War World: Discovery

by Discovery v2 lit

  The argument raged while they brought Ditter back and laid him gently on an empty pallet in the cold room of the supply tent. When the sun came up again they would bury him near the riftwall. Nordon suggested the site, out of the way of both camp and any future mining activity on the lava cliffs, with enough fallen rock from the riftwall to cover the grave and keep off the Tamerlanes. That probably meant the drillbits would eat him. Most miners felt it only right that the drillbits had their turn. After all, it was their teeth that were paying for all this--and paybacks are hell.

  They got down to the real arguments as the night got darker and colder and the wind from the surrounding mountains screamed down the valley, headed for the lowlands. Who would or would not do what for a million credits? Who had the opportunity? Who had the motive?

  Sommers pointed out that Rasmussen had always been fighting with his cube-mate and was deeply in debt.

  Rasmussen offered to hold Sommers’ head under water. Parker pointed out that Sommers was always talking of finding a shimmer stone and bribing his way back to Earth. Sommers got huffy and argumentative. Sam Nordon wondered why Johnson just happened to be off alone with a trike on a sample-collecting run, no witnesses. Johnson said if he could run a trike from the riftwall to the crater and back in less than an hour he would be a dirt-trike champion back in Hellza, with lots of money, women and booze, not freezing his ass off with twenty guys. Besides, Nordon was full of tamercrap. It went downhill from there, and the night was two days long.

  5. (194:45, Workday-9): Last Chance Valley.

  Johnson finished loading the last energy pack on the survey trike, pulled the flaps down over the load, and smoothed the seals closed. Footsteps in the gravel behind made him pause as he stepped on the mounting spar.

  It was Nordon. “Pretty big load for just a survey run along the lava face, Johnson. You got a week’s worth of rations alone.”

  “Yeah, Sam, I thought I would run up to the north end of the valley and get a link to the reference library in Castell. Maybe I can find out some more about this carbonatite stuff.”

  Nordon’s head came up and his right shoulder rocked back, the way it always did when he disagreed with you. “Are you out of your pushin’ mind? First time you hook-up with the library they’ll trace your coordinates and anybody with ten credits in their pocket can find out where our mine is! We’ll have claim jumpers all over us inside of a week!”

  “Oh hell, Sam, there’s no way they can find us that way and you know it. For one thing, they’ll have to trace it through two relay points. For another, we are going to have to file a claim pretty soon anyway, just to make sure none of the big companies include our digs in a broad area license. Besides, it’s 1200 klicks from Castell City, and twice that from Hellza. Anybody who traveled light enough to get here in a month of cross country driving couldn’t bring much gear or supplies with them. Or are you worried about some singleton living off of tamerburgers and figs?”

  “I still think it’s an idiot move, an’ it’s too important for your say alone. I am calling an executive meeting, and as soon as I get hold of Damson, you’ll be outvoted.”

  Johnson pulled his jacket tight and stepped up onto the trike saddle;

  “Sorry, Sam, but I am right and you are wrong, and by the time you get to Damson I’ll be halfway to the lava face.”

  Nordon’s scowl became even deeper. He grabbed the windscreen and stepped in front of the left wheel.

  “You do that, Johnson, and you’ll be out of this company on your ass, and I don’t care if you did start it.”

  “Sam, if you think you have the backing to win a straight-up and down vote like that, you try it...and let me know how it comes out. Meanwhile, I’ve got a job to do, and I’m going to do it my way. Watch your fingers.”

  Johnson reversed the trike, jerking the windscreen out of Nordon’s hand, wheeled around him, and headed for the lava face. “If you want to get Damson, he’s up at the crater works. Since this is the only trike available, I guess you will have to walk. Have fun. And let me know how the vote comes out.”

  He popped the drive and rolled away, grinning. Sam Nordon stared at his back for a moment, then turned and started walking furiously back toward the crater.

  An hour later Johnson eased the trike to a halt, leaned back against the saddle, and looked around. He had ridden hard the whole time and was now a third of the way down the lava field, headed for the eastern riftwall. Behind him the cinder cone of Crater Lake was a pale triangle against the dark cliffs.

  He grinned again. Right about now, Nordon was probably having a musky calf when he found out that Damson was not at the crater. Probably no one was, since this was a maintenance day. If Nordon stayed mad enough he would not remember that till he got to the crater digs. One hour to walk there, then another hour to camp. Not a happy miner.

  Johnson stepped off the trike and started walking around, stretching tired muscles. Ten hours work and one on the trike left him stiff and sore. It was Byers’ noon, and Cat’s Eye was just rising, blocked out by the mountains behind him. The earth shuddered gently, starting small rivulets of dust and pebbles off the riftwall. He smiled. Right on schedule. Funny how the quakes coincided with Eyerise or Eyenoon or the other times of alignment between Byers’ and Cat’s Eye. Probably the tides.

  Across the valley, a cloud of white mist blew off the cinder cone. Idly, he wondered what the crater looked like when it did that. No one had ever been on the crater during a quake, and that was when the smoke came out. Have to make a point of being on the rim during the next Eyerise, or ask Nordon. Meanwhile, it was not yet time to rest, tired or no. A day and a half to the relay point and the same time back. There would be hell to pay when he got back to camp, but damn-it, he was right!

  They had to have more information, and those direct-action, live-for-the-moment miners could not see it. That was the problem with knowing more than other people: it made you responsible for them.

  A day and a half after leaving camp, Johnson sat shivering on a rocky outcrop next to the commpack, reading the summary screens in the dull red light of an early dimday. It had taken him two hours to align the unit on the comm station at Redemption and set up a relay from there to Tampa and Castell City. Now it was all automatic, and all he had to do was relax and read while the light beam filled the chips with data. Carbonatite made for interesting reading. Calcite, dolomite, kimberlite (diamonds?), soda-rich nepheline syenite, whatever that was, soda-water lakes. Hmm. Cameroon rift volcanoes. Lake Nios.

  He stared at the screen unseeing as the implications of the information sank in. They could all have been killed that first day... They could all be dead now!

  He jumped up and the viewscreen dropped onto the rocks. Swearing, he picked it up and the commpack, throwing them in the pannier. Half the transmission was lost, but that was unimportant; he had to get back to camp before Eyenoon!

  6. (259:46, Workday-12): Crater Lake.

  It’s amazing what you can force your body to do when lives are at stake. Particularly the lives of friends. That thought trickled slowly through Johnson’s head twenty-six hours later, after a wild, reckless, battering ride through the dark-lit Haven countryside. Friends.

  All these years he had felt responsible but left out, like an unpopular but dutiful stepfather. Now he discovered that he really did consider the whole cross-grained, crabby, unwashed crew to be his friends. And in support of men he had not even known that he thought of as his friends, he had driven at breakneck speed across terrain he would have thought twice about walking over. He had totally disregarded eight years of outback experience and paid no attention at all to the threats of Haven’s wildlife.

  Twice, crossing streams, he had scattered gangs of tamerlanes at their prey, and once he had driven right over a drillbit and left it snapping at it’s broken tail. It was all very marvelous, and if only he could keep his eyes open it would all work out fine--maybe he could be a dirt-trike champion in Hellza.

  Weary, wor
ried, and saddle sore, with a bone-deep tiredness his third set of stimpills could only partially shake, Johnson rolled into Last Chance Camp.

  It was empty except for Barry Iverson, pulling cook detail. He looked at Johnson with an odd mixture of surprise, confusion, and apprehension. Johnson was too tired to worry about Iverson’s problems.

  “Where is Damson, Barry?”

  “Up at the lake, checking the puddling gear. They’re having some problems with leakage.” Iverson clutched his cleaver as if he expected a gang of tamerlanes to break into the cook tent.

  “Shit. I have to get them out of there.” Johnson turned and sprinted clumsily toward the trike. “Don’t let anybody else go up there!”

  As he angled the trike up the outer wall of the crater, Johnson checked his watch. Almost Eyenoon. Almost time for another quake. If he worked fast he still might have time to clear folks from the lakeside, but he would be cutting it very close. He tried opening the power feed wider, but found it was already pushed beyond the emergency stops and the overload lights were beginning to flicker from yellow into the red.

  Cresting the rim, he could see that Crawler 2 had been moved in beside the puddling tank, probably as a pumper. It looked like half the men in camp were working in the crater. They watched him slide the trike down the inner wall, then stood up and walked over as he shut down the motor and set the brake.

  Relief at arriving in time took the edge off his high, and almost put him to sleep in the saddle. He jerked upright; now was no time to relax.

  “Anybody here seen Frank or Nord? We got problems.”

  Arne Elstrom stood there, his face in an unaccustomed frown. “Frank is over at the crawler, Johnson. And as for Nord, where do you think he is? We buried him next to Ditter, the other guy you killed. You’re the one with the problems.”

  That sounded stupid, or maybe he was. “What? Nordon’s dead? When? And what do you mean I killed him Arne?”

  “You killed him and left him in the lake last Eyerise, just like you did Ditter. You got away with it last time ‘cause half the people were out on singletons. This time the only people out of camp were you and Nordon.”

  A crowd had gathered while Elstrom was talking. Johnson was surrounded by bulky forms and unfriendly faces. He groaned inside. I don’t need this. Not now.

  “Arne, I didn’t kill either one of them. It was the lake that did it. I just spent the last three days finding out how.”

  The rest of the crew found their voices. Loud and angry. Faces would have been red, except they were already red-from the glow of Cat’s Eye, almost full and almost directly overhead.

  “Don’t give me that shit, Johnson.” This was Pete Linton. “You were riding lookout on the grinder when Snuffy and his crew got shut down. You killed Ditter when he found a shimmer stone, and you killed Nord when he figured out what you did. You’re trying to kill us all off so you can hog the strike! We oughta gut-shoot you and leave you for the tamerlanes.”

  Johnson was desperate. This was not going as planned. The volcano was about to kill them all and here they were yammering about him killing somebody.

  “You know that’s not true, Pete. Snuf tried to run that gravel bar like it was a speedway. And I’m telling you the lake killed Nord and Ditter.”

  Angry miner voices shouted him down. Angry miner hands grabbed his arms.

  “Wait a minute guys, let’s hear what he has to say.” Damson was finally exerting some leadership, now that they were almost ready for a lynching.

  Johnson shrugged himself free. He was starting to get angry. “Look, I did not run away. I didn’t even know Nord was dead. I spent the last three days getting far enough north and high enough up to get a line of sight to Redemption.”

  “And what’s so important you had to steal a trike and sneak off for two days?”

  “I didn’t steal it, Pete, I had as much right to it as you. More right, in fact ‘cause it’s a survey trike. And I didn’t sneak, either. Nordon knew I was going.”

  “Easy to say, now he’s dead.”

  “Get on with it!” Damson again.

  “I had to talk to the main library at Castell, and the only way was by a link through Redemption. I wanted to check on carbonatite and on this volcano and see if we could find a better way to mine it.”

  They were quieter now. Listening.

  “What I found was, some volcanoes put out lots of CO2 and carbon monoxide gas. And that gas gets trapped at the bottoms of crater lakes like this one. And sometimes, when you get a quake, some of that gas bubbles out.”

  He looked around. ““The same thing happens in the rift valleys in Africa, back on Earth. In a crater like this, the gas could stay thick enough, even with the wind, to kill anyone who stayed down here after the lake turned over. That must be what happened to Nord.”

  He looked around earnestly at the faces in the bright red glow. “And we don’t have time to sit around here and talk about it. We could even be in danger now. It’s almost Eyenoon and we’re due for another quake. Remember Ditter was killed during the quake just when Cat’s Eye would have been at midnight, and you said Nordon was killed at Eyerise.”

  Now the rest of them looked around, eyes rolling red in bearded red faces. There was an apprehensive pause. Miners knew about trapped gasses. They were waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the quake. Nothing happened.

  The spell broke.

  “That’s a load of tamercrap and you know it, Johnson! You’re just trying to spook us so we let you go.”

  Once again the hands grabbed him. They dragged him away from the trike, toward the workings at the edge of the lake. The ground shuddered gently, briefly. Another attempt by the straining crust to relieve the enormous tidal pressures.

  “Wait a minute! Did you feel that?” he shouted. They slowed again.

  “I didn’t feel nothin’.”

  “There! Look at the lake!” Look at it!”

  This time they stopped. The milky surface of the lake was starting to curdle as small bubbles and streaks of brown appeared.

  Frantically he pulled loose from the hands holding his arms. He had to make them understand. High ground was their only hope.

  “Run for it! Run for the rim! It’s gonna blow!”

  He turned and ran upslope amid shouts and confusion.

  “Johnson’s running!”

  “After him!”

  “Give me a line-of-fire!”

  Johnson was halfway up the slope, and the first gunburst had gone crackling into the underbrush beside him, when the lake erupted. There was a soft, foamy roar, like all the surf in the world breaking on the shores of the Southern Sea. He stopped and turned.

  The lake bubbled and foamed. The foam became a crown, became a wall of brownish white, became an expanding mound, filling the volcanic crater like the head on an enormous pitcher of beer. The wall grew until it halfway filled the crater, reaching almost to his astonished feet. The displaced air howled past his ears, flapping the unhooked sides of his jacket. A fine mist blew from the top of the foam and lifted over the crater edge.

  It looked like wisps of steam.

  Two heads appeared, gasping and choking above the foam. The two men underneath them staggered out of the foam upslope toward Johnson, heads and faces bleeding from blind falls in the blinding foam. They staggered and fell in the first empty spot. It was Damson and Linton, the two men nearest to Johnson when he started running, but now both were interested only in staying alive.

  Almost as quickly as it had formed, the foam disappeared. One moment the crater was awash with whitish brown foam, the next it was as they had always seen it. Except five men were lying on the shore of the lake, gasping in the deadly fumes of the now-invisible gas. One other was half in the lake, head under water.

  Haven’s eternal wind was rapidly swirling new air into the crater, but there was no telling how long before the bottom layer became breathable.

  Johnson’s lungs were still straining from the climb. Even this high on the
crater wall there was enough CO2 to hinder breathing. The two men at his feet would probably be all right. The others still needed help, might survive if he could find some way to get them air.

  He looked around, beating his muddled brain to find an idea. The crawler was sitting next to the puddler, three or four meters above the level of the lake. If he could get to it, he could use the medicinal oxygen. There was no time to waste, but he was still having too much trouble breathing to move very fast. The men on the crater floor could not live much longer.

  He turned and started along the crater wall. You couldn’t call it running. It was more of a rapid stumbling, hampered by the slope and three days of saddle sores. Johnson moved around the crater wall until he was just above the crawler.

  Four deep, deep breaths and he plunged downslope towards it. Two meters down, breathing strong, coughing at the stink. Six meters. Eight meters, and his eyes started to smart and the air he sucked in no longer satisfied his needs. Now the real race began. He held his breath and kept going, bounding and sliding his reduced weight sideways down the slope in the low gravity. Ten meters, and he was at the crawler, his knees crackling and buckling as they tried to stop his forward motion; weight may change, but mass is forever.

  He slammed into the side of the cab, cracking his ribs on the grab-bars, scrambled aboard, fumbling the door closed with unresponsive hands and rapidly narrowing vision. Oxygen first. He pulled the walkaround bottle out from under the driver’s seat, pulled the mask over his head, and started gasping. Now to move the crawler. The starter clicked, the motor whined up to speed, then lugged heavily as it tried to drive the crawler straight up the slope with the brake still set.

  He swore, turned the wheel, popped the brake, and almost fell out the unlatched door as the big machine roared and spun around on the steep slope.

  Moments later the crawler was next to the fallen bodies. Johnson braked and dashed back to Medical. No time for finesse. He cracked the valve on the largest oxygen tank and let it start filling the compartment. Then he grabbed more walkaround bottles, jumped out the driver’s side, and started pulling people in through the door.