Yalda said, “There is no coercion here. You’re free to make your own decision on this.”
“And free to persuade my friends to make the same decision, I hope,” Delfina added cheerfully.
“Of course.” Yalda was angry now, but she was not going to change her stance and start making threats. Help spin the mountain, or you can go without food next harvest.
Far better, she decided, to call the spoilers’ bluff.
“But we’ll need to start drawing up the rosters,” she said, “so I’d like to get the numbers clear right now. How many people are prepared to work to make this happen—either in the farms, or out on the slopes? Please raise a hand if you’re willing to do that.”
About a third of the crew responded immediately. For a long, painful moment it looked to Yalda as if that burst of enthusiastic support was all she would get, but then the numbers began to grow.
In the end, only about two dozen people chose to side with Delfina. Most were from the feed chambers, sending her a message about Nino. No doubt there were many more who wanted the saboteur dead, but they weren’t going to risk the crops—or even risk being seen as risking the crops—just to express their anger over something else entirely.
Frido was not among the dissenters. At some point he had counted the numbers around him and decided to raise his hand.
17
As they waited to use the airlock, Yalda helped Fatima into her helmet and cooling bag. No one’s flesh was flexible enough to conform to the shape of the fabric perfectly—and the whole point was to ensure that there was air moving freely over your skin—but if you let the bag hang too loosely anywhere it just blew out into a rigid tent, leaving you fighting it with every move. The trick was to come close to filling the bag but to wrinkle your skin as much as possible, creating a series of small air channels between skin and fabric.
Yalda finished checking the fit. “I think you’re right now,” she said.
“Thanks.” Fatima reached into the hold beside them and took out two canisters of compressed air, passing one to Yalda. Yalda attached it to the inlet at the side of her own bag.
“Someone should find a better way to keep cool,” Fatima suggested.
“In time for the next shift?” Yalda joked.
Ausilio had finished pumping down the airlock pressure; he slid the external door open, took hold of the guide rail just outside the exit, then pulled himself through. As soon as he’d reached back to slam the door closed, Fatima opened the equaliser and air hissed slowly back into the lock.
Yalda was growing tired of these laborious preparations, shift after shift, but she kept her frustration to herself. Three more stints, and she’d never have to go through this rigamarole again.
Fatima entered the airlock and began working the pump energetically, bracing herself with three hands against the clearstone walls.
By the time Yalda was through onto the slope, Fatima and the rest of the team were already out of sight. Yalda swung herself between the guide rails and set off down the mountain, moving briskly but always keeping at least two hands on the rails. In the absence of gravity she ought to have been oblivious to the gradient of the slope, but the rim of the inverted bowl of garish color trails above her matched the old horizon perfectly, making it impossible to think of the ground as level.
The new horizon was a dazzling, multicolored circle where the fastest ultraviolet light from the old stars was shifted to visible frequencies before giving way abruptly to blackness. Straight ahead of her—“downhill”—the more modest trails of the orthogonal cluster shone sedately. Away from the guide rails, silhouetted in the starlight, dead trees sprawled at odd angles. Notwithstanding the high altitudes to which they’d been accustomed, their roots had not been enough to keep them cool in the complete absence of air. Patches of red moss had colonized the deadwood, but its faint light suggested that it was struggling.
A few saunters from the airlock, Yalda reached the pit. Lamplight from deep within the tunnel shimmered off the dust emerging from its mouth. At first glance it was easy for a planet-trained eye to see these motes as being borne on some kind of breeze, but then the thumb-sized fragments of rock scattered among the specks—moving more slowly, but just as freely—put an end to that illusion. Nothing was propelling the dust; it was flowing out of the tunnel for no other reason than its own chance collisions, inexorably driving it to occupy more space.
The guide rails, dating from before the launch, ran right past the tunnel’s entrance but couldn’t take her in. Yalda shifted her grip to a pair of ropes anchored to a series of wooden posts that veered off into the light. The floor of the tunnel sloped gently down into the rock; it was another half saunter before the roof was above her.
The haze of dust and grit thickened. When Yalda gripped the rope close to the posts, she could feel the vibration of the jackhammers. When she raised her hand, backlit motes of rock swirled away from it, driven by the air slowly escaping through the fabric. Fatima was right to be dissatisfied; it was a crude business when the only way they could cool themselves was to throw warm air away.
Gradually the rock face came into view, ringed by blazing sunstone lamps. Seven members of the team were working it with jackhammers, braced against the rock within their cages. Three taut guy ropes ran from the top of each cage to the tunnel wall, holding worker and cage in place against the tool’s relentless kick. Yalda had done that bone-shaking job for two stints, and then finally conceded that she was past it.
Four other workers were moving between the cages, clinging to the guy ropes and dragging the open mouths of their rubble sacks over the fragments of broken rock that were bouncing away from the hammers. It was impossible to scoop up all the debris, but their efforts kept the workspace more or less navigable.
Fatima spotted Yalda and waved to her, then turned her attention back to the rubble she was chasing. With the cooling bags covering everyone’s skin, communication was reduced to glances and hand gestures. If you brushed against someone you could exchange a few muffled words, but mostly the shifts were spent in a kind of tacit camaraderie, where the rhythms of the work itself—shifting the hammer cages, re-pinning the guy ropes—had to take the place of friendly banter.
There were already two full sacks waiting to be removed, the drawstrings at the top pulled closed and used to tie them to hooks on a pulley line that ran the full height of the tunnel. Yalda dragged the line around to bring the sacks within reach, slipped their drawstrings over her shoulders, then set off back to the mouth of the tunnel.
The catapult sat on the other side of the guide rails. Yalda put the rubble sacks on holding hooks at the side of the machine, grasped a nearby support post with her two left hands, then started turning the crank that ratcheted the catapult’s launching plate back along its rails, stretching a set of springs below. As the crank began stiffening its resistance, she could feel the support post working itself loose from the ground. Cursing, she shifted her lower hands to the catapult, dug a mallet out of the tool hold, and bashed the support post half a dozen times.
Yalda checked the post; it felt secure now. But as she bent to put the mallet back in the hold, she could feel a tiny rocking motion in the catapult itself: she’d managed to loosen some of the tapered wooden pegs that held its base against the ground.
Never mind; she’d deal with that later. She swung the first sack onto the launching plate, checked that it was properly closed and sitting squarely on the plate, then reached down and released the catch. The plate shot up a full stride before the springs stopped it, leaving the whole machine reverberating. The sack continued on, gliding away smoothly into the void. Yalda had had her qualms about disposing of the rock this way; who knew what demands their descendants might have for even the most mundane materials? But the effort that would have been needed to secure the rubble on the slopes—let alone cycle it all through the airlocks and stash it somewhere inside the mountain—was more than they could spare.