The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [46]
For an instant, she considered lecturing Phlox about Vulcan ethics and honesty—but then the memory of her uniform, still hanging in her closet, returned to her.
She had chosen to go to the Expanse, to help the inhabitants of Earth; now was not the time to indulge in self-righteousness.
She returned Phlox’s hopeful gaze with something less than enthusiasm; he had known all along, of course, that she would not logically or ethically be able to refuse his request, despite her reluctance.
Flatly, she said, “Good night, Doctor.”
Phlox understood the response for the capitulation it was. T’Pol turned and exited, leaving him to smile brilliantly behind her.
Chapter 11
Deep beneath the surface of a planet whose name she did not know, the miner Xelia shuffled, feet and shoulders aching, through the dark, narrow tunnel toward another mindless day’s work.
Or perhaps it was night; she could not see. It had been a full ten solar revolutions, according to her homeworld’s way of reckoning time, since she had last seen the sun of this planet she merely thought of as Blue. Blue was the color of the toxic haze through which she now walked, queued up with six fellow miners; all of their faces were swaddled against the hazardous fumes, revealing only their streaming, stinging eyes. That was all Xelia knew of her peers—their eyes, for they were not allowed to speak with each other during work time, and too exhausted after to do more than eat and sleep.
Blue was the color of the poisonous trellium they mined; it caked the walls dark cobalt; it stained Xelia’s nails, colored her hair, her boil-covered skin—and, she knew, despite the pathetic protection afforded by the rag, her lungs.
By now, her brain was blue as well. She knew she was entering the last stages of trellium poisoning; she coughed blue-black sputum constantly onto her rags, and listened to her breath come and go in rasps. There were times, at night, when she bolted from sleep, struggling for air, feeling as though one of the great monsters that served as guards were sitting upon her chest.
Xelia did not fear the thought of death; it would come as a relief. But she feared dying. She had seen other miners go before her, and she knew the end was painful, with convulsions and gasping; she had heard the cries, all the more pitiful because they were incoherent. Trellium destroyed not only the mucosal lining of the throat and mouth, garbling speech, it also brought a fatal dementia. She had seen fellow workers hurl away their tools, tear away their rags, and bellow—only to be shot down by the guards.
The first sign was loss of memory—and Xelia struggled during the agonizing, tedious days trying to remember her homeworld, her life before the hellish mines.
Roa—Roja—She could remember only the beginning of her home planet’s name. She clung to it fiercely, repeating it to herself at night in a croak of a voice she could no longer recognize as her own. How had she come to be here? She had been young, a beautiful female, not yet mated. She was still young, though the mines had transformed her into a hideous, dying creature. A freighter; she had worked aboard a freighter, and there had been a distress signal from the planet of Blue ... She tried, and failed, to recall those who had served with her aboard the freighter. All of them had long since perished.
Xelia filed with the other miners past twelve guards, each one her full height plus half. They stood, menacing towers, over their piteous charges, clutching large weapons that glowed in the dark cyan haze. Their race was alien to her; like her peers, they never revealed their faces, which remained covered by rebreathers; to Xelia, the rebreathers looked like great, tentacled parasites. She imagined them sucking the brains from the guards; certainly, they could not be highly intelligent to have chosen such a profession. Perhaps, she thought, they didn’t even have faces.
Or perhaps they, too, were like her, unwilling