Li herself was a survivor, not a hero. Any illusions she’d had on that score had been scorched out of her back on Gilead. But down here she didn’t need to be a hero. Down here she just needed to keep breathing. And keep breathing was exactly what she did, as night paled to smoky daylight at the top of the shaft three kilometers above them.
She and Ramirez outlasted three different rescue teams, ran into McCuen somewhere toward dawn and kept on searching with him. They followed pointing fingers and hoarse-throated directions. They listened for the dogs’ barking. They helped dig through rockfalls and shore up dangerously loose lagging. They hefted bodies, live and dead, and carried them until they found someone to hand them off to.
Meanwhile, Li’s internals monitored the contaminated air, beeped warnings at her—warnings she ignored—and sent out suicide armies of virucules to combat the contamination that was clogging her lungs and flooding through her body. After the first few hours of exposure, the nonceramsteel components in her internals started overheating, and her oracle shifted all nonessential systems into powersave. At four hours she started coughing up coal black chunks of phlegm loaded with dead virucules. At fourteen hours, she had to go back above ground and sit hooked up to the oxygen feed for most of an hour to catch her breath and give her systems a chance to reboot. Then she went back down, forcing herself not to think about the damage she was doing, and started the whole process over again.
In every rescue or battlefield cleanup Li had ever worked, there came a point of diminishing returns. It might come after only a few hours, or it might take days to arrive, but sooner or later it always did come. Then the rush of saving survivors was replaced by the grim obligation of retrieving bodies, and you started to wonder just what it was you were risking your own life for. Li always felt sorriest for the dogs when it got to that point, and this rescue was no exception. There was a shattering sincerity in their reactions: the hesitation, the doubtful whining note that slipped into their barking, the worried licking of hands and faces that were long past reviving. Even at the end, even after every human rescuer had shut down and given up inside, the dogs couldn’t stop hoping.
Li hit her own point of diminishing returns somewhere in Anaconda’s 3700 level, creeping down a shattered drift with a pulse locator that hadn’t spiked on a live person in fourteen hours. Even Ramirez had started to at least talk about packing it up.
Then, finally, they got the hit they almost stopped believing would come: a locator beacon in a relatively undamaged section of corridor well off the main circulation paths—and, they hoped, out of the worst smoke. But when they reached it, they found only empty corridor running away into the darkness.
“What the hell?” Li said, her locator still blipping at something that clearly wasn’t there.
McCuen pried a piece of lagging away from the wall and pulled the beacon out of a niche in the wall.
“Bootleggers,” he said, his voice muffled by his rebreather mouthpiece. “If they’re still alive, they’ll have been working within shouting distance of it.”
The three of them stared at each other, hardly breathing. Then they started shouting.
When the reply finally came, Li thought it was an echo. She forced her pickup to maximum and heard it again. It was shouting, although it sounded too faint to be anywhere near them—certainly too faint for unenhanced ears to hear.
“Sshh!” she said.
Ramirez and McCuen stopped shouting and looked at her.
“What?” McCuen whispered.
She heard it again. Two voices, muffled by rock and dropped coal, but voices all the same. And above the shouting, a second sound. A buzzing, vibrating sound that came from much closer.
They tracked the sound along the corridor and up a rough side tunnel that ended in a roof fall. And when they called out there, even McCuen and Ramirez thought they heard it.
As soon as they heard it, they went crazy. McCuen ran back toward the main gangway to get help and spread news of possible survivors. Li and Ramirez began a furious race to collect all the timber and lagging they could find within carrying distance and start shoring up the roof and chipping their way into the rubble pile.
“Right, then,” Ramirez said when they had cleared a passage through the first big blockage. He unbuckled his kit and started stripping off his bulky safety gear. “I’ll go take a look around.”
Li shook her head. “Forget it. I’ll go.”
“No way,” he said, tugging at a stubborn buckle.
Li put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to prove anything, Leo.”
He stopped and gave her an incredulous half-angry stare. Then he grabbed the end of the cord and clipped it onto his belt. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m trying to get those people out safely.”
Li felt her face heat up. “If that’s what you want, you’ll let me go. I’m smaller, stronger. And I can get by without my rebreather if I have to. Wherever they are, I’ve got a better chance of getting to them, and that’s God’s truth.”
She took the cord out of his hands, tugging a little to free it from his clenched fingers. As she unclipped it from his belt and attached it to her own she kept her eyes fixed on his. “Just feed me rope and come dig me out if the roof falls on me,” she said. “All right?”
As if in response to her words, the roof boomed and cracked—the sound of a mountain’s weight of coal and rock shifting above them, seeking a new equilibrium now that the ribs had been burned out of the deep tunnels.
“Don’t worry,” Ramirez said grimly. “I’ll be here.”
The tunnel behind the rockfall was dark but not too smoky. Li guessed that the roof had caved in so quickly that not much smoke-tainted air had made it into this section.
She crept forward through air so close and hot that her infrared gave her only a blurred sketch of the path before her. The tunnel was relatively clear once she was past the rockfall; it was just a matter of squirming around the rubble that had been ripped off the walls and ceiling when the fire had come through.
The posts and lagging littering her path were more than inconveniences, of course. They were what had been holding up the ceiling before the fire. And now that they had come down it was only a matter of time until the mountain took the tunnel back.
The trick, of course, was not to be there when that happened.
She was ten meters down the passage when she heard the roof crack again. A sound like tearing paper rippled through the dark toward her. Rocks pummeled the ground a few meters ahead. She crouched in the partial shelter of a fallen timber and waited.
“Okay?” Ramirez called when everything but the roiling dust had subsided.
“Okay,” she called, as loud as she dared. She pushed her hard hat down on her head, waited a few moments to make sure the fault wasn’t spreading, then pushed forward.
Just as she started forward, the noise started again. This time it was a scratchy rasping sound, not like anything she had heard before. She dove back under the shelter, expecting more roof fall. The noise stopped, then started again, repeating at regular intervals. It wasn’t the roof shifting at all, she realized; it sounded more like a switch turning.
She tracked it to the drift’s far wall, behind a twisted piece of lagging that had once been pressure-bolted into the ceiling. She didn’t dare move the lagging; even her ceramsteel-reinforced muscles and tendons couldn’t hold the immense metal plate if its few remaining bolts came loose. She ran her hands up behind it, trying to find the source of the noise. Finally her fingers touched what she had not allowed herself to hope for: a phone box.