Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (18 page)

Lesser bores were to be made by colossal machines that the Marini had used for decades, to dig everything from aqueducts to castle basements. They resembled the massive monsters Earth’s engineers used to bore beneath the English Channel and under the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Marini tunnel borers were like steam-powered freight trains, two hundred yards long. Their locomotives were cylinders tipped with rotating, bladed disc cutters, and stood as tall as houses. On Bren and Earth, boring machines cut rock with carbide steel, scarcely harder than the nickel and iron fabric of Mousetrap, or with corundum. But Howard and Bassin designed cutters that used crushed industrial diamonds set in a matrix, which would Û€, which scour through Mousetrap’s nickel iron like it was lard. On Earth or Bren so much bort would have been a fantasy.

But Weichsel’s first and perhaps last contribution to the Human Union changed that. The wrecked dredge that Mimi Ozawa and the
Emerald River
returned from De Beers’ camp to Earth contained ugly-but-abrasive industrial-diamond, “bort.” On Weichsel, a child could dig gem quality diamonds by the cup. But a test dredge could suck up bort by the ton.

Much of the transformation of Mousetrap was being wrought by massive machines. But some was the product of down and dirty pick and shovel miners. During the first months, the miners had worked in pressure suits, to seal a billion years’ worth of nooks and crannies. Meanwhile, the engineers had installed a system of pressure tight doors, which could hold air in Mousetrap like a twenty-mile long submarine.

The day that job was finished, a hundred of us, all dressed in pressure suits, gathered in a room on Level Twenty for the pressurization ceremony. From that control room, every door and hatch in Mousetrap could be opened, or, on this happy day, closed. Gustus, rotund in his pressure suit, depressed a red pad—I suppose more accurately a button—that sealed Mousetrap. We applauded, but made no sound. That underscores why pressurization was a big enough deal to merit a ceremony. But more importantly, we mounted a memorial plaque inscribed with the names of the fourteen Marini who died during construction.

After that, workers and machines could work in tunnels and caverns pressurized with an air mix extracted from Mousetrap’s cometary ice patches.

Now, the mining crews dug more “delicate” passages, often up to just beneath Mousetrap’s surface. The miners bored conduits to carry power to be generated by solar arrays, dug anti-ship weapons emplacements, hacked out launch ports for defensive spacecraft. Hard rock mining is nasty work. Growing up in Colorado, I had a summer job as a gofer in a half-ass gold mine. It had almost been enough to make me study for SATs.

Many of the crews comprised female soldiers, whose smaller size advantaged them in cramped, claustrophobic conditions, and whose lesser upper body strength scarcely disadvantaged them in Mousetrap’s low gravity. Female tunnel rat crews’ dug tonnage routinely exceeded the totals of male crews. The Head Rat would tell you that at the drop of a mead flagon. Which brings me back to the deserter and the stowaway, who were the same stubborn person. FORTY-FIVE

“GOD, JASON!”Munchkin’s headlamp beam reflected off white spikes and splinters that had been one of her miner’s humeri. The skin through which they erupted glowed in the light, pale and bloody. A pulsing, baitbox-large nightcrawler wrapped around the bone shaft. It was a vein. Munchkin jerked away from where we knelt together, flung herself across a boulder as big as an old TV

set, and vomited her guts out into the dark.

When it was all gone she gasped, as I wiped tears from her eyes and drool strings from her lips. The Marini girl was conscious now and screaming so loud that I was afraid more of the roof would come down.

Munchkin twisted back, and tried to smooth her palm across the girl’s forehead. “Easy, babe. You’re fine.”

The girl thrashed her hand away, then squeezed her temples between her palms and whimpered. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” She sobbed. “Is my arm off?”

Munchkin turned her light away from the girl’s face.

“Is it?”

Munchkin turned back again and drew a breath so her voice wouldn’t quaver. “It’s still on, babe.” That was the trouble. The angular iron boulder that had collapsed, crushed the girl’s arm, and now pinned it, was as thick as a heating duct. On Earth, it would have weighed more than a truck. On Mousetrap it weighed no more than a tree trunk, which was enough. The rubble that came down with it surrounded us. Munchkin shone her headlamp up into the blue-black cupola the rock fall had opened above us, glimpsed movement and flinched. Something whacked my helmet, then thumped my shoulder as it went by. I looked down. The toaster-sized boulder rocked on the drift’s floor. The roof creaked. The rest of it would come down in minutes. We had to get the girl out.

The other crews were working a stope too far away. It was just the three of us. I knelt and pushed my shoulder on the boulder until my muscles quivered, and swore at myself for not wearing armor. This had begun as a casual visit so Munchkin could brag about her miners, the transferred objects of her maternal affections since Jude was light years away.

Munchkin coiled back on her knees, growled and slammed herself against the boulder. It barely twitched. Rock rattled down. The girl screamed, then passed out.

I slid my light along the boulder, to where it angled back into the wall, and swore. It was all connected. If the beam-shaped rock moved, everything came down.

I crawled to the crew toolbox, rummaged, then sat back on my ankles. My breath made fog in the light while I heard the two of them breathe. Smells of machine oil, dust, and vomit mingled as I thought about what we had to do.

A hand touched my shoulder, and I jumped.

“You said the miners were staying away from the fracture cones.”

She turned her head. “It was easy tonnage.”

I pointed at the girl, and whispered. “That could be you! Screw your goddam tonnage!”

“It’s bad enough I screwed up. Don’t yell like that.”

The girl stirred and moaned.

I took Munchkin’s arm, pulled her ten feet up the drift, and cupped my hand around her ear. “Her arm’s hamburger. And pinned. That boulder’s not budging. The roof won’t last ten minutes. The cavalry’s too far away.”

I tilted my head, and my lamp beam glinted off the hacksaw’s blueã€hacksaw’-steel blade. “I got it from the toolbox. Bone’s softer than steel. I’ve got cord to make a tourniquet above the break.”

Munchkin pushed the saw away. “She wants to be a surgeon, Jason.”

Our breath puffed across our interlocked light beams.

The girl sobbed.

I dropped the saw, and sighed. “Go back up where this drift intersects the adit and get a jack. And cable. And those two sheets of corrugated.” I held my hand flat and level with my eyes. “The ones about yea high.”

“A jack? You move that timber and that roof’s coming down on whoever’s jacking.” She punched her palm. “Bam! Right now!”

I tilted my head, so my light painted her brown eyes. Ice cold.

“Move!”

She ran like hell in the dark.

By the time Munchkin staggered back, the iron jack in one hand and the two rusty sheets of corrugated steel trussed with the cable across her bent back like a shawl, the roof was creaking worse. It was a constant forty Fahrenheit in here and still I sweated.

I had been busy. A three-sided wall of stacked rock, open toward us, surrounded the girl where she lay, like a sarcophagus in a tomb. Another sarcophagus rose next to the fallen boulder. I looked up from where I knelt alongside the boulder and waved Munchkin forward with wiggled fingers. “Hand me the jack. Put one sheet of tin over her like a roof. Tie the cable under her armpits.”

I tossed a last rock on my pathetic fort, straightened and gasped. “Once I get the jack snugged underneath the timber and I’m laid down alongside it put the other tin sheet over me. Then take the end of the cable and get back a safe distance. I’ll yell when I get her leg jacked free.”

I pointed at her. “You haul like hell and don’t stop for God. Got it?”

“Keep off a rock fall with tin sheets? And who hauls
you
out? What the hell kind of plan is that?”

“The only one I got.” I lay down between my stubby stone walls and began setting the jack. Munchkin said, “You’re too big.”

I looked around. I had swept together every cobble and boulder within range, but she was right. My little fort was too small. I would be crushed.

Munchkin pushed me aside, and laid down beside the jack. “I fit.”

I nodded, then I stood, and tied the cable. As I laid the sheetmetal across the girl, her eyes widened like I was nailing the lid on her coffin.

Munchkin had the jack in place below the elongated rock, and had her hands on the crank. I laid the tin sheet across her back. “Munchkin—”

“Later.”

I backed off, turned around and lã€d aroundooped the cable around my waist. Munchkin lay facedown in my flimsy, flat-roofed doll hut, the girl on her back in hers. Iron squealed as Munchkin cranked the jack.

Rock pattered against the metal shields. Like the start of a storm.
Clack
.
Clack clack
.

“Now! Now, Jason!”

I leaned all my weight back on the cable. The girl moved inches and screamed. Falling rock thundered on the tin. I strained and my boots slipped against the smooth floor rock. The girl wasn’t moving. I yelled, and pulled harder.

Munchkin swore in Arabic.

The roof collapsed.

FORTY-SIX

IRON DUST BLINDED ME. I choked on the metallic taste of it and spat into the dark. My ears rang. The cable cut into my palms as tons of rock tried to tear it from me. I had told Munchkin not to stop for God. God didn’t seem to be here, anyway. I pulled my guts out. I had stumbled backward. One step. Two?

The darkness got silent. I coughed a fit, and gradually tears washed out eyes I had no hand free to wipe. I kept inching backwards.

My lamp penetrated farther and farther into settling dust. Where there had been space there was sharp-edged iron rock. Mountains of it.

I pointed my light beam down. The girl lay in front of me. Her head. Her torso. Her hips. Her thighs. Then rock. I loosed the cable, staggered forward, tripped and swore. I tore rock away until I saw the girl’s leg. Then both legs. Her broken arm looked like a snapped, bloody Q-tip but it was still attached. I bent, laid a hand in front of the girl’s mouth, and breath tickled my palm. My plan had worked. Halfway.

I looked back at the rockfall. “Munchkin?”

Nothing.

“Munchkin!”

I stepped forward again, lifted rock and threw it aside. The big ones I levered with a shovel handle. I moved rock until my back screamed and inside my gloves my fingers slipped in blood and sweat. Even as I sweated, I trembled. I had torn away fallen rock like this a quarter of a century before, to reach a buried, crushed drop ship cockpit on Ganymede. And part of me had died there. It couldn’t be happening again.

I panted, “Munchkin?” every few minutes but I no longer paused for the reply I knew wouldn’t come. I grabbed a dusty rock smaller than a bread loaf. It was attached to something and wouldn’t come loose. I looked closer. Munchkin’s boot!

I threw and pushed and heaved rock until the edge of the sagging corrugated sheet became visible. I must have swallowed a pound of dust. I screamed, “Munchkin!”

The boot moved. No, it didn’t.

Yes. It wiggled. The other moved, too. Munchkin inched herself backward, belly down, from under the sagging, corrugated tin.

She was out as far as her belt line when I heard her, muffled. “What took you so long?”

I slapped her boot sole. “Goddamit!”

Then I cried.

Ten minutes later, from far up the adit, a voice echoed. “Hang on! We’re coming!”

I played my light on the adit walls, their hewn surfaces reflecting with the plaid crisscross Widmanstatten crystalline pattern of meteoric iron. Solid.

But the area of the rock fall resembled similar infirm spots the Rats had been finding. Mousetrap’s solid iron skin turned out to be pocked every few surface acres with hundred-foot deep, radiating conical scars, where the iron had fractured in place into shatter cones, as though the planetoid had suffered a drive-by shooting.

I crawled toward Munchkin, but she coughed, and waved me toward the girl. As I adjusted the tourniquet that stopped the miner’s bleeding, I said to Munchkin, “I think they can save the arm.”

Munchkin didn’t reply.

I turned, and saw that she was crawling across the new rockfall, her light beam jerking from ceiling to floor as she moved. Above her, the ceiling opened huge, now. The iron that had filled the space lay in a heap, fractured into sharp-edged fragments.

I shrugged as I said to her, “This could’ve turned out worse.”

She stopped, and shone her helmet light beam at an iridescent, blue object atop the new-fallen rock. She said, “Maybe not.”

FORTY-SEVEN

HOWARD CAUGHT UPwith Munchkin and me at the
Eisenhower
’s infirmary, where we sat, gowned and facing each other, on Plasteel tables in an examination bay.

He raised his eyebrows at the bandages on our faces and exposed limbs. “Evidently peacetime doesn’t agree with either of you.”

It certainly hadn’t agreed with Munchkin, who had jumped ship from the blue ribbon panel before it left Bren, half from boredom, and mostly because from Mousetrap she could hitch a jump to Tressel to see her baby.

The surgeon who had been working on Munchkin’s miner stepped toward Munchkin. “She’s sedated. We’ve reduced the fracture.”

“How’s the arm?”

He shrugged. “Lot of rehab. But little fine motor loss, long term, I think.” He shook Munchkin’s hand, then left the three of us.

Howard watched him go, then frowned as he turned to me. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “It’s a Football, alright. What’s it mean?”

The Slugs might use a million different complex machines, but we only knew about a handful. As Howard would say, the Slugs didn’t need to invent much. If the Cro-Magnons had discovered Cavorite, mankind might not have bothered to invent the wheel. So far as we knew, they had no toasters, sportscars, or lawnmowers. What they had included one kind of gun that came in three sizes, from anti-personnel rifle to a cannon big enough to thump a cruiser. They had two kinds of starships, U.N. phonetic designators Troll and Firewitch. They had big kinetic projectiles to blow up cities, and smaller, faster ones to blow up towns. And, finally, they had indestructible little early warning sensors that looked like iridescent blue footballs, which they sprinkled on, or shot into, planetary surfaces. Howard said, “Well, the first thing it means is that the Pseudocephalopod knows where Mousetrap is. But the fact that all It did was fire a few hundred sensors into the planetoid in passing suggests that It doesn’t actively watch Mousetrap. We’re lucky you two were there. Marini miners might have ignored the Football. Far as we know, this is the first Football we’ve disturbed. We were lucky again, that we worked from the inside of Mousetrap outward.”