by M M Buckner
His shoulder butted into a warm belly, and they fell headlong together against the stone floor. The stranger shrieked and punched Dominic in the left eye.
“Fuck! I felt that!” the NP yelled.
Dominic flinched and rolled away. He heard the stranger scramble to the far side of the passage, then he remembered the torch in his hand and flicked it on. There was Benito, Juanita’s little boy.
Dominic said, “What the hell?”
Benito curled up in a knot and covered his head with his scrawny arms as if he expected blows. He was wearing a pair of enormous striped shorts, tied under his small round belly with a length of cord.
“Have you been following me?” Dominic grabbed the boy’s elbow and shook him. Benito offered no resistance. He said nothing. When Dominic let go, he curled up again. Exasperated, Dominic swelled his cheeks and blew so hard, his lips fluttered. Then he sank back on his heels. The soft tissue below his left eye was already swelling where the boy had punched him. He was going to have a serious bruise. With a frown, he played the torch beam over Benito’s thin brown body.
“For a little guy, you hit hard,” he said. Then the comedy of the scene registered, and he let out a laugh. It felt good, like a muscle release. He realized his sinuses were clearing. That ridiculous cold was finally running its course.
“Benito, sit up,” he said. “Tell me what you’re doing here. I won’t hurt you.”
Benito uncovered his face and squinted into the torch beam. He looked sullen.
Dominic laid the torch down. Its white beam cut across the floor and bent up the far wall, and by the reflected glow, he finished tightening the rags on his feet. “I don’t have any food, Benito. You’d better go back to Tooksook if you’re hungry.”
The boy said nothing. His eyes glittered in the shadows.
Dominic stood and arched his back, and two vertebrae popped. He peered down the deserted ladder shaft again. When he glanced at the small figure on the floor, clenched as tight as a fist, something inside him softened. “I can’t find my way back, so I don’t suppose you can either. Eh, Benito?”
“Send the brat away. You don’t need baggage,” the NP said.
When Dominic approached, the boy hissed and kicked.
“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.”
Dominic scooped the boy up, half expecting another punch in the eye, but Benito lay still. He seemed almost weightless. Just as Dominic stooped to pick up the laser torch, the boy twisted and locked his small arms around Dominic’s neck and buried his head against the dirty tee shirt. He made no sound, but Dominic could feel him trembling.
“Benito, stop it. You’re too old for this behavior. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
The instant he spoke, he felt the mockery. His father had instructed him with those exact words when he was a boy. Richter Jedes hadn’t approved of fear, and young Dominic had done his best to appear brave. He lived to please his father. But even in his sheltered young life, he knew there was much to be afraid of. Now, for this boy in this place—he couldn’t even imagine. With awkward movements, he disengaged the boy’s arms and lowered him through the hatch onto the top rungs of the ladder.
“It’s all right, Benito. We’ll go together.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
DEBENTURES
DOMINIC switched on Penderowski’s laser torch and carried it in his teeth. Its beam danced crazily over the dark stone wall as he descended. They’d been climbing down only a short while when the shaft went palpably silent. The air quit moving, and small vibrations that had been singing unnoticed in metal pipes came to a stop. Dominic gripped the ladder and listened. Another power failure. Life support had shut down. Benito continued shuffling down the rungs below, until Dominic whispered, “Wait.”
When the ladder stopped shimmying, the only sound was the boy’s breathing and his own. He counted seconds. A minute passed. The other blackouts hadn’t lasted this long. Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran down his neck. “Let’s keep going, Benito.”
The sound of the boy’s quick, light movement comforted him. He puffed out his cheeks and blew hard, then reseated the torch between his jaws, grasped a rung and lowered himself down through the silence.
Without warning, a thunderous explosion blew out a section of the shaft wall above them. “Jesus Krishna Christ!” the NP yelled. Lurid sparks flared above. Then bloodred flames. And dust. A thick cloud of dust billowed down the shaft. Backlit by fire, the dust cloud glowed orange, and rock chips rained down like missiles, slicing Dominic’s shoulders and back. The boy yelped. Then shouts echoed overhead, and the drumming of many feet jolted the ladder. Dominic sensed an army was coming down the ladder right on top of him.
“Benito! Hold tight!” he yelled.
As the ladder shook violently, he swung down and covered the boy with his own body to shield him from the falling rock. Then he flashed the laser torch to search for a landing below.
“We’ll climb down to that catwalk—you see? Hurry. We’ll let these people go by us. You stay between me and the ladder.”
The army was descending fast. Lurid dust silhouetted their jostling limbs, and their mingled shouts grew louder. When Dominic shot his torch beam up, all he could see were boot soles. He grabbed the boy and tried to slide down the ladder one-handed, but he slipped and nearly lost his hold.
Then the ladder shook with a new, heavier weight below, and a different noise erupted as dozens of white laser beams sliced up through the shaft. When Dominic looked down, he saw sweaty devilish faces shining in the orange light, and the beams were shooting straight out of their foreheads! Finally, he grasped that they were wearing helmets with headlamps.
“Damn me, it’s the miners!” The NP chuckled. “I was beginning to think they didn’t exist.”
The miners below were climbing up fast, while the miners above were climbing down with equal speed. Dominic was trapped in the middle. Just as the two groups converged, he clutched Benito to his chest and leaped onto the catwalk. The miners followed right behind, shoving him against the steel door like a piece of rubbish bashed into shore by the tide. Miners soon mobbed the catwalk, and three of them elbowed him aside to get the door open. Among the shouting, Dominic distinguished phrases. “Cave-in!” “Tons of rock.” “Three people trapped!”
When the door fell open, the crowd pushed Dominic through, and his only course was to stay on his feet and run. Benito clung like Velcro. After a chaotic race in semi-darkness, the army constricted through another small portal, and Dominic bloodied his left shoulder on the door flange as they shoved him ahead. Then he was climbing another ladder, ramming his head into the boots of the miner above because the miner below was ramming into him. Benito’s fingers dug into his flesh.
They entered a tunnel where the dust was so thick, Dominic thought he might choke to death. A few miners wore plastic face masks, but most breathed through rags tied over their mouths and noses. As soon as the space widened out, Dominic flattened himself against a wall and placed Benito on the floor between his knees. Then he tugged off his tee shirt and ripped it in two. “Here, breathe through this.” Benito didn’t seem to understand, so Dominic quickly tied one cloth over his own nose and mouth, then did the same with the other rag for the boy. The improvised breathing masks helped a little.
Someone shoved a work tool into his hand, and after a moment, he recognized it as a bucket. It was large and full of rock chips, heavy as lead. Farther along the tunnel, the miners were digging like fiends at a pile of rubble and forming a bucket line to transfer the rock. “Move it!” shouted a short, bandy-legged man wearing a red bandana.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” the NP advised. “I’m scanning that support structure, and it’s not stable.”
“I don’t exactly have a choice.” Dominic adjusted the cloth over his nose, then bent to whisper in Benito’s ear. “Stay against the wall.”
Someone handed him a second bucket weighted down with rock, so
he stepped up and handed both buckets to the next person in line. “Keep the rhythm,” the miner said. Dominic noticed she was a stout, dark, muscular woman with gray hair. Other miners quickly queued along the wall, and the buckets passed from hand to hand.
“This is prote work,” the NP said. “You should refuse.”
Dominic didn’t bother to reply. The buckets kept coming, mounded high with rock and dust. Each one weighed thirty kilos at least, and the bucket handles cut into his soft hands like wire. His arms were soon beyond aching. His muscles trembled. When he staggered and dropped a bucket, the woman beside him kicked it away and elbowed him to grab the next one. Then she started singing.
She sang in a strong steady rhythm to the swinging buckets, and her lyrics were guttural grunts in some American patois Dominic didn’t recognize. Soon the whole line picked up the tune.
“Crude,” the NP said. “You want me to translate?”
By that point, Dominic didn’t have enough energy to subvocalize, much less speak aloud. More buckets. More. Would they never stop coming? Was this how miners spent their days? Dominic trained in the executive gym, but he’d never exerted himself like this. Sweat ran down his back, and his heart beat like a piston. When the skin on his fingers flayed off, he hardly felt the pain. He would never have believed himself capable of such labor. After a while, he began to grunt aloud to the woman’s song. The pounding heart rate was affecting his brain. He felt inebriated, almost jolly.
“You’re overexerting, son,” the NP said.
At that moment, a shout louder than all the others rang through the mine, and a ray of light filtered through the rubble blockage. As one, the miners dropped what they were doing and rushed forward to dig with their hands. Dominic tripped headlong over his bucket, and in the melee, someone stepped on his back. If he hadn’t curled up and rolled toward the wall, he might have been trampled. Benito was still huddled there, sucking his little hand. Dominic hadn’t even gotten his bearings before the boy crawled into his lap.
“Huah!” the miners cheered. They were celebrating. He could see them raising their fists in the dusty air.
Now they were leading the survivors out. Dominic rested against the wall with the boy in his arms and watched the strange procession. At its head sauntered a round-faced man with curly hair and a broad, burly chest. Pale dust covered him like a coat of paint, and he strutted with his chin thrust forward as if proud of the blood coursing down his cheek. Right behind him came the short, bandy-legged man in the red bandana, grinning and sweat-soaked. Next came two others in torn gray uniforms layered with dust. One cradled a broken arm. After them followed the whole united array of miners, men and women, filthy, sweating, euphoric, their headlamps shooting beams through the thick air. They numbered only a dozen, Dominic was surprised to find.
“You comin’, doggo? Chief’s buying drinks all around.” The brawny woman from the bucket line stood frowning at him with her hands on her hips. Her face was broad and flat and heavily lined. She had quick dark eyes and leathery brown skin, and her gray hair was chopped very short. “Hey, you ain’t no digger.”
Dominic lumbered to his feet and sagged against the wall. His muscles were already beginning to lock up. Benito scrambled for a perch on his shoulders. He said, “I suppose we’re lost.”
“New people.” The woman looked him over. “Humph. You did yer share. Come get yer drink. They ain’t many free drinks, these days.”
Dominic hadn’t lied about being lost. He considered asking this woman how to find the Net link, but the firm set of her jaw told him she might not be as gullible as Penderowski. He decided to wait for a better chance. Meanwhile, her offer of a drink made his throat quiver.
On stumbling legs, he followed her down a ladder to a lower deck. Benito stayed close as they picked their way along a half-finished corridor already clogged with settlers and finally entered a wide hall with a sign over the door marked, “Mess.” Scores of rough tables and chairs filled the plain, utilitarian room, which seemed to have been hewn by hand from solid rock. When Dominic looked closer, he noticed the furniture was made of hammered sheet metal. And someone had carved a scene in one of the rock walls, something historic, a line of jagged palm trees with a cone-shaped mountain in the background spewing smoke. There were strange birds with long sweeping tails, and luscious fruit hanging in the palm trees, and primitive nudes of both sexes lying on the beach. The image was bawdy, but Dominic found the draftsmanship rather good.
As more miners filtered in, the bandy-legged man wiped his dirty hands on his red bandana and started dispensing warm ale from a hose nozzle. Though Dominic could barely hold the plastic cup between his chafed, bleeding hands, he gulped it down like water and got a refill for Benito.
Soon, the hall was packed, and people were shoving tables against the walls to make more room. A woman with only one leg scrambled onto a tabletop and began picking a tune on a curious three-stringed instrument. A skinny juvenile boy joined her with a musical pipe, and they launched into a lively dance tune. Several people starting beating a background rhythm on overturned buckets. It was the strangest music Dominic had ever heard. All around him, the miners made rude jokes and threw chairs and howled and punched each other. Beer flowed freely, and when the cups ran out, they drank foamy ale from their helmets.
Then someone blew a shrill whistle, and Benito clambered up Dominic’s back. The barrel-chested man they’d rescued was standing on a table in the center of the hall, and the celebrating miners bunched around him, lifting then-cups. Dominic staggered over and joined them. Everyone wanted to get close to the barrel-chested man. They yelled toasts and called him “Chief.” Then he hollered loudest of all.
“Boys, it’s good to be alive!” He lifted his enormous cup and drank heavily. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and beer streamed down his jaw. Everyone cheered.
“There I was,” he went on. “I’d just finished drillin’ the cross-cut, and everything was lookin’ fine, when right above my head, I see a lateral fault in the strata. Krishna Christ, if she didn’t drop right down in my lap. Haw haw haw!”
The chief upended his cup again and chugged a pint of ale in one go. Several miners offered their own full cups to replace his empty one.
He smacked his lips. “If I hadn’t dug through that wall with my freakin’ fingernails, Liu and Dalesco would still be suckin’ rocks.” He took the nearest cup with a self-satisfied grin. “How long did it take me to dig out, huh? Anybody time it?”
“Five minutes, Chief. If that,” someone said.
“Haw, haw!” His thick hair hung in sweaty ringlets over his forehead, and curly lashes fringed his brown eyes. A handsome cleft bisected his heavy chin, and his whole massive head glistened. Dominic couldn’t guess his lineage. American bloodlines were always confused. At that moment, the chief noticed Dominic staring at him.
“Who the sweet Jesus are you?”
“A volunteer,” Dominic said. “I assisted with your rescue.” Calmly, Dominic sipped his ale, then handed what was left to Benito, who was sitting on his shoulders.
The chief wiped his gashed cheek with the back of his hand. “You a freakin’ college man?”
Dominic noted the animosity. “I’m a negotiator.”
“College man. Half-ass worker, half-ass boss. That makes you one complete asshole.” The chief winked at his audience, and they howled at his joke. “So what the sweet Jesus you doin’ down here in the slime ‘assisting with my rescue’?” He mimicked Dominic’s pure Net English accent.
“Back away, son. They have you outnumbered,” the NP urged.
Dominic pushed through the crowd and stepped closer. “You invited me.”
“Sereb, he helped with the buckets,” the brawny woman said.
“Keep out of it, Djuju. I like to hear him talk. Go on, college. Tell me when I invited you.”
Dominic quoted from the miners broadcast, raising his voice so everyone could hear. “All human beings evolved from the same gene poo
l, so we have the same rights to move around as free agents and make our own choices.” Then he pointed a finger at the chief. “Aren’t those your words?”
The chief jumped down from the chair, and the miners parted to make a path. For a stocky man, he moved with surprising grace. He stepped close, and though he stood a head shorter, he seemed to face Dominic eye to eye. “You’re the banker.”
Dominic froze. The man must have recognized his face from the Net.
“Run for it!” the NP said. “They’ll slaughter you!”
They were standing so close, Dominic could count the pores on the chief’s round nose. He couldn’t run anywhere. The miners closed in behind him, and in any case, he’d spent his last reserve of energy. It took all his will just to stay on his feet. Abruptly, the chief’s face crinkled in a mass of smile lines.
“Boys, meet the banker. This sorry-ass used to hand out coins for a living. Can you believe it? Like a machine. The execs sent him to college so he could count change.”
The miners roared with laughter again, and Benito tightened his grip. Dominic held himself rigid. Normally, insolence from a prote would have incensed him, but now he merely waited through the insults and focused on remaining upright, not giving in to fatigue.
When the chief slapped him on the back, he nearly toppled forward. “Boys, get this sorry-ass another beer. Yer among friends now, banker.”
Cups of beer sloshed at him from many directions, and someone gave him a helmet brimming with foam. From sheer thirst, he leaned back to drain it, and Benito grabbed his ears to keep from falling. Then the barrel-chested man thumped him in the chest.
“Call me Sereb. I’m crew chief. Is that yer son?”
“We met by accident,” Dominic said without thinking.
Instead of listening to the answer, Sereb seized Dominic’s hand and turned it palm up. Deep angry cuts lacerated all ten fingers, and the patch of redness between his fingers had spread. “Look at that. Pitiful. Big man like you with hands like a baby. That’s what comes of countin’ coins all yer life.”
