Spin State - Chris Moriarty [71]
Li twisted around in the narrow space, jammed her back against one wall, her feet against the other. McCuen did the same, though the passage was far more cramped for him. He was panting, quick and shallow as a hound dog, and the flame of his headlamp was tipped with a ghostly blue spark. Li sniffed, and smelled the telltale whiff of violets. Whitedamp.
McCuen had noticed it too. He checked his Spohr badge. When he looked up, his eyes were wide.
“You okay?” Li asked.
He nodded, but his face was pale and sweat-slicked and his eyes burned feverishly.
“Go back down,” she told him.
He shook his head.
“Just do it. Want to get yourself killed? I’ll meet you in ten.”
She watched him down the steep climb and onto flatter ground. Then she asked herself if what she was about to do was a good idea.
The passage ran steadily uphill, and whitedamp would collect at the top of the chamber. By the time she found Cartwright, the air would be bad enough to kill an unaltered human. Her very presence would advertise what she was as surely as if she’d written it across her coveralls. But if he was up there, he was the same. And why would another construct betray her?
She took off her badge and set it on the floor of the tunnel. She left her headlamp and helmet beside the badge, switched off her internal recorder, and shifted her optics to infrared. She couldn’t turn off her black box, but if and when they cracked it open she’d have more terminal things to worry about than whether some Corps tech knew she wasn’t just quarter-bred.
The smell of violets got stronger. Soon she was traveling through a lethal cocktail of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Her internals launched wave after wave of scrubbers into her bloodstream, fighting off suffocation. Finally she began to hear the steady clinking of a rock hammer. Cartwright was up there. Alone. Without ventilation or oxygen. Prospecting for condensates in a deadly haze of whitedamp. She shook herself like someone waking from a bad dream and crawled forward into the choking darkness.
She came on him unexpectedly—but then unexpectedly was how you always came on people in this bootlegger’s world of narrow passages and flickering lamp beams. He was undercutting the seam, carving out a space for the cut coal and crystal to drop into. He had undercut the vast hanging weight of the coal so deeply that only his legs were still out in the open chamber. Yellow I-profile virusteel chocks propped up the now-unsupported face, and as he worked he pushed the freshly cut coal back out past them so that it piled up like a monstrous black molehill. When he’d made his undercut, he’d pull out the chocks and wedge-drop the coal from the top. Dropping a coal face without explosives was hard slow dangerous work, but it was worth it if the strike was rich enough. And this one was rich; the exposed face of the Bose-Einstein bed flared white-hot on infrared, like half-buried diamonds.
Cartwright didn’t hear her arrive; his hammer must have covered any noise she’d made. She watched him, catching her breath. After a moment he stopped hammering, and she could hear him breathing, wheezing a little. When he spoke, she thought he was talking to himself.
“Hello, Caitlyn,” he said. “Or whatever you’re calling yourself now.”
She froze, heart pounding.
She’d feared this moment, dreaded it. But she hadn’t expected it to come like this. Had he seen her? Heard her? How did he know her?
Cartwright slid out from under the face, coveralls rucking up over skinny shins. He’d stripped to the waist. Coal scars ran so thick over his back and shoulders that they looked like a contour map of the mountains whose roots he’d spent his life dismantling.
“How long has it been, Katie? Eighteen years? Twenty?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cartwright just tilted his head curiously, looking like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. “You still have your mother’s voice,” he said. “Though they say you’ve forgotten her. Are they right? Have you? Never mind. Let me get a look at you.”
He put his hands to her