In conclusion, the presence of live Bose-Einstein strata on Compson’s World is both an internal and external security threat. It is vital, both in relation to Syndicate industrial espionage activities and for reasons of political stability (vis-à-vis the IWW and other outside agitators) to transfer the production of transport and communications-grade condensate off the planet and into a controlled laboratory setting. This goal presents a compelling reason, in and of itself, for supporting Dr. Sharifi’s research.
“You understand what that means, don’t you?” Daahl asked. “They’re saying that the very presence of live crystal on-planet is a security risk. That as soon as they can manufacture it off-planet they’ll destroy the deposits that are left in the ground here.”
“This memo doesn’t say anything like that, Daahl.”
“Doesn’t it? Then what does that mean, ‘the presence of live strata is a security risk’?”
“It means nothing. Some paper pusher producing overblown verbiage for a departmental meeting. And anyway, you have no guarantee this thing is genuine.”
“My source was too good for it to be anything else.”
“If you want me to take that claim seriously, you’d better tell me who this ‘source’ was and let me make up my own mind.”
“You know, Katie. Think about it.”
Li stared at the sooty fiche, her mind spinning through the possibilities. Station security. Mine personnel. TechComm itself. But almost by definition no one cleared to see this kind of document could have come from a place like Compson’s World, let alone cared enough about it to risk their job and freedom for it.
“Who?” she asked, looking up to see Cartwright and Daahl both watching her. “Who was it?”
Daahl smiled. He took the memo back, pulling it from her fingers so gently that she hardly realized she’d let go of it, and folded it carefully away into his shirt pocket.
“Hannah,” he said. “Hannah Sharifi.”
AMC Station: 23.10.48.
Li woke to the sound of people running down the corridor outside, banging on its alloy walls hard enough to set them echoing: the universal spacer’s manual alarm system.
She rolled out of bed just as the station lit up her livewall and started talking to her. Her first thought was that there’d been a blowout, but as the calm automated voice droned on she realized it was calling all rescue and medical personnel to the shuttle bays. Whoever was in trouble, they were on the planet below.
She reached over to her cabin’s one chair and started pulling on the uniform she’d flung over it a few short hours ago. She was just lacing her boots up when the station put up a planet-side call for her.
Sharpe.
“You have medical training, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.
He was in his office at the hospital, and he looked as if he’d been hauled out of bed by the same crisis that had the stationers running for the shuttle bays. A mournful keening rose and fell on his end of the line like the Doppler-distorted navigational beacon of a drive ship pushing lightspeed.
“Just the usual,” she said. “CPR. Trauma response. My oracle has a combat med praxis it can load. What’s happened?”
“The Anaconda blew again.”
Suddenly Li recognized the wail coming over the line behind Sharpe’s voice for what it was: the pit whistle.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Pit 3’s gone. And 4’s burning. The above-ground foreman told me he’s got four hundred and twenty miners on the logs, all but seventy still underground. The closest doctor besides me is in Helena, three hours from here. More, if the weather doesn’t clear. If you can open a burn wrap and find a vein, I need you.”
Li stood up, realized she still had one boot left to lace, sat down again. “When’s the next open shuttle seat?”
“Gate 18. And hurry. They’re holding it for you.”
As the shuttle plunged toward the planet, the copilot scanned the surface channels for news of the fire.
No one they could raise had time to talk to them, but little by little they began to piece together the long slide through miscommunication and mischance to disaster.
The first step was the breakdown of the Pit 4 chippy lift. With a ten-meter-square lift floor that took up half the breadth of the main shaft, the chippy lift was the only way in and out of Pit 4 for every one of the miners who worked her two-hundred-odd cutting faces. With its chippy out of action, Pit 4 had to fall back on the double drum lift—a heavy-duty lift built to carry muck, ore, and waste rock, not miners. Eager to keep cutting, management stopped pulling waste up on the double drum and swapped in the eight-man emergency evac bucket.
That was the first link in the chain: four hundred miners underground with a lift that carried only eight men per trip instead of the chippy lift’s forty-eight.
The first shift foreman then made a decision that, only a week ago, would have been the right one. He consulted the airflow maps and rerouted Pit 4 evac through Pit 5’s main shaft, two and a quarter miles southeast of the Pit 4 headframe. What he didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that the maps he was looking at were four days out of date because of a glitch in the AMC data system. And two days ago, a work crew had closed off the 642 crosscut to Pit 5 in an attempt to fix the ventilation problems that had contributed to the last fire.
Haas knew about the closures, of course. He would have known the maps were out of date, would have been able to put the pieces together and turn things around if he’d been there. But Haas was at a Mine Safety Commission hearing in Helena. And with Haas gone, no single person on-site was in a position to see what was coming.
And that was the second link in the chain: an entire shift sent downshaft with evac instructions that dead-ended thirty-two hundred meters underground in front of two locked-down steel ventilation louvers.
Meanwhile, Pit 4’s double drum lift was still being used to haul miners—and all the coal, waste rock, and condensates those miners were hacking out of the ground had to go somewhere. The miners began routing their carts through the 531 crosscut to Pit 3’s still-operable double drum lift. Coal and waste carts began piling up in Pit 3’s central gangway, directly under the main air intake, whose Vulcan fan pumped forty-two hundred cubic meters of air per minute through the entire active workings of Pits 3 and 4.
That underground traffic jam was the third link in the chain. That, and a simple physical fact: coal is a rock that burns.
At 3A.M. a flash fire flickered through the 4100 level of the Trinidad, almost six kilometers from the Pit 3 headframe as the crow flies. The fire crew suited up and went down, but they couldn’t find a point of origin—and though they shut down the nearby brattices, air was still coming in from somewhere. They called up to the Pit 3 fanhouse to report the fire. The fan operator checked his maps, saw that the fire was on Pit 3’s main ventilation circuit, logged the time, and flipped the safety shutoff on his fan, cutting all forced-air ventilation to Pits 3 and 4.
On any other day, the shutoff would have been the right thing to do. It would have given the fire crew additional time to find the flash fire’s source, and it would have stopped the big fans from pumping suffocating smoke through the rest of the mine until they got the crystals under control.
But today wasn’t any other day. Today there was a freight-train-sized traffic jam of coal and refuse carts lined up down the length of the 3100 gangway just below the intake shaft.
As long as the fans were running, the fresh air flowed through the gangway fast enough to catch the highly flammable coal dust rising off the carts and blow it out the Pit 4 outtake before it could stagnate and become volatile. When the fans shut off, however, the dust began to thicken in the unventilated gangway and climb toward ignition temperature. All that was missing now was a spark. A spark, and fresh air to feed the fire the spark would start.