Spin State - Chris Moriarty [70]
They relived the same ghostly scene ten, twelve, fifteen times. They caught the first faint tapping of rock hammers, glimpsed refracted lamplight glittering on the hewn and splintered walls. Then men emerged from the darkness, speared on the narrow beams of Davy lamps, their eyes glittering like coal under running water.
“The priest?” Li would ask. “Cartwright?”
And each little clot of men would send them on deeper, into smaller tunnels.
As the ventilation faltered, the air grew hotter. Soon Li was sweating, straining just to pull enough air through the mouthpiece of her rebreather. McCuen rolled his coveralls down, tied the arms around his waist, and took his shirt off. Li did the same, but left her T-shirt on; she still had a string of pearls from her underground days, and she’d just as soon not spark awkward questions about whether a certain Catherine Li had worked underground and who had known her back then.
She soon gave up even trying to check their progress against the AMC maps in her database. They were off company maps here, and besides, her reception was going. Late in the day a last team of miners pointed them into a steep, narrow drift that followed the Wilkes-Barre vein as it dipped along the broken strata at the mountains’ edge. Twenty meters up they hit a sharp kink in the drift. Just beyond the turning, they found a narrow little slit between two canted layers of bedrock, leaving just enough room for a thin person to squeak through into a dark tunnel beyond—a tunnel far too cramped to accommodate a miner in full safety gear. Someone had chalked a symbol at the mouth of the tunnel: a crescent moon with a cross under it.
“Cartwright’s sign,” McCuen said. “But no rebreather. I guess he doesn’t carry one.”
So Cartwright was a genetic. Of course he would be, Li realized. An unaltered miner might take off his rebreather in order to keep up with the pace of work at the face, but only a genetic would risk going into the more remote tunnels without a supply of clean air to breathe if he ran into a gas pocket. “How many of the bootleggers are genetics these days?” she asked McCuen.
“Most,” McCuen answered, confirming her half guess half memory. “Who else could get into this stuff? Plus they have an edge on the rest of us; they don’t have to buy air from the company.”
Li sat down, bracing herself against an outcropping of bedrock, and started to unstrap her rebreather. “Let’s go find him,” she said.
McCuen hesitated. “Maybe we should wait.”
“What the hell for?”
When McCuen didn’t answer, she looked up into his face and saw something she’d seen in more young faces than she could remember: fear.
She smiled reassuringly. “This level’s clean, Brian. Just look at your Spohr badge. We’ll be up there, what . . . twenty minutes? Nothing you breathe in twenty minutes is going to kill you. You’d do yourself as much harm smoking a pack of cigarettes.”
“You’ve never seen anyone die of black-lung.” McCuen’s voice rang hollow on the last word.
Li shook her head, pushed away the memories McCuen’s words had shaken loose. “No one’s going to die of anything,” she said.
A moment later McCuen spat out his mouthpiece and she heard the quiet snick of the power switch on his rebreather.
They squeezed through the slit in the rock and started up the passage. It climbed steeply, following the bed of an underground stream. The water was fresh, without a trace of sulfur, and Li splashed some over her sweaty face and neck. Cartwright must have some strike up there to make this commute worthwhile.
Soon they were climbing what amounted to a ladder, moving from handhold to handhold across rocks slippery with water. Li’s breath came quicker and shorter as they climbed, though whether it was from exertion or bad air she couldn’t guess. After what seemed like forever, the passage leveled off, the stream now running in a shallow trench to