Jewel (16 page)

Spy
? she asked.
Do you know why the Ymirians
picked this world to mine and what they were initially looking for?

Your initial supposition was correct, Luxora
, the
bioware informed her.
The Ymirian miners arrived hoping to find armenium.
Would you like me to show you or read you the documentary evidence?

“It’s really a shame,” Erik said. “A thousand people trying
to make a better life for themselves—some of them even bringing their
families—and it all ends in ashes.”

Then how did they pick this star system
? Jewel asked.

There was an unusually long pause on the part of her
bioware.

Spy?

I’m searching for the requested information
, Spy told
her,
but am finding no results for my query. There are several firewalls I
have not penetrated yet. Perhaps the data is contained behind one of them.

Find it
! Jewel ordered.
That information could be
more important than everything else we’ve found in this system. If the Ymirians
figured out a way to predict which planets had raw armenium deposits…

The information would also be more dangerous than
anything else we’ve found in this system
, Spy observed.
The Armenites
would do anything to keep that secret from getting into foreign hands.

“Do you think Strongheart would object to me going down and
taking a look around?” Erik asked.

“What?” Distracted as she was by her conversation with Spy,
Jewel wasn’t certain she’d heard him correctly.

Ana, apparently, was under no such misapprehension. “Have
you gone absolutely insane, Erik? Or do you just feel the need to show off for
your younger girlfriend?”

Ana’s statement immediately set off alarms in Spy’s
programming.
Why does the engineer think you are the executive officer’s
girlfriend? Miner Strongheart also implied an inappropriate relationship exists
between you and the executive officer.

Oh, for Stars’ sake, Spy, isn’t it obvious? Erik is sweet
on me and Ana is jealous
, Jewel thought back in completely true sentiments.
Without waiting for Spy to respond again, she threw herself back into the human
conversation, skipping over Ana’s distraction to the more important issue. “Why
would you even ask that, Erik? Have you ever been down on a deep-water dive
before?”

“No,” Erik said. “That’s part of the reason I’d like to do
it. Have you?”

“Yes,” Jewel confirmed, “when I was twenty standards old.
Believe me, these are not the conditions you want to undertake a sightseeing
tour in. It’s damn dangerous under the best of circumstances, and Strongheart’s
people are working hard down there.”

Erik did not appear convinced. With typical alpha male
machismo, the reference to danger seemed to encourage, rather than discourage.
“Maybe I could help. They’re not really mining—just scooping up ore and filling
cargo containers.”

The manual method was a particularly slow and inefficient
way of harvesting the ore. The mining platforms had sucked the material up
through a great tube, depositing the ore into a vast hold from which they had
run it through a series of filters before pouring it into the cargo containers
they had found on the
Genesis
. Unfortunately, with the platforms at the
bottom of the sea they didn’t have that capability anymore.

“This isn’t a job for amateurs,” Jewel insisted. “Working
that deep—there’s no light that you don’t bring with you, and despite your
suit, you can feel the water pressing in all around you. It’s not like in
space. It’s a very claustrophobic experience.”

Jewel didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, but one of her
friends on the trip had. Nefta had started to lose her mind about half way down
to the ocean floor and her bioware had had to sedate her and return her, via
her suit controls, to the surface. It had not been pretty and Spy had responded
by trying to sedate Jewel as well—which had triggered Jewel’s own psychoses
surrounding losing control.

Warning
! Spy blurted.
Fatality in the Jörmungadr
facility!

Fatality
? Jewel gasped in her mind. At least she
hoped it had been in her mind.

“What’s wrong?” Erik asked her. “Your skin just blanched.
Are you all right?”

Void! Void! Void!
She did not want even Erik to know
that her bioware was operating again.
Find out what’s happening,
she
ordered Spy. To Erik and Ana she said, “I don’t know, I feel weak all of a
sudden.”

To add verisimilitude to her story, she staggered a step and
reached out to grab Ana for support. No one would believe she’d do that without
good cause.

Erik came up and steadied her with a hand on her elbow.

Faceplate seals have blown on Miner Intrepid
Strongheart’s helmet
, Spy reported.
Seawater has penetrated his
environment suit. All vital signs save brainwave activity are null.

“Stars above,” Jewel whispered. She’d spoken audibly this
time, but the shock of the news was too great. She couldn’t adequately censor
herself.
Please don’t tell me that was Glorious Strongheart’s son
, she
told Sapphire.

Negative. The deceased miner is Glorious Strongheart’s
younger brother.

Oh, no.

Instructions not understood.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Erik suggested. “Is there any
pain? How is your chest?”

Jewel’s com-link buzzed. “Tanngrisnir, this is Jörmungandr
II. We have a medical emergency. Please have Dr. Brüning standing by.”

Jewel lifted the com unit to her mouth while Erik got on his
own to call back to Snója. “Understood, Jörmungandr II, we’re summoning Dr.
Brüning now.” She felt like an ass because she knew it was too late, but she
asked the expected question anyway. “What is the emergency? Is there anything
else we can do, Jörmungandr II?”

There was a long moment of hesitation. “You might try
praying, Ms. Aurora. Because I don’t think anything else can help Intrepid
now.”

* * * * *

It took three hours to get Intrepid Strongheart back to the
surface, but Spy reported he’d been irrevocably dead in seventeen minutes. The
cold water had numbed his body sufficiently to provide a slight extra margin of
survival time for the brain, but the miners hadn’t been able to maneuver him to
the still working winch quickly enough to make a difference. Nobody could last
three hours without oxygen.

Glorious had accompanied the body to the surface and was
talking now about his brother, although it wasn’t clear if he was actually
talking to anyone else. Dawil Kwon had brought out Dr. Brüning in the fast
boat,
Huninn
, but the physician hadn’t spent more than a minute
examining the dead man. After the most cursory of appraisals he’d pronounced
Intrepid dead and returned to
Huninn
to wait for his ride back to Snója.

“He was a good man, a canny miner,” Glorious muttered.
“Departed in the deep the way he would have wanted.”

The stout, squat man had his helmet off and was leaning over
the back rail, staring into the dark, rolling waters.

Jewel stepped up behind him and rested her hand on his
shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Strongheart,” she said. “Is there anything we can
do to help you now? Are there services you’d like performed?”

Glorious shook his head, not rejecting the idea but looking
as if he were trying to clear his thoughts. “First off, we’re going to need
more new seals,” he said. “I’d prefer to work on the suits down in the air
pockets—at least for basic maintenance. The less time we can spend moving up
and down from the surface, the more time we have to gather ore.”

His words shocked Jewel, and she wasn’t the only one.

“You’re not going to keep mining, are you?” Ana asked. “It’s
only been a week and your brother is dead. How many more people are you going
to lose if you keep going down there?”

Ana’s arguments made no impact on Glorious. “We can’t stop
now,” he told them. “There’s ore spilled out all over the ocean floor down
there—easily recovered. Besides, Intrepid wouldn’t want us to quit. He’d want
us to keep at it—expanding his share. He’s got a family to provide for, you
know.”

“But the seals—” Jewel started to say.

“Oh, we’ll have to be a bit more careful, but have you any
genuine idea how valuable that armenium is? And my crew and I are now the only
men outside of the Armenite Hegemony with any experience at all in mining it.”

Jewel didn’t agree that picking rocks up off the ocean floor
was the same thing as mining, but that certainly wasn’t going to convince
Glorious to change his mind.

He obviously sensed her uncertainty. “Besides,” he cajoled
her, “it will be at least another three weeks before Captain Kiara returns with
the
Euripides
from picking up all of those space buoys. You don’t want
us to stop before then, do you?”

Actually Jewel really did, but she was smart enough to
realize she wasn’t going to get her way. She hoped that Glorious wouldn’t have
cause to regret this decision, but she knew in her heart that he would.

She wandered away from Glorious, back to the warmth of the
main cabin. Erik was there, talking to the captain on the
Euripides
.
Time lag. Com-link messages were limited to the speed of light, which meant
that there was a lot of delay between each side of the conversation, which let
Erik turn to her without being rude to the captain.

“Hey, stranger, how are you holding up? You were hit really
hard by Intrepid’s death, weren’t you?”

Jewel shrugged and sank into the other seat in the cabin.
“I’m doing okay, I guess. I mean, it’s not like I even really knew the man. But
it’s…” She hesitated, wondering if Erik would understand. “It was all so
unnecessary. I mean, we knew this was going to happen. We know it’s going to
happen again. Why are those guys down there? All the money in the world isn’t
worth what they’re risking.”

Erik listened to her very seriously and didn’t stop looking
when she stopped talking.

“What?” Jewel asked him. “What is it?”

The captain’s voice crackled over the com unit. “If he
doesn’t want a funeral service, then let him get back to work. I don’t
understand the problem. Kiara out.”

Erik looked at the com unit in his hand for a moment, then
lifted it to his mouth and said, “Understood. Gunnarson out.”

He put down the com unit and returned his attention to
Jewel. He stared at her.

She embarrassed herself by beginning to squirm
uncomfortably. “You’re doing it again,” she told him. “What is it?”

Erik shook his head. “I suppose it doesn’t actually matter.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“It doesn’t matter which story is true. I like you. I’d
support you either way. I’m just trying to understand why Intrepid’s death
bothers you so much.”

“And I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jewel told
him. “Why doesn’t Intrepid’s death bother you?”

“Oh it does,” Erik assured her. “I’m completely with you on
this one. I think we reached too far in this system and that Intrepid’s death
is indefensible. If it had been up to me, we wouldn’t have tried to mine the
armenium at all. I’d have slipped the location of this moon to the Ymirian
Government in Exile and let them use it as they see fit.

“But you I can’t figure out. If you’re who you say you are—a
young woman caught up in her parents’ scheme to become a Cartelite—then using
Intrepid to help you get what you want shouldn’t bother you at all. And if
you’re who Brüning says you are—a genuine Cartelite in your own right—then one
poor miner—or a thousand of them—should matter even less. So why do you keep
arguing that we should stop trying to increase our fortunes and worry about the
human cost?”

Embarrassment colored Jewel’s cheeks—a problem that might
have been less noticeable if her parents had left her with her natural skin
tone. “Is that what you really think of the Cartelites?”

“It’s what everyone thinks of them,” Erik assured her.
“They’re greedy, capitalist industrialists who care more about a single solar
than they do about a roomful of impoverished schoolchildren.”

Jewel’s embarrassment turned to shame. The worst part was
that she couldn’t even argue that Erik was exaggerating. She’d had far too many
peers who felt exactly as Erik said they did. Still, she had to say something.
“I guess that proves that I’m not a Cartelite then, because I don’t think money
is worth dying over.”

“I know, you said that before,” Erik reminded her. “What I’m
trying to figure out is do you feel that way because you’ve always had so much
money you’ve never had to worry about it? Or is it because you’ve always had so
little you learned to do without it?”

He stood up. “You don’t have to answer that. It doesn’t
really matter to me either way. I’m just enjoying trying to figure you out.”

He picked up his cold-weather coat and brushed at something
on the front of it.

The whole front of the garment sloughed off. “What in the
Void?”

Jewel sprang to her feet and ran over to figure out what had
happened. The winter weather gear consisted of five layers of a tough synthetic
compound that trapped heat against the body, moisture outside, and still let
the wearer’s skin breathe. The top three layers of Erik’s coat had fallen to
the floor in a mess that looked little like cloth anymore. The fourth layer was
coming apart almost as they watched. “How did this happen?” she asked.

In sudden recognition of her own potential danger, Jewel
looked down at her own coat and found the outer layer of her garment crumbling
away. The damage wasn’t nearly as far along as that in Erik’s coat, but it was
happening just the same.

She looked back at Erik. “How?” she asked him.

The expression on his face made it obvious he had no idea.