Spin State - Chris Moriarty [37]
The witch.
When the preparations were complete, she rose, approached the freshly cut face, closed her eyes, and put her hands to the stone. Li had seen crystals witched before, but mostly in poor bootleg deposits, not company claims. And the witches of her childhood had been Shantytown dwellers. They’d witched for food, or a share of the strikes they found, or a little winter fuel. Their talent had been the fruit of a genetic fluke, not a carefully manufactured commodity.
The witch passed back and forth along the face, stopping now and then, head cocked as though she were listening for something. Her pale skin shone against the uncut coal. The light from her Davy lamp hung about her like a halo.
The surveyors and geologists hovered tensely. Immense amounts of money were at stake. Turn away from a cut too soon and you lost millions without ever knowing it. Cut too boldly and you’d be left with cartloads of dead crystal, worthless as quartz. Miners had tried every technology there was: radio imaging, X rays, random core sampling. Witching was still the only real way to locate live, viable crystal. And the annual profit margins of entire multiplanetary corporations rose and fell on the choices a witch made at the cutting face.
The witch stopped at a perfectly ordinary spot along the face and pressed both hands to the coal face. They came away wet, stained bloodred with sulfur water. “There,” she said.
The surveyors surged past her as if drawn by an undertow. They attached sensors, hooked up feedback circuits, safety cutoffs. Li watched, fascinated, as the cutters bored into the coal face. When she glanced at Haas, the intent, hungry look on his face reminded her of the old songs miners sang after the whiskey had passed around a few too many times, songs about men whose blood ran with coal, who lusted for the mine like dope fiends.
Everyone in the gangway fell silent as the first crystal came into sight, pale, gleaming, unmistakable. A geologist leaned into the face, holding his breath, and put his hand on it.
“Well?” Haas said.
The geologist removed his hand, wiped it on his coverall front, touched his forehead as if he were taking his own temperature, and put his hand back to the condensate again. He shook his head.
“Dead,” someone muttered at the edge of the lamplight.
The witch had retreated when the surveyors moved in, shrinking into herself like an actor slipping out of character. She barely reacted to the news of the dead crystal.
“Come here,” Haas said to her.
She turned obediently, but her gaze slipped past Haas and fixed on Li as unerringly as a compass needle locking on to magnetic north. The violet eyes looked dark underground, each iris shaved down to a narrow line around an immense pupil. And beyond the pupil nothing, as if you were staring straight into the black pit of the woman’s skull.
Holes in the universe, Li thought, and the shiver that ran down her spine had nothing to do with cold.
By the time they surfaced, the storm had hit. The headframe whined and rattled under its assault. Scraps of viruflex and jagged sheets of aluminum siding skittered past as if all the contents of the valley were being stirred by an invisible hand.
Li felt the taut, held-breath quality of the air as soon as she stepped out of the pit office. Fifty meters away, a ragged line of men and women ranged along the spine of a tailing pile. Some held homemade signs. A few carried primitive, home-brewed weapons. Strikers. Wildcats, technically, since there was no legal union in the Anaconda.
She blinked wind tears out of her eyes and squinted through the blowing grit. In a brief slacking of the wind she read the signs they held:
JUSTICE FOR CORPORATE BABY KILLERS!
HOW MANY MUST DIE?
SHUT THE TRINIDAD BEFORE IT KILLS AGAIN.
She wondered why they didn’t come closer, get within shouting distance. Then she saw the row of blue uniform