MiNRS (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Reality

The next night, I was
on watch, sitting a short way from the infirmary and reading my book. Oliver had just been shot during an attempted robbery. He was the robber, although he’d actually been forced into it by this jerk named Bill Sikes. Just as I got to the part where Sikes left Oliver for dead, I heard a loud rumbling echoing down from the direction of the elevator shafts.

I closed the book and stood up. The noise grew as I walked down the tunnel, listening intently. All of a sudden the rumble gave way to a tremendous thunderclap, and a cloud of dust flew at me, the force knocking me over.

Even as I flew backward, a thought hit me as hard as
the blast. The Landers had finished loading the ore and were detonating their bombs!

I scrambled to get up, and hurried in my digger back to camp. An avalanche of debris chased after me. Chunks of concrete and steel dinged off the rear of my digger. I turned on the radio and yelled, “Landers! Landers!” then ignited my disrupter and escaped into the rock.

We had an emergency plan already drawn up, which was basically to move camp as far away from the core-scraper as possible, then go back and see what had happened. I hoped I was wrong about the bombs because if that were the case, even moving camp wouldn’t save us.

Everyone was awake and moving by the time I returned. Elena ordered them to grab their belongings and get into a digger. She’d already loaded Alek into her cockpit. He was sitting there, staring ahead.

Maria had gathered Darcy in her cockpit. I gave Darcy a thumbs-up. She smiled weakly but was trembling.

We turned on our diggers and sped farther through Tunnel 3 down into the mines.

My digger was in the lead, and I alternated two more series of left and right turns. Then my light illuminated an enormous excavator, sitting idle before a wall of solid rock. I slammed on my brakes. We’d reached the end of the tunnel. I realized with a pang of sadness that this
was where the miners had stopped digging the night before the blackout party.

There weren’t even any lights, emergency or otherwise, this far down.

I flicked on my microphone. “Okay, we’ll set up the sleeping quarters near the excavator, where it’s dark. Mandeep and Finn will help set up camp. Elena and Jimmi, once you’ve dropped off your supplies, we should head back to the core-scraper.”

“Roger,” Elena said.

“Okay,” Jimmi said, but I could hear his quick breathing through the speaker.

Half an hour later we returned to the main entrance to the tunnels. The hall was completely filled with a wall of concrete, steel, glass, and garbage. It was like staring at a giant wall of junk. Small rivulets of dust and rubble trickled down the face. We could get to the other tunnels, but not back to the core-scraper.

“I don’t think this was caused by a bomb,” Elena said, pulling her digger close to the wall. “There’s no smoke, no fire, no cinders.”

I pulled up alongside. “So, a cave-in?”

She nodded. “A big one. Plus, there’s still breathable air here in the tunnels, which means the terra-forming equipment is still working.”

“We must have set off a chain reaction when we took out the twenty-eighth floor.” My insides twisted. This was my fault.

“Maybe. But I doubt it. The core-scraper had been seriously compromised by the original attack. There had to be a lot of weight pushing down on that floor already.”

“So it was just a matter of time before gravity finished the job.”

She pointed at the wall. “This forces our hand, you know.”

There was no way to go back inside the core-scraper or the hall. The cave-in had crushed the locker room, the infirmary, and the cafeteria, along with the refrigerated food inside.

“Why can’t we just dig through the rubble and get the stuff?” Jimmi asked, his eyes darting around nervously from us to the wall.

“Doesn’t work that way,” I said. “When you dig in solid rock, the stuff above you isn’t loose, so it doesn’t fall down. Digging through a cave-in is like digging in sand. It will collapse.”

Jimmi backed up a few feet. “It doesn’t look very stable,” he said, watching as small bits of debris came loose and fell to the floor, even sending pings of pebbles off the cockpit roof of my digger.

“Let’s head back to camp and figure out a plan,” Elena said. We backed up and turned around, heading down the tunnels in a line, Jimmi first, me in the rear.

I flicked off my radio and yelled, pounding my steering wheel. This was bad. In a flash, the only food we had left were the supplies we’d carried to the camp. We were going to need food and water, and we’d need them soon.

I’d been hoping to put off a real raid until it was absolutely necessary.

Now it was.

“It’s okay. A cave-in, but not an attack,” I said as I got out of my digger. Maria gave a huge sigh of relief. “But we’ve lost the infirmary and the cafeteria. I have a plan. Meeting in five minutes.”

I walked over to Darcy. “Can you keep an eye on Alek while we have our meeting?”

She gave a serious nod. “He and I want to make toys out of the used food cans.”

That was a bit of a surprise, a happy one. “Cool! Be careful you don’t cut yourself.”

She nodded again and toddled off to the beds.

Mandeep gave me a quick smile. “Alek still isn’t saying much, but he does seem to come alive a bit with Darcy and Finn.”

“That’s good.”

“And a little more good news. While you were gone, we took a look around. There’s actually a break room just up where the lights still work. No food, but they did hook up some water. And they predug holes for toilets.”

“Great. Thanks. Tell everyone we’ll use the break room for the meeting.” I walked off to see how well the predug toilets worked.

A few minutes later everyone had crowded into the room.

“Okay. The situation is this . . . ,” I began. “We just lost our main supply of supplies.”

There was a collective groan.

“There’s good news. There is a place filled with supplies from Earth and food from the farming zones here on Perses. The main storage depot.”

“Isn’t that where the Landers are?” Maria asked.

I nodded.

“A full-out attack could get us enough food for the rest of the Blackout,” Elena said.

“But if we attack, won’t they come after us?” Maria shuddered as she said this.

“We don’t even have any weapons,” Jimmi said, his voice rising.

“I know, I know. But when we say attack, we don’t mean an actual
attack
.” I stared at Elena, hoping my
use of
we
would make her understand the others still weren’t ready to think about a fight, let alone have one. “What we’re talking about here is more of a raid. We think there’s a way to get in and out without them knowing we were ever there.”

“How?”

Elena took a bit of concrete and began to draw a circle surrounded by small dots on the rock wall. “This is the layout of the main depot. The circle is the landing pad and the administrative buildings, the hospital, that sort of thing. These dots are storage silos. Like the core-scrapers, the silos are built down into the ground.” She drew a large X about a foot away. “And this is our location.”

I drew a line from the X to the circles.

“We can stay underground, undetected. We drive the diggers right underneath the storage silos, make a hole, climb up, grab some food, and head back out.”

“What if there are Landers inside the silo?”

I jumped in before Elena could say how much she looked forward to that. “There won’t be. I don’t think they know there are survivors, or they don’t care about us enough to come after us. So they won’t be guarding the food.”

“Which one is the food silo?”

Elena drew a large circle around the whole image. “I’ve gone with my dad on trips to the depots. The ones near the landing pad hold all the ore. The food storage is kept away from those to prevent contamination. But I’ve never actually been to the actual food silo.”

Pavel snorted. “Let me get this straight. We don’t even know where to look?”

“Not true,” I said, sensing a brewing argument. “The Landers have to eat. They have a large crew. We all saw that. So they have to feed them, and there is no way their ship is giving up storage space for food they can steal here.”

Elena nodded. “So, we monitor their movements around mealtimes, and see where they go on a regular basis.”

“How the heck do we do that?” Jimmi asked.

All eyes turned to me.

•   •   •

Elena and I sat in our diggers. We were the guinea pigs, in a way. If this raid worked, it would be the template for all future raids.

It was a risky plan. I couldn’t see Elena through the rock, but I knew she sat exactly five feet to my left. Our radio receivers were on, but our microphones were off. The Landers were only a few feet away, traversing the
ground right above us. The sensors in our diggers could pick up the vibrations from their vehicles. We’d slowly snuck underneath one of the roads that led to the main loading dock, where we assumed the Landers’ ship was sitting.

And we were waiting.

There were numerous roads that radiated out from the central landing pad. There would be lots of heavy traffic above us all day long, the transport vehicles moving ore from storage silos, and the processing machines, to the ship.

We were ignoring that noise, looking for something smaller. We’d been here for most of the day, and a pattern was emerging. An hour or two before each meal, a small vehicle, judging by the smaller vibrations, would set out and return on the road directly above us. It was a couple of hours before dinner, and if the sensors picked up the same vehicle, we were going to follow it.

The sensor on my dashboard began flashing. The smaller vehicle was making another trip. “Bingo,” I said.

I turned on my radio and tapped three times on the microphone.

Elena tapped two times back and restarted her disrupter. She drove straight ahead, staying right underneath the vehicle. It began to slow, and so did we.

I watched the screen. The vehicle continued for another thirty feet or so and then stopped. A few minutes later it started up again and headed back to the ship.

The cooks, if we were right, had just gotten their ingredients and were now heading back to prep dinner. I waited until the vibrations disappeared, then I tapped three more times on my microphone. Elena answered back.

I began to move forward and then dove down. After a drop of about thirty feet, I turned my nose up and approached the silo from the bottom. Elena was on standby in case something went wrong.

I didn’t want to think about that, partly because there was no real plan B.

If I got in, and we were right about the silo, she’d also break in but from the side.

My digger crept closer and closer, until the nose cut through the concrete floor of a dark room. The sensor on the nose cone kicked in and stopped the disrupter. I continued to drill ahead slowly, as quietly as I could, and emerged in the silo. As soon as my cockpit was above the level of the floor, I turned off the engine. I opened the latch a crack, not enough to turn on the light, and listened. There was no sound. The room was completely dark and very cold. There was the faint aroma of cooked food.

I smiled.

I crawled out of my cockpit and turned on my headlamp. A package of hams had caught on the disrupter. It was steaming and smelled delicious. I could hear the sizzle of the roasting ham but nothing else.

My stomach growled. But I wasn’t here to eat. I was here to be the Artful Dodger.

I reached back in my cockpit and turned my radio back on, tapped the mic three times, and then turned it off.

A few moments later the nose of Elena’s digger cut through the wall to my right. Then she spun around and backed in, opening the storage area at the back of her digger.

I quickly grabbed as much food and water as I could. I also grabbed the hams, stealing a small deliciously crispy bit of gristle before I placed them in Elena’s trunk.

Elena gave me a wave and then drove away slowly.

My nerves were on edge, half expecting the sound of the door opening, or somebody coming back because the cooks needed an extra onion. But I pushed all the fears out of my head and concentrated on covering our tracks. Luckily, the diggers didn’t leave much rubble in front of them, so I just needed to disguise the holes.

I slid a stack of boxes in front of the hole Elena’s
digger had made. Then I put a large crate next to my hole. I got in my digger, reversed down about ten feet, and then dug back up on an angle. Once my cockpit was even with the hole, I stopped and then flipped it open. Standing on the fuselage of the digger, I reached back into the room and grabbed the crate. I slid it, as best I could, over the hole my digger had cut in the floor.

I knew the holes would be found eventually, but I hoped we’d be able to stage a few more raids before that happened.

I turned my radio back on and tapped it three times. Elena tapped twice, and I heard her give a huge sigh of relief. I turned my mic off, and we headed away.

About five minutes into the return journey, I noticed a red blip on my screen, a warning signal.

It hadn’t been there thirty minutes before, and I was now following almost the exact same path back from the food depot.

As I watched, the red blip became more constant and brighter. My screen was now showing at least thirty red blips, all from the same place.

Had I stumbled on my dad’s warning beacon? This was too good to be true. I quickly noted the coordinates. Then the red lights shut off.

I shook my head, just in case I had hallucinated. How could they just disappear like that?

I turned on my radio. I hoped we were far enough away from the Landers that there was no way they’d hear us, even if they were listening for radio transmissions, which I doubted. Still, I kept it short.

“Miner Three to Miner Two. Detour. See you at home.”

“Roger, Miner Three. Miner Two out.” There was a pause, and then I was sure she added. “Be careful.” But it was barely a whisper.

I turned off my radio and headed for the location of the blips.