Neurolink (17 page)

“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 pool, 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.”

Sereb held Dominic’s bleeding palm high for everyone to see, and Dominic gazed dully at the miners’ sweaty grins.

“No more of that shit. From now on, you’ll have respectable work.” Sereb dropped Dominic’s hand, spun on his heels and waded away through the crowd. “See the banker drinks his fill tonight, boys. Say, where’s them fiddle-players? I wanna dance.”

Later, Dominic remembered finding a chair and trying to sit in it. The rest of the evening would forever be a blank.

He woke up with Benito sitting on his chest, tugging at a clean white bandage wrapped snugly around his little brown hand. When Dominic’s vision cleared, he saw a drop of blood seeping through Benito’s bandage, and he tried to recall how the boy had hurt his hand. In the next moment, he elbowed the boy away, rolled on his side and vomited. There was so little in his stomach, the spasms seemed to rip his viscera out. Then his brain quaked inside his skull.

“Son, you got a mother-bitch hangover.” The NP chuckled. “Sometimes I miss physical sensation. Then again, sometimes I don’t.”

Dominic realized both his own hands were swathed and padded in white gauze. His fingers were bound together, and when he flexed them, he gasped aloud. Oh yes, the bucket handles. He wondered who had given him med care. With a grunt, he sat up and held his white paws in his lap. Something hard poked his thigh, so he lifted his leg. It was Penderowski’s torch.

“You wanna know how long you slept?” the NP asked.

“Just tell me how soon the oxygen runs out.” Dominic pushed the torch away.

“Twenty-one hours, zero minutes, eight seconds and counting, unless that prote engineer starts dicking with the oxy mix.”

Less than a day! Dominic bolted up. He must be over a hundred meters deep below the seafloor. He had to start climbing! Then he swayed and fell and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting again.

Light tubes banded the ceiling like glaring white ribbons. He was still in the room called “Mess.” The tables and chairs had been put back in neat rows, and other than a few wet stains on the stone floor, no evidence remained of the beer party. Except for himself and the boy, the room appeared empty. His first impulse was to run into the corridor and search for any ladder leading up, but each time he moved, he felt as if a jackhammer were trying to tear its way out of his skull.

“Benito,” he whispered hoarsely, “is there any water?”

“Faucet in the ceiling,” a female voice said.

Dominic wedged his elbow into a chair seat and pushed himself up where he could see who spoke. On the tabletop beside him sat the brawny miner woman called Djuju. Her legs were crossed in lotus fashion, and she held a strange artifact, which at first he couldn’t identify. Then he recalled an image from a history site. That thing she held was a book. He’d browsed video about books. They were read-only, plain-text datafiles made of plant fiber. Fragile, impermanent, of no practical use—yet prized by collectors and therefore valuable. Dominic was surprised to find such a rarity here, but even more bizarre, Djuju actually seemed to be reading it.

With a sigh, she clapped the book shut and stowed it in the bosom of her uniform. “Okay, coin man. You got a name?”

“Nick,” he said. “And this is Benito.”

“Me and yer son are old friends. Sereb told me to look out for you today. You’ll be on my crew.”

“I can’t,” said Dominic, just as the NP whispered, “Tell her you can’t.”

He tottered to his feet and searched the ceiling for the faucet. When he twisted the valve open, a thin stream trickled into his mouth. It tasted warm and vaguely sour, and he drank for a long time. “Benito, you want some?” he asked.

“Stop playing nursemaid to the brat!” the NP’s barked. “Ask this prote for directions.”

“Shut up,” Dominic subvocalized.

“That soft-headed streak, I swear I don’t know where you got it.” White sparks burst across Dominic’s eye, and he blinked.

Djuju watched him. She slung one muscular leg over the table’s edge and kicked her boot rhythmically against the chair. Her glance was dry and appraising. She seemed to be waiting for him to explain himself.

Dominic smiled, and in a smooth tone, he said, “I have urgent business on the
Dominic Jedes
. How about a barter? If you’ll give me directions to the bridge, then I’ll—I’ll—” But his mind was still fogged by alcohol.

“Tell her the brat will stay and work,” said the NP.

“The boy will stay and work.” Even as Dominic repeated the phrase, the words jarred him. When Benito shot him a questioning frown, he had to look away.

Djuju sniffed. “You want breakfast?”

Before he could answer, the NP said, “Give her the con job. You do it so well.”

An ache shot up Dominic’s back, and he realized his muscles were knotted with tension. He rolled his shoulders and almost in a monotone, he recited the lie he’d used with Penderowski. “Djuju, your colony’s running out of air. I’m bringing an offer of trade. Respirator equipment, fuel and supplies. I have to meet your council on the
Dominic Jedes
’ bridge.”

Would it work this time? She lifted her chin and studied him. “This trade, what do we give in return?”

Penderowski hadn’t asked that question. Dominic forced his mind to work. “Debenture bonds.”

Djuju narrowed her eyes. Her boot stopped swinging.

“I’m offering a straight loan package,” Dominic continued, hoping to confuse her with jargon. “You’ll pay prime plus two for a standard term, with a balloon option. You won’t find a better deal.”

“Money,” she said.