Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 (12 page)

Gareth L. Powell

illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey

Microcosmos
(222)

Nina Allan

Miles to Isengard
(220)

Leah Bobet

illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Monetized
(220)

Jason Stoddard

illustrated by Paul Drummond

Mother of Champions
(222)

Sean McMullen

illustrated by Anne Stone-Coyote

No Longer You
(224)

Katherine Sparrow & Rachel Swirsky

illustrated by Mark Pexton

Saving Diego
(221)

Matthew Kressel

illustrated by David Gentry

Shucked
(224)

Adrian Joyce

illustrated by Dave Senecal

Silence & Roses
(223)

Suzanne Palmer

illustrated by Mark Pexton

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Best
(220)

Eugie Foster

illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso

Spy vs Spy
(220)

Neil Williamson

Sublimation Angels
(224)

Jason Sanford

illustrated by Paul Drummond

The Festival of Tethselem
(224)

Chris Butler

illustrated by Martin Bland

The Godfall's Chemsong
(224)

Jeremiah Tolbert

illustrated by Martin Bland

The Killing Streets
(225)

Colin Harvey

illustrated by Mark Pexton

The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai
(223)

Eric Gregory

illustrated by Arthur Wang

Unexpected Outcomes
(222)

Tim Pratt

Ys
(222)

Aliette de Bodard

illustrated by Mark Pexton

[Back to Table of Contents]

Lappet worked the mineral vein by hand. There were machines, of course, but they weren't always suitable. This was a narrow, rotten course of pyrochlore, loaded with niobium and tantalum. It corkscrewed through the asteroid like a drunk on a crotch rocket. Machines didn't work with too many serial vector changes. A rockhead with a hot tip and a trowel, on the other hand, could follow it just fine.

She didn't mind, really. Outside work kept her away from the habitat. Ever since Malibu died, Alain had been insufferable. Tanielu had been a shit from the beginning of the tour.

The mining crews didn't try to bring in bulk ores—siderophilic chunks of mantle, for example. Those were tagged with screamer beacons. Their job was to locate and harvest the rare minerals, valuable material in small quantities that didn't show up well on remote scans or fast sensor sweeps. Anything with something else inside it had a chance of being important.

This pyrochlore was the fabled ‘something else'. The loose vein was shifting again, trending into the third octant from local-z orientation. Time to cut another length of access tunnel. She clipped her hot tip and her trowel to the capture bag and carefully worked them down her back tunnel to the closest void. Lappet's handheld rock burner was stowed there.

Their rock, (217496) 2078 hj3, was a chunky mass of carbonatite—crustal material, an unusual find with a high potential for rare earths and a number of scarce metals. It had several voids, which was also unusual. Out in the Belt, rocks without good structural integrity tended to become smaller rocks.

Kind of like what happens to people
, she thought. Alain was flying apart. Tanielu had never been anything but a monobloc of shitheadedness. Lappet wondered what that theory meant for her.

The good thing about the voids was she didn't have to back all the way up the tunnel every time she needed an equipment change. The usual alternative was to burn out a stowage cave, but the company strongly discouraged that. Ceres Mineral Resources took the view that extracting bubbles of hot rock from their precious real estate was a health and safety risk. More to the point, they were afraid of slagging something of material value.

Rockheads such as Lappet were not considered especially valuable.

She was still just as happy to be down here by herself. If she'd been running one of the remote burners, she'd be back in the hab sharing oxygen with a couple of very difficult men.

Lappet shifted the handheld burner back up her access tunnel. It was a heavy beast, massing over 100 kilograms. Tiny reaction jets positioned and stabilized the burner when it was running, but she wasn't supposed to move it while there was any power to the systems. She'd seen a couple of burner accidents early on. That was one safety precaution almost everyone bought into.

She aimed the burner roughly along her desired line of cut. There was an imager mounted to the handlebars to check the cutting path for voids, insertions or boundaries in the rock matter itself.

The imager caused the handlebars to vibrate slightly. Her faceplate offered a data feed, but Lappet concentrated on the unit's built-in display. An even distribution on radargram would mean a clean cut. Anything else would mean wrestling the damned burner back down to the last void and going in by hand. She wouldn't even use the hot tip if there were another void ahead. It would be all HERO—hand extraction of rubble overhang. The problem with voids was that they might contain gas. Cutting into one with a handheld burner carried a potential for more excitement than any rockhead wanted to meet on an outside shift.

The radargram showed a substantial void, with a metallic inclusion to boot. “Damn,” hissed Lappet. She'd be half her shift cutting into that one the hard way. On the other hand, she could bring up all her stowage once she'd opened up the space.

Her earbud whined. “Hard vac three, do you need assistance?” It was Tanielu. He must have been monitoring her audio feed.

Tanielu could be rough and ready whenever it pleased him to be, but when it came to Lappet he was nothing but by-the-book, all the time. She had enough infraction notices from him to fill a kit bag by way of proof.

"Negative, rock control,” Lappet said.

"Then cut the chatter. Rock control out."

"Right. Hard vac three out.”
You anal purge valve
, she mouthed into her faceplate. Though there was certainly a code for that buried somewhere in the company man pages, her saying it out loud wouldn't have been so much by the book.

There was no helping what lay before her. Lappet shifted the burner back down her access tunnel, then set to work the old fashioned way.

There was a reason rockheads still called themselves miners, even out here in the deep dark amid their cocoons of remote operating controls and life support and company regulations. In the end, it still came down to shovel and pick work.

Lappet labored three hours in silence punctuated only by the ragged sound of her own breathing. The carbonatite was fairly soft—it broke easily and she could push it back by hand. The trick in such a small tunnel was removing the spoil with a timing that balanced between efficiency of effort and not blocking herself in.

All in a shift's work.

Flexors and tensors in the fabric of her skinsuit braced against her muscles so she could move in the asteroid's microgravity. The tools seemed to be extensions of her arms—dagger sharp fingers and shovel-bladed hands. It was work, in the purest sense, combining the physical strain of gym time back in one of the rock ports and the thoughtful process of setting her next strike, pulling her next load.

Based on her reading of the radargram, now cached in her faceplate's processors for reference, Lappet needed to shift less than three steres of rock to open her tunnel into the void. Her dig plan was to work the full two meters of access tunnel, rather than open an exploratory shaft. She would only have bothered with that if she'd thought there was any serious chance of a gas outflow. The three other voids she'd opened so far following the pyrochlore run had been vacuum.

The metallic inclusion was more on her mind. The signature didn't make a lot of sense—too dense and small to be an ore vein. She assumed it was a nodule that had gotten caught in the original lava flows which laid down this carbonatite, back when the rocks were still part of a planet.

Sometimes she wondered if they remembered those days, with slow silicate thoughts. Did rocks know regret?

"Lappet."

It took her a moment to realize she was hearing Alain's voice in her earbuds.

"Busy here, rock control,” Lappet said, dismissing her fantasies of thinking rocks. She was close to breaking in. Dust fogged her lights. She needed to run a sweeper soon before her sight lines were too occluded.

"Tanielu's asleep.” Alain sounded dreamy, unfocused.

She leaned against the shaft of her Robbins shovel and let her heart rate settle. The slight plucking sensation of the skinsuit wicking away her sweat was pleasant. “Alain, maybe you need to sleep, too."

"You've been out a long time.” There was definitely a sing-song quality to his voice. “Come home before I lock the door and turn out the lights."

That
was a threat. “Alain...” Damn Malibu for getting himself killed. Who could have known his love was the lock that kept Alain's head case tendencies shut down?

Well, the Ceres Mineral Resources psych group, for one.

Lappet thought for a few moments. He couldn't lock her out, not literally.
All
airlocks opened from the outside with a purely mechanical by-pass. Rescue was more important than piracy. Even to rock pirates. She was suited up for vac now, so whatever turning out the lights meant to Alain, it wouldn't affect her immediately. Unless he dumped the life support or purged the fuel cells, there wasn't much she couldn't recover from.

So it wasn't a threat, just an annoyance. At least to her. Some stir of conscience troubled Lappet. “Alain, can I talk to Tanielu?"

"My name is rock control, sweetie."

"In that case, my name is hard vac three.” She toggled the haptics in her left glove and made Tanielu's handsign. The habitat's central systems would send him an alarm. He'd be pissed at her for waking him up, but whatever color Alain's sky was at the moment, it wasn't the honest black of space. Someone needed to pay attention.

Alain's voice was jittery now. Had he been crying? “Well, OK. But come back soon. I miss you."

"Hard vac three out,” Lappet said brusquely. Alain was on another Malibu jag. Stupid luck was the leading cause of mortality among rockheads. Human error ran a close second. The company classed those two together, though any miner who ever shipped out of a rock port could swear to the power of luck both good and bad.
Psych-outs were the third cause
, her conscience whispered.

She was out here, Alain was in there, and Tanielu could handle him.

As long as her flow was interrupted, Lappet ran the sweeper. When she'd cleared much of the dust she resumed working her face. The pyrochlore awaited.

Lappet broke into the void a few minutes later. There was a swirl in the dust. Possibly some small amount of gas
had
been trapped within. More likely it was volatiles condensing in the energy input of her lights.

She worked the opening until it was large enough to peer through. This void looked just like the others had—a relatively smooth-walled bubble in the original igneous flow which had formed this rock bit. There was a dark patch on the far wall, over a meter away from her breakthrough. She couldn't see how high up the void went.

There were probes for this sort of measurement, but in any case she meant to complete the process of extending her digging. This was mining, not science. Lappet used her number three recoilless pick to widen the opening until it was large enough to serve as the next frame of her tunnel. She took another run with the sweeper, then stepped inside.

The void ran almost three meters along her current y-axis. It was slightly over two meters across. Lappet aimed her lights upward. A darker line across the nominal ceiling showed the transit of the pyrochlore vein. She then looked at the patch on the opposite wall.

It was metal. A mass of metal about the size of a small child, with planed and curved surfaces and a regularity of form which began to frighten her.

Worked metal,
inside
an asteroid. With the same strange gray-green sheen of the caltrops which were found from time to time in caves and voids all around the Belt. Everyone said those were crystals of some kind.
This
was undeniably a made thing.

"Rock control,” she whispered. “We have a problem."

Lappet backed out slowly, careful not to touch anything else inside the void, or indeed the tunnel. One by one she turned out her lights.