Rift in the Races (24 page)

She nodded, looking down at her hands. Roberto’s com badge sounded the tone again. The tone was immediately followed by the call over the intercom: “Lieutenant Levi to Shuttle Bay Two. Lieutenant Levi, report to Shuttle Bay Two.”

“See you tonight,” he said and ran off down the corridor.

Orli watched him go. The breath that followed was forlorn, but a smile followed it. She was certain that without him she would have lost her mind long ago. She said a silent thanks to the universe for providing her a friend like him, and then she set herself back to work. It would keep her mind busy until tonight, when she would talk to Altin about helping her escape. No matter what Roberto said, she had no intention of serving aboard a spaceship again. But she could help the cause from where she was. At least for now.

An hour later found her making her way down into the dark mines that were rapidly expanding beneath Tinpoa Base. A veritable maze to her mind, she gripped the tablet with her map display as if it were life support.

She stepped off the rickety lift into the coffee-black dirt of Mine Shaft A. She could smell dust and the smoke from hot drill bits and hard-pressed industrial lubricants. The calls of men echoed dully down the corridors from time to time amongst the cacophony of machine sounds and the
plink-plink
of shovels and pickaxes.

“Miss Orli,” called a familiar and gravelly voice. “’Bout time, young lady. I been waitin’ fer ya up on seven minutes now.” He was standing next to a new E-1 recruit, a young woman from a farming town on Kurr, as Orli recalled. It had been a long time since anyone had occupied those lowest ranks, and Orli was still surprised to see the single stripe on their uniforms whenever one of them came near. Their presence was an interesting manifestation of the new Earth-Prosperion relationship.

Ilbei Spadebreaker, on the other hand, was no raw recruit. He was a crusty old miner from Prosperion, one of the blanks the Queen provided to help in the mines. There were many of them down here, almost all with more knowledge of mining than anyone on the fleet ships had. And although it was certainly not the knowledge of advanced mining techniques and ventilation systems that the fleet folks had access to through their computers, the Prosperion laborers possessed knowledge of a far more practical variety, not to mention actual experience with the real and dangerous work. They understood the nature of the job, and Ilbei ranked highest amongst the Queen’s people in that regard. Which is why Ilbei served as foreman, answering only to the chief engineer from the
California
—who mainly advised on the technical and equipment side, and who was humbled by Ilbei’s knowledge of the mining craft—and to Lord Thadius Thoroughgood, the magician charged with oversight of the project for the Queen’s labor contractor, Castles, Inc. and who also provided the occasional enchantments and transmutations as necessary.

Ilbei tottered up to her on bowed legs, his gate sure but side-to-side, in part dictated by the rotundity of a belly that was firm but prodigious, made so by many decades quaffing ale with his mates from the mines and, before his time as a digger, the military. He smiled at her, though it was barely visible through the unkempt nest of his beard, a gray bramble that he kept at a marginally uniform length with a few swift strokes of his knife from time to time. All in all, he looked every bit a creature of the soil from which he’d made his living for many, many years.

“Ya know, young lady, I can’t be toleratin’ tardiness or there’ll be hell ta pay,” he said as he came close enough for her to catch the ever-present scent of tobacco in the air, an olfactory aura that seemed to whirl about the man in perpetuity like some invisible captured cloud.

“And who is going to make me pay it?” she asked, her smile in greeting him as affectionate as his had been. “You, Master Spadebreaker? You are way too sweet to scare me. You might scare all of them,” she pointed down the tunnel left and right with her thumbs, out toward the sounds of machinery, shovels and picks, “but you don’t scare me at all.”

He grinned, missing one tooth at the far left corner of his mirth while another glinted gold near the gap. His dirty moustache spread like a poker hand made of gray straw, and his cheeks rounded, compressing the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, pushing them back like fault lines suddenly bent on giving his fuzzy ears a shake. “Aye. Ya have me there, lass. But I’ll knock the lad down what suggests likewise, and that’s no bet.”

She nodded, certain of it. She’d seen his temper flare twice since working with him. He had no patience for insubordination or laziness, especially from the young men of Kurr. He’d shout them down whenever he saw such behavior, berating the culprits and pointing out how they had a “rare opportunity with these here Earth fellers.” And twice she’d seen him actually knock particularly belligerent men down. One of these belligerents, the second incident, involved a huge beast of a man, six-foot-six and with shoulders that seemed nearly as wide as the mine shaft itself. The foolish young digger had heard one too many curses from the bellicose old Ilbei and decided it was time to challenge the foreman and take control of the crew himself, by brute force. He’d swung a long crowbar at the squat, pot-bellied miner and that had been it—the moment he discovered his mistake. Foreman Spadebreaker’s spindly bowed legs gave the bluff of what was in truth the startling speed of reality. The old man ducked the swung iron easily, hooked the back of the youngster’s knee with his own pickaxe and yanked the big man’s leg out from under him, a jerk that tilted him sideways and put him off balance. A swift butt from the pick handle’s blunt end sent the man careening into the shaft wall where his head struck a dull sound. He slid like a mudslide down the wall to the mineshaft floor where he lay motionless for almost a full fifty-count.

Orli had been mortified at first, but when the young man came to, he was none the worse for wear, if a bit lumpy at the back of his head and around the right eye where the pick handle had hit.

“If’n I’d wanted to hurt him, I would have,” Ilbei assured her when she told him she would have to record the incident in her report—fleet officers were required to make note of violent incidents among the crew. Period. “These lads ain’t the softies your boys are—no offense a’ course. Treat them like girls, they get ta expecting favors and perfume, rather’n a hard day’s work—again, no offense.”

She’d tried to be angry, but the sparkle in the old miner’s eyes, and the perfect candor with which he spoke, won her over in time, a sentiment made permanent by the fact that the humbled young miner had come over and respectfully apologized to Ilbei—a scene of masculine status-making more honest and genuine than any she’d ever seen in the fleet with its rulebooks and guidelines. Respect down here was earned, not assigned.

Ilbei had clapped the youngster on the shoulder after the display of humility and said, “I was your age once, son. I wasn’t much fer making good decisions back then neither. But I had heart, and so do you. I respect that. Line it up with your head, and you’ll do good things.” He’d tapped the youth on the forehead gently with a thick finger as he said it, which made the fellow nod. Then the burly younger man, glowing with the praise, went back to work, more effective than ever before. Ilbei winked up at Orli after sending him away, and from then on, she left him to lead his people his way.

Now he and Orli were rapidly becoming friends, the working relationship between them nearly frictionless: Orli received samples from him to analyze and report on, and he provided those samples. He did so in large part by learning how to operate the fleet’s various pieces of mine-related machinery, which he would then teach to the crews brought up from Prosperion.

None of the ten fleet ships in system, the
Aspect
in particular, had enough crew remaining after battling the Hostiles to spare many for an enterprise on the scale of the Tinpoan mining operation. Their technical personnel were better deployed in fine fabrications and performing the actual ship repairs than in doing the digging and ore processing that went on deep inside the rocky moon. A little-acknowledged truth, at least on some ships, was that, had it not been for the Prosperions, many of the Earth ships might not have been able to go on much longer. Not to the Hostile system and certainly not all the way back to Earth. The Prosperions in the mines were making that possible. And it was with his familiar and implacable sense of efficiency in that pursuit that Ilbei set himself to updating Orli on the most recent progress.

“So the fourth level is broke through,” he told her as she checked the map on her tablet to see which way to go. “And the boys cut ya a few spokes ta sample from. Just waitin’ on ya ta tell us when ya want to come down. We’ll clear out a space big enough for your machines once ya tell me what my nose already knows.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. He was a little crazy, she knew, convinced he could recognize the presence of most metals and ores by smell, even from several feet below ground. She wasn’t about to tell him what she thought about that, so she indulged him with a nod.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.” She started walking westward down the tunnel and was three steps along when she realized Ilbei hadn’t come along. She turned back and saw him standing there impatiently. With her hands out at her sides, she gave a slight shake of her head and a widening of her eyes as if to say, “What are you waiting for?”

He reflected the expression right back at her, mimicking her movements and yet somehow managing to throw in a shovel-full of sarcasm via the playful glint in his emerald eyes and the little smirk that peeked out from beneath all that tatty facial hair.

“What?” she said, realizing he had no intention of coming.

“Sign in, lassie. Ya know the rules well as anyone.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes. The rules. Always the rules.” She stomped back to where he stood next to the young petty officer and logged in on the tablet the woman held out for her. “I signed in up there, anyway.” She jerked a thumb upwards as she spoke.

“And you sign in again down here.” His matter-of-fact tone made it clear that he was not going to argue this point and, even more, that he did not care if she were an officer from Earth, an alien, or even the Queen of Kurr. Rules were rules for a reason, and he had a job to do. Keeping everyone who entered this mine safe and accounted for was one of them. Period.

“Fine, you bossy old thing. Are you happy now?” she asked as she handed the tablet back to the petty officer.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.” He grinned and led her off to the newly installed lift that would take them down to the level designated Mine Shaft D.

Chapter 14

T
hree days after the siege at Calico Castle, Altin found himself sitting in the Queen’s war room with Her Majesty and a host of key advisors. Tytamon and Aderbury sat on either side of him at a long table which faced another just like it set parallel and only a few paces across the room. Her Majesty, of course, sat upon a half-sized version of her throne, and it was she who was maintaining the illusion map on the floor, a rare occasion in itself. Though her rank in the school was a royal secret, Altin reckoned it to be no greater than an E by the lack of detail visible in the rendering and the dimness of the light in places. Nonetheless, it was up to the task well enough—not that he would have said otherwise even had it not been.

“Captain Andru,” she began, addressing the newly promoted cavalryman, “you will take twelve hundred horse through Kenderon Pass. I will assign you a hundred battle mages as well.”

“Your Majesty,” he said, “I would prefer to take my men in alone. We can call for the mages when we ferret out the orc stronghold.”

“You will be taking the mages, young man. You saw what the orcs had with them when they attacked. A full circle of shamans ambushed us, and they had many other casters to spare. They have unprecedented magical resources now, and you will be taking the sorcerers when you go.”

“With all due respect, Your Majesty, sending mages will slow us down. Doubtless, less than ten of them will ride well enough to keep up, given the type of terrain we’ll be covering and the weather that will be setting in. Even now the clouds are forming in the north and east.”

“You will take the mages,
Captain
,” she stressed the word to remind him of just how new his rank was, “and you will do it without another word.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Altin couldn’t really blame the young captain. Most wizards were poor horsemen. The typical wizard was a bookworm, more inclined to investing time in alchemy than equestrianism. And the ride was going to be brutal, a campaign of many months in some of the worst conditions Kurr had to offer: the Daggerspines in winter.

The captain and his men were being sent because, remarkably, the Queen’s diviners could not locate the stronghold magically—another unprecedented occurrence—and speculation was that the orcs had developed counter-magic and were blocking the search. Strong counter-magic too, for the royal diviners had moved through the best seeking spells they had, as had the royal seers, and the last search had included a concert of forty sorcerers and a massive spell spanning thirty-two hundred pages written across four ancient spellbooks. If they couldn’t find the orcs with that, then the only chance of finding them was going to be by doing it the old-fashioned way: men, horses, gryphons and time. Altin knew well enough how hard it had been just to find one small village of the savages from the advantage of dragonback. And those hadn’t had any magic working to conceal them. He didn’t envy the newly-made captain his task.