She hesitated half a step as 6320 received her portion, then was shoved forward as soon as her own bowl touched her fingers. She would have snarled at 4216, the pushy bitch, but the food took all her attention now. She carried it close to her face, protecting it against loss until she found a spot between two other women at the corner of the shack. She hunkered down and shoveled the lumpy stuff into her mouth, hardly waiting to chew one bite before taking the next. Her growling stomach relaxed as it received the gift of food; for one moment she forgot the cold and spared no thought for the work waiting at the end of this brief pleasure.
Fourteen-oh-eight had nearly come to the end of her portion of the morning meal when she felt the women on either side of her stiffen and move away. She looked up, but saw only a hulking shadow outlined against the sky. Then the shadow’s heavy boot crashed into her ribs, and the bowl, with its last precious mouthfuls, was snatched from her hands. “No!” she shouted, scrambling after it. The boot caught her at the shoulder this time, rolling her into two others not quick enough to move.
She heard a laugh from overhead, then a dusty scrape of boots carried the sound away, and she was left alone. She spit grit and blood out of her mouth and lifted her head cautiously. Her tormentor had melted into the huddle of bodies in the quad. Only one woman was looking in her direction, and she was far too small to have been the owner of that boot to the ribs. The look of sympathy on the woman’s face transformed 1408’s useful rage into helpless self-pity.
Fighting back tears, 1408 picked herself up off the ground before the guards could investigate. When the work whistle blew, she brushed at the dust on her jumpsuit and joined the line forming to snake through the gate to the mine entrance.
“Work with me today.” The whisper came from just behind her in the line. “I saw who took your grub.”
She moved a half-turn with her next step to see the tiny, dark-skinned woman who had been watching in the quad. She faced front again, careful to keep her face blank for the guards who were stalking the line, electric prods at the ready.
They said nothing more as the line filed out the gate, up the rocky path and into the tipple that housed the elevator over Shaft 16, but 1408 positioned herself to ensure that she stayed near her witness. The pair entered the same elevator car with more than twenty others and waited out the long, creaking descent into darkness in silence.
At the bottom, they exited the car quickly, shoving along with the others to get clear of the cage before it started back up the shaft. Fourteen-oh-eight had seen the consequences of moving too slowly—women with arms or legs torn off as the car shot back up the shaft without warning.
Her companion remained at her elbow as they picked up their headlamps and cutting lasers. They started to follow the others into the railcars that would carry them through the tunnels to the working face, but a burly guard stopped the smaller woman.
“You. 1012. They need you out on G tunnel. Blazer duty.”
Fourteen-oh-eight stopped breathing, her heart battering at her ribs. She didn’t know what “blazer duty” was, but it never paid to attract the attention of the guards for any reason.
The other shrugged. “I’ll need a rigger.”
The guard scowled, creasing his heavy brow ridges. “Fourteen-oh-eight, go with her. Azlac, take them in the hand cart.”
A second guard put a gnarled hand on her shoulder and pushed them both in the direction of the hand cart. “Move.” They took up their places on the platform, the two women on opposite handles of the push bar, the guard on the rear seat, his weapon resting loosely in his hands. Fourteen-oh-eight tried to ignore the squeeze of fear around her heart and focused on moving the cart—push down to start the cart rolling, lean back as the handle comes up. Push down, lean back.
They continued until, up ahead in the gloom, she could hear the whine of laser against rock. Diggers chipped away at the tunnel surfaces, planting roof and wall supports, opening up new seams for the miners. She and her partner eased back on the push bar, allowing the cart to coast to a stop in front of a barricade that marked the end of the cart rails.
“Off.” The guard gestured with his weapon. The two prisoners jumped off the cart and followed their wavering headlamps toward the noise and leaping shadows that marked the work site.
“Vong’Ta! I’ve got your blazer and rigger.”
The crew boss turned to glare at them. “About time! I’ve lost a segment already.” The boss was big enough to block a third of the newly started tunnel, and distinguished by a drooping rectangular face and elongated ears. There were many who looked like him among the bosses, and none among the prisoners. That much 1408 could have said of him. She’d never speculated as to his origins. The mystery of his people, like her own identity, was as dark and unexplored as the cracks they followed in the rock.
The boss dismissed the guard with a curt, “You can go.”
“What am I supposed to do—push myself back?”
“Either that or sit on your ass in the dark until the end of the shift and draw a punishment tour for jerking off.” Vong’Ta scowled at his new workers. “Come on. The hole’s down here.”
They squeezed past the diggers working in the narrow passage, then down a twisting worm of empty burrow extending into the smothering darkness. The earth closing in around her made 1408 want to scream, but she knew if she began, she would never stop. She would become one of the screeching wild things they dragged out to be shot and tossed into the debris carts with the rest of the slag. She was afraid to die. So she shut out the panic and focused on the boss’s broad, sweat-stained back bobbing ahead of her in the circle of light from her lamp.
They were still within earshot of the digging crew when they reached a cramped bay in the passageway, as wide as her outstretched arms and high enough for them to stand upright. At the base of one wall was a ragged triangular hole.
“Sonics show a crack at least as big as that hole running for twenty meters.” The boss stood aside to let them look. “Then it opens up—maybe a cavern, we can’t tell. One thing’s for sure, though. Just beyond the open space, the whore’s full of crystals. Find me a way in.”
The tiny woman nodded. “Sure thing, boss.” She pointed at a pile of shiny debris beside the hole. “What’s the matter, crawler let you down?”
“Shalssiti robots are worthless in this pit.” He kicked at what was left of the digging probe. “It took two men three segments just to pull that fucking thing back out of the hole. So you’re up.”
Ten-twelve’s grin only widened. “No problem. Got the gear?”
The boss let a load of rope and rigging tools drop off his shoulder. He squinted at 1408.
“You ever rigged before?”
She started to shake her head, but her companion spoke up. “She’s new at it, but she’s got the touch. We’ll be okay.”
The boss frowned, deepening the ridges on his forehead. “I don’t want any screw-ups. You get stuck or fall off a ledge in there and I’ll lose my finder’s bonus. And I got plans for that finder’s bonus. You get it?”
“Sure, sure, got it, boss.” The woman cocked her head at him. “And the sooner we get to work, the sooner you’ll be spending that bonus, right?”
Vong’Ta took a step, as if he meant to strike the blazer. He loomed over her much smaller form, forcing her to look up, but she didn’t back down. Fourteen-oh-eight waited, her heart racing.
“You know, if you weren’t so useful, 1012, I’d vardzo shalshitti idzta purzin. Get to work.” He turned and trudged back through the passage toward the digging crew.
“Yeah, but I am useful, you bastard, so you won’t be kicking my ass anytime soon.” The woman threaded her arms through a webbed harness, then suddenly smiled up at 1408. “It’s not like he could crawl through this hole!”
In the light of this woman’s fiery spirit, 1408 stood mute and awkward. The only smile she’d seen in this hellish place had been the grin of a gloating guard. The only laughter had been a brief bark
of ridicule at some poor sufferer’s expense. She’d never seen anyone like this woman.
“Call me Dozen. It’s short for Ten Dozen—1012, get it?” She peered up at 1408 with ebony eyes as if searching her face for something.
Fourteen-oh-eight caught a brief answering flicker in her mind. Dozen. The word was familiar, part of something distant and forgotten. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard the word before. A dozen. Twelve. The lines around her mouth softened a fraction.
Dozen nodded. “I knew there was a little left in there. I can always spot it. Do you have a name?”
“I’m 1408.”
“So the answer is no. Give me some time; I’ll think of something.” She held up another harness. “Here, get into this. No, like this. Buckle up here and here. Make sure they’re secure.” She stooped to shine her headlamp into the tunnel they would be navigating. Then she glanced up at 1408. “Well, you’ll make it, but just barely. Maybe it’s a good thing you lost half your breakfast.”
A joke. Fourteen-oh-eight rummaged in the wreckage of her mind for a response, but couldn’t find one.
“Okay, so I go first.” Dozen knocked a piton into the floor of the bay and secured one end of a cable to it. “It’s my job to blaze the trail—you know, find a way through and mark it so we can find it again. You have two jobs: Make sure I come back out, and haul the hazard rigging.”
“Hazard rigging?”
“Ah, the Sphinx speaks! I was beginning to wonder if you had the power of independent thought.” She was smiling again. Fourteen-oh-eight perceived this as another joke, but she had no idea what “Sphinx” meant. “We have to rig cables around the dangerous spots so others won’t drop off into a bottomless hole somewhere. Hazard rigging. You’ll help me do that.”
Fourteen-oh-eight stared at the hole, transfixed with terror at the thought of the airless tunnel behind it. Twenty meters, he’d said. Her mouth went as dry and bristly as the rope in her hands.
Dozen looked up at her, assessing her degree of paralysis. “Scared, huh? Don’t like tight spaces?” She stood and put a hand on 1408’s arm. “Look, this crack has been here for millions of years. It’s not going to close up now. Nobody’s digging here, disturbing the structure of the rock. This is probably the safest place in the mines.”
It was mostly a lie, 1408 knew, but something warmed in her anyway.
“Just look at my feet—unless, of course, you prefer to look at my ass.” Dozen grinned at her. “Don’t think about anything else. We’ll be through and into the cavern in ten minutes. You can stand anything for ten minutes.”
Fourteen-oh-eight offered a tentative nod. “Okay.”
“Okay. And trust me. It’s my job to get you out of this hellhole. Here we go.”
Dozen ducked and scrambled through the opening. Fourteen-oh-eight paid out a few feet of rope, then passed through behind her. The rough sides of the passage clawed at her hips and shoulders; the rock tore at her palms and knees as she crawled. The passage twisted and turned, at times so tightly that it seemed her bottom half could not follow her top half around the bends. Her headlamp showed her nothing but her hands, the rope ahead of her and the rock.
The blazer issued a steady stream of instructions and encouragement, punctuated by grunts of effort as she maneuvered through the torturous passageway. Abruptly, the drone of observation ended with an emphatic “Shit!”
“What is it?” Fourteen-oh-eight came to a halt, panting in apprehension.
“Can’t see where this goes.”
Hysteria rose into her throat, choking the breath out of her. What was left in her lungs came out in a thin, pitiful whine.
Dozen apparently recognized the signs of panic and spoke quickly to reassure her. “Hey, Sphinx, it’s okay. There’s air in this passage—can’t you feel it? It’s moving down the tunnel from that cavern the boss told us about, remember? There’s an opening. We aren’t stuck. Just relax, okay?”
Fourteen-oh-eight willed herself to lift her face and feel the movement of the air. She imagined she could feel it. She thought if she could just believe in it, the draft would become perceptible. She clung to that idea with desperate strength and tried to breathe.
“That air is coming in somewhere.” A methodical tapping of pick and hammer against rock started up ahead of her. “I’ll find it in a minute. Just hold on.”
The metallic tapping continued until one strike sounded a duller note. There was the sound of crumbling rock, of pebbles tumbling. A lifting of dust.
Then a triumphant grunt from Dozen: “Gotcha, you sonofabitch!”
From her prison of stone, 1408 listened as the blazer attacked the hole she’d discovered. She could hear the rock falling away in larger chunks. Then she heard a single word. “Man!” Wonder and admiration filled Dozen’s voice.
It had been so long since 1408 had heard those emotions expressed that she almost didn’t recognize them. She could not connect the sound of Dozen’s voice with any feeling that made sense. Confusion and frustration were her only response. She just wanted to be free of this damn tunnel.
“What do you see?”
“This sucker’s huge!” Dozen laughed. “Baby, we are set for days! No scratching away at a fucking rock face for us—we’ve got exploring to do!”
Dozen contorted her body to turn and look at 1408. She was grinning. “Only problem is, this tunnel comes out close to the top of the cavern wall. It’s a long way down to the bottom.”
Terror returned to grab 1408 by the throat. “Now what are we supposed to do?”
“No big deal. We rig a rope and rappel down.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry,” Dozen tossed off. “It’s easy. You’ll be fine.”
The blazer busied herself with enlarging the exit hole to person-size and hammering in the pitons that would hold the lines. Meanwhile, 1408 lay sprawled in the darkness of the tunnel, sweating with barely controlled panic. She had more than enough time to trace back over her morning, searching for the moment her miserable life had gone off track, until Dozen scrunched around to give her a handful of line strung with weighty clips.
“Hook those up here and here.” She indicated rings on her own harness at chest and hips.
Fourteen-oh-eight did as she was told, her hands shaking.
“I’ll go first. Don’t worry. If I run into trouble, I can haul my ass back up easy enough. Once I’m down, I’ll belay you. You won’t fall. I’ll have hold of the lines from below.” Dozen paused to get a look at her rigger’s face. “Sphinx, are you listening to me? Nothing can happen. All you have to do is work your way out of the hole feet first and let go. Just try not to move a whole lot and keep yourself away from the wall with your feet. Safe as houses, okay?”
“Okay.” Her voice was nothing but a dry rasp.
Fourteen-oh-eight watched in the circle of light from her headlamp as Dozen twisted and rotated again to bring her feet to the tunnel mouth. The tiny woman pushed back with her elbows and rocked her hips to work her way out of the hole. Then she dropped from sight.
Fourteen-oh-eight drew in a terrified breath and held it, anticipating a horrible crump! as Dozen fell to the cavern floor. Instead, some seconds later, she heard the blazer call up from below. “Hey, Sphinx! Come on down!”
She worked her way to the tunnel mouth, sensed rather than saw the vast open space beyond. The wisp of air from the cavern was like a howling wind, feeding her fear. She froze, unable to move.
“Sphinx! Come on. You can do this!”
“No! I can’t—I can’t move.”
“Just take it one move at a time. Turn around first. Then you won’t even have to look.”
Sobbing, she contorted her body to turn around in the tight space. The effort took several minutes and left her panting and sweating. Dozen was right; not having to see the emptiness beyond that opening helped. Still, she felt the panic rising again as she wriggled backwards to send her lower half through the hole. She froze again, numb with terro
r.
A beam of weak light played around the mouth of the tunnel. “Hey, Sphinx, I see you mooning me. Come on out.”
She shook her head, hands scrabbling in the loose rock on the passage floor. “No,” she moaned.
“Trust me. You can’t fall. Just push out and let yourself hang on the ropes. Keep your feet on the wall.”
She knew she could not stay as she was, but the knowledge did her no good. Her arms and legs would not obey the conflicting orders of her panicked mind. The tug of gravity on her lower half was terrifying.
“Okay, you’re forcing me to ruin the surprise I had for you.” Dozen’s voice seemed so far away. “If you don’t come down, I won’t be able to give it to you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Food, baby. I’ve got some here for you. But you have to come down.”
“You lying bitch!”
“Oh, you think I’m lying? Okay, fuck you. I’ll eat this bread myself.”
She couldn’t help it; she was salivating at the mere mention of food. What if the other woman really had some?
“You don’t have any bread.”
”Yes, I do. But if you want any, you’ll have to come down. And I’d hurry if I were you. Once I unwrap it, I may not be able to stop myself from eating it all.”
“Why would you share?”
“Oh, for chrissake! Stay the fuck up there if you want. I’m done talking.”
There was a faint jingle of equipment as Dozen made herself comfortable below. Then there was nothing. No sound. No light except the small circle thrown by her own headlamp. Fourteen-oh-eight imagined she could hear Dozen unwrapping the precious food, imagined she could hear her chewing. The remembered smell of bread filled her nostrils, and her mind. Soon even the thought of dropping into the silent darkness was nothing compared to her desire for the promised morsel.
“I’m coming down.”
Unchained Memory (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 1) Page 5
