?”
Haas sat down, muttering something about people who thought they were funnier than they were. But he was smiling, Li noticed. He could take a joke, you had to give him that at least.
The water was cold but clear, and as soon as she scanned the submerged cavern she knew this was the real experiment site. Whatever had been going on upstairs was peripheral, a mere prep room and antechamber. An underground river had flowed through this cavern in some earlier geologic age and stripped the coal off the condensate beds. The bare crystals formed an intricate lattice supporting the cavern’s ceiling. Curving pillars sprang from the floor like the ribs of one of Compson’s long-extinct sauropods. Pale tendrils of condensate spidered across the dome above like fan vaults. And Li didn’t have to feel these strata to know they were alive; they pulsed on her quantum scans like an aurora borealis. Whatever life there was in the planet’s Bose-Einstein strata—and whether there was any at all was a subject of intense debate among the UN’s xenographers—this was one of its centers.
Sharifi had found herself a glory hole.
Something brushed Li’s arm, and she whirled around just in time to glimpse a VR glove floating past her on a slow underground current, contact wires trailing.