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“Whatever you do, don’t put your fingers on the conveyor belts, don’t touch the mining equipment, and don’t go wandering off into old galleries. They’re partially blocked by boulders painted in red, but anyone can get past. If you do visit them and run into trouble, we won’t come looking for you. Those old galleries haven’t been inspected since they were shut down and are dangerous. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and try. Just don’t expect us to come and dig you out. We don’t have time to waste on lost tourists.”
The mining team leader, a large, muscular man with angular features and deep-set, intelligent eyes, paused to see his audience's reaction, Command Sergeant Faruq Saxer’s Delta Troop.
“Sounds like a great idea for a survival exercise,” Lance Corporal Carlo Torres muttered to his winger, Sergeant Osmin Sberna. “No light, no map, a failing rebreather, and two hours of air. Now make it back. I know a few people who could conveniently vanish that way.”
The miner frowned at Torres. “Any objections, Lance Corporal - is it?”
“No, sir. I was merely telling the sarge that you seemed like a knowledgeable and competent gent to whom we’d better listen.” It was said in a voice oozing with so much feigned innocence that the rest of Delta Troop couldn’t keep a straight face, and many chuckled openly.
To everyone’s surprise, the team leader put on a genuine smile.
“I see there’s a comedian in the ranks. Good. It can get boring as hell down below. Just remember, once you step into the lifts, your survival depends on your smarts. I’m dead serious about safety. You’ve seen what happens to a body when a suit gets punctured.”
The Marines nodded soberly. It was a common sight aboard ships raided by pirates.
“Every so often, a miner screws up, someone who fools the safety checks and makes it into a gallery drunk or stoned. None of us like to carry the body back up. We don’t even bother removing the remains from the suit before we ship it home in a sealed casket.” The miner glanced at Command Sergeant Saxer. “That’s it. How did you want to split up your people?”
Saxer pushed himself away from the wall.
“How many troopers are you willing to take with each team?”
“Two or three. Preferably two. The pressurized control modules are pretty small, and we don’t keep extra oxygen supplies for more than six in each gallery.”
“No sweat, Mr. Isenar. We work in fire team pairs anyhow. Our rebreathers are fresh off the production line, and we’ll bring our own spare oxygen canisters, but I don’t think we’ll stay for more than a few hours at a time. Certainly not for an entire eight-hour shift. As for the old galleries, we’ll just take our chances if the major orders us to scout them. We’ve done crazier things over the years.”
Isenar shrugged dismissively. “It’s your funeral, Sergeant. Ed Limix asked us to take you guys down because the chief admin was against the idea. What you do there is your business, just as long as you don’t interfere with operations or endanger us, which means no going in front of the control modules. Behind them? Be our guests.”
“Fine with me, Mr. Isenar. How many pairs can we send per shift?”
“Six on the alpha shift, five on the beta shift, and seven on the gamma shift, because that’s the number of teams who agreed to take tourists with them. The first time, you’ll enjoy a grand tour. After that, you’re on your own.”
“Understood. I’ll give you a list of my people and the shifts with which they’ll go.”
**
Sergeant Sberna finished checking Lance Corporate Torres’ pressure suit integrity and clapped him on the shoulder.
“You’re good to go, Carlo.” His words came through Torres’ helmet speakers since both were buttoned up.
Torres, in turn, checked Sberna and gave him a similar tap when he was done.
The latter flicked his helmet radio to the miners’ frequency and glanced at their guide.
“We’re ready, Mister Johansen.”
The Marines and Johansen’s team — himself and two others — were in one of the airlocks leading to lift cars. Other fire team pairs were preparing in adjoining airlocks.
“Okay.” Johansen grinned at his two mates through the helmet’s transparent visor. “Let’s make room for our tourists, and don’t forget to point out the sights along the way.”
He then made a little bow at the Marines and swept his right arm in front of his body.
“Welcome, welcome, gentle guests. Please step aboard and hang on to the rookie bar. We don’t want you flying all over the lift cage when we plunge into the planet’s murky depths. Complimentary barf-bags are available on demand.”
The lift door slid shut. A flashing alarm light started to strobe to the piercing scream of a siren, while a toneless voice warned the occupants of the imminent depressurization of the lift car. The heads-up display on the inside of Sberna’s helmet faceplate gave him a running readout of the surrounding pressure. When the red digits reached zero, and they could no longer hear the siren, the lift dropped out from under their feet.
Both Sberna and Torres felt their stomachs leap up into their mouths, and they struggled to keep their breakfasts down. It was as if someone had cut the lift free of its cables, and it was falling uncontrollably toward the bottom of the shaft, several kilometers below.
“It isn’t the fall that kills you. It’s the sudden stop at the end,” Sberna muttered.
Banishing thoughts of impending death, Sberna stared at Johansen. The miner smiled back, clearly enjoying the Marines’ discomfiture. Sberna wouldn’t be surprised if he found out that the miner deliberately rigged the lift’s speed controls to play a little trick on them. He was wrong.
“How do you like it, Sergeant? Our very own rollercoaster ride. Surprises us the first time too. Fastest mine lifts in the sector, here at Tyrell.”
“It’s just dandy,” the Marine replied in as casual a tone as he could muster. “Reminds me of jumping from perfectly good shuttles in low orbit — that’s our version of your rollercoaster ride.”
The lift slowed, imperceptibly at first, and then with enough force to make the occupants flex their knees. Finally, it came to a stop and the massive doors slid open on a dream world of harsh light and dark shadow.
Johansen and his two men stepped out, followed by the Marines.
“Beauty, isn’t she, Sarge? Welcome to Hades. Level Sixteen is the lowest level of Shaft Number One and the deepest in the mine, period. We’re thirty-five hundred meters below the station. This chamber here was once filled with high-grade ore.”
Lance Corporal Torres let out a soft whistle tinged with awe. The lift had stopped at the bottom edge of an enormous cavern whose roof vanished into the darkness. It was huge. A dozen light globes illuminated the cave but couldn’t pierce the gloom sufficiently to show the far walls.
The lift they’d taken was one of three serving this particular shaft. From the outside, the lift tubes looked like shiny rods clustered around a large trunk. As Sberna knew from studying the mine’s setup, the trunk was an anti-grav vacuum that sucked extracted ore up to the smelter. Four conveyor belts coming from four widely spaced active galleries fed it ceaselessly.
Since this was shift change, the cavern slowly filled with suited figures. Those coming off work appeared from the galleries aboard small vehicles with oversized wheels, while others, like Johansen and his team, stepped out of the lifts. The miner led them to the large module in the center of the cavern.
“Shaft boss,” he explained, using his team’s private frequency. “We check-in, so he knows who’s here in case there are problems.”
The module had a large window with several terminals below it facing the miners. Inside the pressurized habitat, three suited figures, minus helmets, worked on a status board. At one end of the shaft boss’ office, a door with a prominent red cross pierced the smooth metal surface. An airlock on the outside, also marked with the red cross, showed the way to the emergency medical facilities, including stasis pods.
Sberna unconsciously nodded with approval and pointed the door out to Torres. He made a note to check out the functions of the other modules before leaving this place. A good reconnaissance always included knowing where the emergency facilities were.
“Sarge, you and your mate just need to punch in your names and serial numbers using that terminal. Don’t forget to come back here and punch out before heading to the surface when you’re done.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Johansen.”
“Sarge, it’s time you stopped calling me mister. Around here, life’s dangerous enough without wasting time on social niceties. My name’s Olaf.”
“Okay, Olaf. Mine’s Osmin.”
“Come on, Osmin, ours is Gallery B, and that’s our vehicle over there.” He pointed at each in turn. “I figured you’d ride with us and then walk your way back, so you can examine the gallery at your leisure.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The miners and Marines piled atop the automated car while nearby, more buddy pairs teams from Sberna’s section did the same with other teams, and the various groups of Marines waved at each other, gesturing obscenities in their private hand signal language. The car pulled away from the waiting area with a barely perceptible jerk and sped toward the gaping hole that marked Gallery B’s entrance.
The tunnel was a smooth granite tube, laser-drilled, with a flat floor. It was lit at intervals by glow strips embedded in the ceiling. As the car sped by, Sberna caught sight of several red splashes on either side of the tunnel — painted boulders marking abandoned galleries that led off into the black heart of the rock. The tunnel was broad enough for the car and the conveyor belt, with room to spare, but its low ceiling momentarily made Sberna feel the weight of the planet’s crust bearing down on him.
Several minutes later, the tunnel widened into another, smaller cavern, brilliantly lit by work lights. The pressurized control node sat to one side, with tools neatly arrayed along its outer shell. A hulking beast slumbered at the very end of the conveyor belt — the remotely controlled miner-borer, silent between shift changes.
“What happens now,” Johansen said, breaking the silence that enveloped them since leaving the lift cavern, “is that we check the machinery and the control node’s integrity. That gets done every shift change. Then we make sure the miner-borer is still aligned with the main ore seam. After that, we three climb into the module and put everything in motion again.”
“Why isn’t everything controlled from the lift cavern or, better yet, the surface? Can’t an AI run the machine itself?” Torres asked.
“Because problems happen, and when they do, you need people to fix stuff without delay. The miner-borers work hard and need regular maintenance. If something breaks and the thing isn’t stopped fast, it’ll self-destruct and take a section of conveyor belt with it. An experienced operator, on the other hand, can tell when something’s about to go wrong and stop it immediately. Considering the cost of a new machine versus pay for three operators per shift, the company would rather pay us to be here with it than several kilometers away, reliant on tunnel transmitters.”
“I see. Interesting.”
“We should start. Otherwise, we’ll hear about it. Please stay behind the control node while we’re working and give me a shout when you’re leaving so I can tell the shaft boss.”
Sberna nodded. “Wilco.”
The Marines watched the miners go through the preparatory cycle and then enter the control node. Sberna nudged his winger and indicated the tunnel behind them.
“We’re off, Olaf.”
“Enjoy the walk. Why don’t you guys meet us for a beer at the Reach after the shift? We can celebrate your first time in the pit.”
“Sure thing.”
“Enjoy spelunking.”
**
“Pretty spooky, Sarge. I can’t imagine spending my life doing this.”
The two Marines had been walking back alongside the conveyor belt for nearly an hour, scanning and recording every inch of the tunnel. It was tedious work.
“I hear you, Carlo. Me neither. Give me open spaces and breathable air under a warm sun.”
As he did every few minutes, Sberna looked behind them at the empty tunnel that led to the ore face and Olaf Johansen’s team. Ten minutes earlier, the Marines passed an abandoned gallery, and its opening was still barely visible at the edge of a bend in the main tunnel. A trio of waist-high boulders painted blood red blocked the entrance, and neither their lights nor their night vision visors could pierce the deep, brooding darkness beyond a sharp curve two dozen meters in.
Major Delgado had ordered them to stay in the active galleries for now. A look from the entrance and a quick scan was it. Later on, perhaps... But Sberna felt uneasy at the idea.
As he turned to face their direction of travel again, his instincts took over. He froze in mid-movement, a spine-tingling sensation of fear raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He could have sworn he saw movement at the mouth of the abandoned gallery out of the corners of his eyes.
Sberna reached for his handheld sensor and aimed it at the gaping maw of the lightless tunnel. Nothing.
“What’s up, Sarge?”
“My eyes playing tricks on me. When I was looking at the abandoned gallery’s entrance, I saw a shadow move, but my sensor isn’t picking up a thing.”
“Let me.” Torres imitated Sberna. “Nope. Nothing, but I’ll tell you what, we’re deep in this planet’s crust, and our little battlefield units are blind beyond a few meters of solid rock. We can’t even pick up Johansen’s miner-borer from here, and its reactor is pretty powerful. Want to turn back and recheck the side tunnel entrance?”
Sberna glanced at this helmet’s heads-up display to see how his rebreather was doing.
“No. Let’s make a note in the log. The more I think about it, the more I figure my imagination is playing tricks on me. Harsh lighting and jagged shadows will do that.”
Sergeant Sberna took one last look behind, just before the abandoned tunnel disappeared in the distance, and felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand up again as he spotted the outline of an unknown watcher behind the blood-red boulders. Or was it his overactive imagination?