Planet of Pain (18 page)

‘They like lording it over others,' she muttered, making sure none were within earshot. ‘Gives ‘em a feeling of power. Some try to bully you into going to bed with them. Up in the complex, I mean. No one's got the time or the energy to fuck down here.'

Tunnel D21 was a double, and the second worker, a woman, arrived just moments after they did. ‘I'm Dee,' she said.

Ruth nodded. ‘Ruth. This is Jo, a trainee. Just stand back and watch what we do, Jo, okay?'

Side by side the two women dragged their tools down the rock face, causing the soft stone to flake and fall to the floor. They chiselled away strip after strip, working astonishingly quickly considering the conditions, which were about as bad as it could possibly get. Besides the crushing heat the chiselling raised clouds of fine white dust that got everywhere; in nose and mouth, making you cough; in eyes and hair. It stuck to skin that was wet with perspiration and yet, despite all that, the two women worked feverishly, as though their lives depended on it. Ruth's effort was doubly amazing when one considered that she'd had precious little sleep and was tired before she even started.

The pile of rubble at their feet began to mount up, to the point where it was starting to impede their progress. ‘Clear!' Ruth yelled at the top of her voice, and seconds later Jo heard a rumbling noise, and looked behind her to see an old man, thin as sticks, pushing a wheelbarrow. Working around the feet of the two women, who never paused for a second, he scooped the stone rubble into the wheelbarrow with his hands, and rumbled off again.

‘You get that job when you can't do this any more,' Ruth said over her shoulder, gasping from her exertions. ‘Hands not steady enough.'

Jo didn't understand why you needed steady hands to hack away at a rock face, but didn't seek clarification. Ruth needed her breath for working, not answering nonessential questions.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she started, for she hadn't heard anyone approach. It was one of the trustees, and he motioned for her to move aside, and stood where she'd been standing. Neither Ruth nor Dee glanced back, but their body language told Jo they knew he was there.

‘Strip,' he said after watching the pair for a while.

Ruth was naked, but Dee, like Jo, was wearing pants. At the trustee's command she stopped scraping, hooked her thumbs into the top of her pants, and pushed them down to her knees. She stood up straight, and the trustee lashed her half a dozen times across the buttocks. She flinched at each stroke, but made not a sound.

‘Work faster,' the overseer said.

‘Yes sir,' she said. ‘Thank you, sir.' She pulled up her pants, and then it was Ruth's turn. He gave her six strokes also, followed by the same admonition, and Ruth duly thanked him. As the women resumed work the trustee turned to Jo.

‘You start tomorrow?' he asked, looking her up and down.

‘Yes, sir.'

He nodded, and a faint smile creased his lips. ‘No doubt I'll be seeing you then.' He walked off.

‘Shithead,' Dee muttered under her breath, after glancing back to make sure he really had gone.

‘That was Squires,' Ruth told Jo. ‘He's probably the worst of the bunch. Don't ever cross him, or any trustee, come to that. They can make your life a misery.'

After that they worked in silence, their routine broken only when the water orderly arrived. They were each given a beaker of water, which they drank greedily. Jo felt a little guilty as she hadn't done anything, but Ruth told her to make the most of it.

‘You'll earn it soon enough, don't worry,' she said.

Then it was back to work for the two of them, and back to watching for Jo. Dizzy from the heat, and wheezing from the dust, she knew she was in hell.

 

The first find was slow in coming. The rubble shifter, as Jo privately named him, took countless loads away, and the orderly brought them water every half hour. Squires paid them three more visits, giving Ruth and Dee six strokes each time, along with the gratuitous instruction to work faster. Then, without warning, Ruth stopped and beckoned Jo forward.

‘See this?' she said, pointing to a discoloured patch in the stone. ‘It usually means there's a crystal just below he surface. Not always, but usually.'

She carried on scraping, more gently now, and then she stopped again. ‘See it? Just there.' Jo saw a tiny speck of glasslike material peeping out of the stone. ‘That's a crystal,' Ruth said with relief. ‘Now all I have to do is dig it out.'

She reversed the tool and began jabbing carefully with the spike to loosen the rock around the thing. As she worked she explained that this was the trickiest part of the whole job. Crystals were very brittle and shattered easily. A broken one was no use to anybody, so you didn't get credited unless they were in one piece.

Gradually the crystal was revealed. Ruth had slowed right down and was working with the utmost care now. She eased the spike under one end and levered… ever so gently. The crystal popped free, and a smile lit up her face.

‘Here,' she said, handing it to Jo. ‘For God's sake don't drop it.'

It didn't look like much: just a lump of dull blue-green glass, oblong in form, about half the size of her little finger. It certainly didn't seem worth all the sweat and toil and suffering needed to extract the damn thing. She returned it to its finder, who promptly popped it into her mouth and moved it with her tongue into her cheek.

‘Where you find one you sometimes find more,' she mumbled, by way of explanation. ‘Saves time to dig ‘em all out together.'

She carried on scraping, but it was soon obvious there weren't any more, and she spat the crystal into her palm. ‘Come on.' She hurried back through the access tunnels with Jo trailing along in her wake, until they came to a chamber at a tunnel junction. Here a trustee sat at a desk, upon which was a small circular plate with a digital readout, and a standard com panel. Ruth handed the man the crystal, which he set down carefully on the plate. Jo saw the readout flicker into life.

‘Fifteen grams,' the man announced. ‘Name?'

‘Ruth Faulkner.'

He entered it, along with the crystal's weight, into the panel. The two women then returned to the rock face almost at a trot.

‘Hey,' Jo gasped, suffering badly in the stifling heat, ‘why the rush?'

‘Time matters,' Ruth said, ‘that's why.'

At the end of the shift she explained, the person with the lowest total weight would be punished: the dreaded ‘low-weight reprimand'. Jo thought about this, and realised that having to explain everything she did was slowing Ruth down, and her very presence as an observer might mean her tutor was the one punished. With a flash of insight she also realised that was why Ruth had been less than thrilled to have a newcomer assigned to her in the first place. She'd known it would be like this.

‘Don't panic,' Ruth said, misinterpreting her concerned expression. ‘You'll be given a few days to get up to speed. You don't need to start worrying about low-weight reprimands for a while.'

It was some consolation, but not a lot.

 

 

 

 

When the trustee came around again Jo saw it was a different man. He enquired about progress, and was informed that only one crystal had been found since the start of the shift. He watched them work for a while, then went away without lashing anybody.

‘That's O'Hara,' Ruth said. ‘He's okay.'

‘What happened to Squires?' Jo asked.

‘Gone. They change round every two hours.'

‘Luckily for us,' Dee added.

O'Hara returned a short while later and told them to transfer to S4 and S12 in section nine, and from the relieved way in which Ruth and Dee received the order, Jo knew it was good news. The new workings were singles, so Ruth and Jo said goodbye to Dee at the tunnel branch point and went their separate ways.

‘This is better,' Ruth said, as she started hacking away once more. ‘They've been pulling crystals out of this section by the bucketful.'

Ten minutes later she gave a yelp of delight and then, to Jo's consternation, she held out the digging tool. ‘Here,' she said, ‘you get it out.'

‘Not me,' Jo said, taking a step back. ‘You must be miles behind the others already, and I'm bound to break the thing.'

‘You've got to learn,' Ruth insisted. ‘You're on your own tomorrow, remember? Come on, lieutenant, you can do this.'

She wouldn't take no for an answer, and Jo reluctantly took the spike from her. She chipped away at the stone while Ruth offered a constant stream of advice. Slowly the crystal was revealed, and it was a lot bigger than the first.

‘That's it,' Ruth said. ‘You're doing great. Now just ease it free.'

Jo pushed the spike under the end and levered carefully, holding her breath as she did so. She heard a crack and half the crystal fell out on the floor, leaving half still embedded in the rock. ‘Oh no,' she groaned, ‘I'm sorry, Ruth. I'm so sorry.'

‘Hey, don't worry,' Ruth said. ‘Everybody breaks their first one. Have a go with the flat end and see what else is under there. And cheer up; it's not as if they can stop our wages, is it?'

She was making light of it, but Jo could see how anxious she was, with the threat of the low-weight reprimand looming ever closer. Jo took a deep breath and began to scrape at the rock, and sure enough another crystal was soon revealed, so she swapped to the spiked end and cautiously exposed it.

‘Oh no,' she muttered, ‘don't make me do this.' It was a beauty, bigger even than the last. Ruth was eyeing it longingly, and Jo knew how much she wanted to take the tool from her and extract it herself. But she didn't.

‘You can do it,' she said. ‘I know you can do it.'

With shaking hands Jo prised at the thing, dreading to here that awful
ching
she'd heard the last time. The crystal didn't budge, and she was just too terrified to press harder.

‘What the fuck, Jo,' Ruth whispered. ‘Just go for it.'

Jo bit her lip and pressed down, and the crystal popped free, whole and beautiful, and slid into Ruth's waiting hands.

‘What did I tell you?' she said with a grin. ‘You're a natural!'

 

Jo went alone to have the crystal weighed while Ruth carried on chiselling. It weighed thirty-five grams, and was credited to Ruth once Jo explained that she was a trainee. She hurried back to find Ruth hard at work; there was no time for questions now. True, they were doing better, but Jo was worried it had come too late. The shift was half gone, almost, and Ruth had exactly fifty grams to her credit. Her grim expression told it all: she needed crystals, and she needed them now.

Work was interrupted briefly at mid-shift by a mandatory fifteen-minute break. They were again given water, and Ruth explained that the engineers would fetch more roof props during this period should they be needed.

‘Have they ever had a cave-in?' Jo asked, looking up at the roof, suddenly fearful for a whole new reason.

‘Sure,' Ruth said. ‘We've had two in the six months I've been here. I think it's six months, anyway. You tend to lose track of time in this place.'

The klaxon sounded to signify that the rest period was over, and Ruth went back to work. The new trustee paid them a visit soon after and told Jo to stand aside, Ruth turning at the sound of his voice, a stricken look on her face.

‘Yes,' he sneered, ‘I'm back. Assume the position.'

Ruth dropped the digging tool and turned to face the wall. She leaned forward and placed her hands flat on the rock face, arms wide, feet together. The trustee drew back his arm and struck her with his lash across her shoulders. He continued to strike her, lashing her shoulders, back, buttocks, thighs, and calves as he moved slowly down her body. There must have been fully two-dozen strokes in all, and Ruth was gasping and squirming before he was halfway through.

‘Stand still!' he snapped, giving her a few extra strokes for good measure. Then he coiled up the lash, stepped forward and put his arm about her, his hand seeking her groin. Ruth groaned but stayed in place. The man fingered her, whispering in her ear as he did so. Finally he stepped back, then turned and walked off, a satisfied smirk on his face. Slowly, stiffly, Ruth squatted to retrieve the tool, but Jo snatched it from her and began to hack furiously with it, taking her anger and frustration out on innocent rock.

‘What the hell was that all about?' she asked, slamming down with the tool so hard it jarred her arms.

‘I know him,' Ruth said wearily. ‘From before all this, I mean. He's a slimy bastard, name of Karlyn. We served together on the same ship. He was always chasing after the female crew, and never taking “no” for an answer. He grabbed me one time and I decked him, then reported him to the captain for good measure. Karlyn got demoted, so ever since they made him a trustee he's had it in for me. They transferred him to green shift a month ago, and I couldn't stop smiling for a week. Now it looks like he's back.'