Spin State - Chris Moriarty [36]
“That’ll do,” she said as she hauled herself up the ladder. “You’ll need to keep this section closed until you get that drained out and I can take a closer look.”
Haas’s eyes glinted where the lamp beam cut across them. “I’ve got a start-work order on this level waiting for the inspector’s signature. The electricians come through tomorrow, and we start cutting as soon as they lay clean line. Your authority stops at ground level, and you just hit the end of my cooperation.”
“Oh,” Li said. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to log the safety violations down here.” She pointed at the corridor’s props and collars, groaning under the weight of the roof, but still standing. “Those props are three meters apart. UNMSC regs require 2.5. Also, there are ungrounded electrical wires at junctions South 2, South 8, and South 11. I’ll download a complete list of code violations for you when we get back. I’m sure you’ll want to get right on top of them.”
It was pure bluff, of course; Haas knew as well as she did that no UN site team was ever going to give AMC more than a slap on the wrist for those violations. But Li was the only UN official on-site, and if she logged an official complaint all the paperwork he had to do to get the mine reopened would pass across her desk—or rather sit on her desk until she got around to signing it.
Haas could go over her head, of course. But that took time. And it was an implicit admission that there really were safety violations. Li didn’t think he’d risk it. Not in the aftermath of a bloody and well-publicized mining disaster. Not with Sharifi’s body still lying in the Shantytown morgue a few miles away.
“Fine,” Haas said, shrugging. “Sniff around all you want. You’re only going to find out Sharifi was a fool.”
When they got back up to the Wilkes-Barre vein, the second shift was in full swing. Most of the miners worked half-naked, bodies gleaming like marble in the sweltering heat two miles below the surface. They worked fast, taking few precautions. Coal-cutting time wasn’t quite dead time, but it was halfway there, and it didn’t pay to spend an unnecessary minute at it.
Few of the men, women, and children underground wore rebreathers, and the ones who did only used them during their rare breaks. The rest of the time, the face masks with their tangle of oxygen lines dangled loosely around sweat-slicked necks. It took all the air a body could breathe to work at speed, hunched over in badly ventilated tunnels, and rebreathers were the first thing to go when time got short.
Without thinking, Li started to unhook her own rebreather.
“Don’t,” said the safety officer. “Mutagens.”
She looked at the miners. The safety officer caught her questioning glance and shrugged. “Genetics.”
A flash of soft memory set Li’s stomach churning. Her father, bending over the kitchen sink, coughing, complaining about the price of filters at the pithead supply house. Her mother boiling water on the stovetop and handing him a dish towel to put over his head so he could cough up a little more coal dust.
“Are you all right?” asked the safety officer. “Sometimes even the filters won’t keep the dust out.”
She nodded and put her head between her knees.
When she looked up again the truck had stopped. Oddly shaped boxes and canisters littered the roadway. Workers bustled in front of them, men and women who moved across the rough ground with the assurance of habit but were too thin, too clean to be miners. Li looked closer and recognized several of the geologists she’d shuttled down with.
Only one person