Spin 01 - Spin State by Chris Moriarty Page B

were little more than boulder piles.
    “So what happened?” Li asked the safety officer.
    Haas answered. “You never know with a flash fire. One guy takes out a ton and a half of prime crystal and goes home to his wife and kids without blinking. The next guy over barely taps a vein and the whole mine comes down on top of him. Every miner has his theories—and don’t get me started on the damn pit priests—but it’s all just guesswork, really.”
    “And you’re sure this was a flash fire, not just a regular coal fire?” “As sure as we are about anything.”
    The chamber was wide, perhaps twelve meters across, though it was hard to tell through the wreckage of pillars and timbering. It looked like a single mining breast had been opened out to give Sharifi’s team more room to work. Or like a particularly rich crystal deposit had lured the miners into robbing a central pillar and turning two separate chambers into one despite the well-known risks of pillar-robbing.
    The fire had burned the top layer of coal off the walls, baring the long edges of condensate beds, smoother and more crystalline than the coal around them. Li touched an outcropping of condensate. Felt its glassy polish, the warmth that radiated from it like body heat, the faint, familiar tugging at the back of her skull.
    She turned back to Haas and the safety officer. “Anything else I should see?” she asked, watching Haas in infrared.
    “That’s it,” he said. She saw his pulse spike on the words.
    “What about you?” she asked, turning to the safety officer.
    He delivered up the goods with a single glance toward the unlit depths of the chamber.
    Li walked back to the corner he’d glanced at and saw what she should have seen before: a large battered sheet of aluminum finished in safety-sign orange. It was the only spot of color in the chamber, the only thing that wasn’t caked black with coal smoke. Obviously, it had been put there since the fire.
    “Who put this here?” she asked, bending down to shove the heavy plate aside.
    “We did,” Haas answered. “So no one would fall down that.”
    Li looked at the place where the plate had been—and found herself staring down a well shaft.
    It was less than a meter wide. Ropy bundles of unmarked electrical cables curved over the lip and dropped into the darkness. The water started six meters below the lip of the hole, and it was as black as only mine water can be.
    “Anything else you’d like to tell me about this?”
    “No,” Haas said. “Sharifi dug it. I assume. She didn’t bother to get permission.” He sounded irritated that he hadn’t caught her at it while she was still alive.
    Li scrabbled around on the floor until she found a scorched length of wire long enough to reach the water table. Then she dipped it in, pulled it out, and wiped it along the bare skin of her arm. Her skinbots flared briefly, swirling around the droplets, then subsided. Nothing too nasty in there, apparently. “Okay then,” she said, and started unlacing her boots.
    The safety officer figured out what she was doing before Haas did. “You really don’t want to go down there, ma’am.”
    “Humor me.”
    “No fucking way!” Haas said.
    He reached out and jerked her back from the hole by one arm. Li wrapped her free hand around his and squeezed just hard enough to remind him she was wired.
    “I appreciate your concern for my safety,” she said. “But I really will be fine. Or was there another reason you didn’t want me to go down there?”
    He backed off fast at that.
    “Lend me your goggles,” she told the safety officer when she’d stripped to her shorts and T-shirt and tightened her rebreather’s harness. He handed her the goggles with a dazed expression on his face. She gave them a spit and a rub, put them on, and pressed them into her eye sockets to get good suction.
    “Okay,” she said around the mouthpiece. “Back in ten and counting. Unless I do something stupid. In which case