AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The Laurel. Twenty-four clans in the underground mining colony of Lykos, one Laurel per quarter. It means more food than you can eat. It means more burners to smoke. Imported quilts from Earth. Amber swill with the Society’s quality markings. It means winning. Gamma clan has had it since anyone can remember. So it’s always been about the Quota for us lesser clans, just enough to scrape by. Eo says the Laurel is the carrot the Society dangles, always just far enough beyond our grasp. Just enough so we know how short we really are and how little we can do about it. We’re supposed to be pioneers. Eo calls us slaves. I just think we never try hard enough. Never take the big risks because of the old men.
“Loran, shut up about the Laurel. Hit the gas and we’ll miss all the bloodydamn Laurels to kingdom come, boy,” Uncle Narol growls.
He’s slurring. I can practically smell the drink through the comm. He wants to call a sensor team to cover his own ass. Or he’s scared. The drunk was born pissing himself out of fear. Fear of what? Our overlords, the Golds? Their minions, the Grays? Who knows? Few people. Who cares? Even fewer. Actually, just one man cared for my uncle, and he died when my uncle pulled his feet.
My uncle is weak. He is cautious and immoderate in his drink, a pale shadow of my father. His blinks are long and hard, as though it pains him to open his eyes each time and see the world again. I don’t trust him down here in the mines, or anywhere for that matter. But my mother would tell me to listen to him; she would remind me to respect my elders. Even though I am wed, even though I am the Helldiver of my clan, she would say that my “blisters have not yet become calluses.” I will obey, even though it is as maddening as the tickle of the sweat on my face.
“Fine,” I murmur.
I clench the drill fist and wait as my uncle calls it in from the safety of the chamber above the deep tunnel. This will take hours. I do the math. Eight hours till whistle call. To beat Gamma, I’ve got to keep a rate of 156.5 kilos an hour. It’ll take two and a half hours for the scanCrew to get here and do their deal, at best. So I’ve got to pump out 227.6 kilos per hour after that. Impossible. But if I keep going and squab the tedious scan, it’s ours.
I wonder if Uncle Narol and Barlow know how close we are. Probably. Probably just don’t think anything is ever worth the risk. Probably think divine intervention will squab our chances. Gamma has the Laurel. That’s the way things are and will ever be. We of Lambda just try to scrape by on our foodstuffs and meager comforts. No rising. No falling. Nothing is worth the risk of changing the hierarchy. My father found that out at the end of a rope.
Nothing is worth risking death. Against my chest, I feel the wedding band of hair and silk dangling from the cord around my neck and think of Eo’s ribs.
I’ll see a few more of the slender things through her skin this month. She’ll go asking the Gamma families for scraps behind my back. I’ll act like I don’t know. But we’ll still be hungry. I eat too much because I’m sixteen and still growing tall; Eo lies and says she’s never got much of an appetite. Some women sell themselves for food or luxuries to the Tinpots (Grays, to be technic about it), the Society’s garrison troops of our little mining colony. She wouldn’t sell her body to feed me. Would she? But then I think about it. I’d do anything to feed her …
I look down over the edge of my drill. It’s a long fall to the bottom of the hole I’ve dug. Nothing but molten rock and hissing drills. But before I know what’s what, I’m out of my straps, scanner in hand and jumping down the hundred-meter drop toward the drill fingers. I kick back and forth between the vertical mineshaft’s walls and the drill’s long, vibrating body to slow my fall. I make sure I’m not near a pitviper nest when I throw out an arm to catch myself on a gear just above the drill fingers. The ten drills glow with heat. The air shimmers and distorts. I feel the heat on my face, feel it stabbing my eyes, feel it ache in my belly and balls. Those drills will melt your bones if you’re not careful. And I’m not careful. Just nimble.
I lower myself hand over hand, going feetfirst between the drill fingers so that I can lower the scanner close
enough to the gas pocket to get a reading. The heat is unbearable. This was a mistake. Voices shout at me through the comm. I almost brush one of the drills as I finally lower myself close enough to the gas pocket. The scanner flickers in my hand as it takes its reading. My suit is bubbling and I smell something sweet and sharp, like burned syrup. To a Helldiver, it is the smell of death.
2
THE TOWNSHIP
My suit can’t handle the heat down here. The outer layer is nearly melted through. Soon the second layer will go. Then the scanner blinks silver and I’ve got what I came for. I almost didn’t notice. Dizzy and frightened, I pull myself away from the drills. Hand over hand, I tug my body up, going fast away from the dreadful heat. Then something catches. My foot is jammed just underneath one of the gears near a drill finger. I gasp down air in sudden panic. The dread rises in me. I see my bootheel melting. The first layer goes. The second bubbles. Then it will be my flesh.
I force a long breath and choke down the screams that are rising in my throat. I remember the blade. I flip out my hinged slingBlade from its back holster. It’s a cruelly curved cutter as long as my leg, meant for taking off and cauterizing limbs stuck in machinery, just like this. Most men panic when they get caught, and so the slingBlade is a nasty halfmoon weapon meant to be used by clumsy hands. Even filled with terror, my hands are not clumsy. I slice three times with the slingBlade, cutting nanoplastic instead of flesh. On the third swing, I reach down and jerk free my leg. As I do, my knuckles brush the edge of a drill. Searing pain shoots through my hand. I smell crackling flesh, but I’m up and off, climbing away from the hellish heat, climbing back to my holster seat and laughing all the while. I feel like crying.
My uncle was right. I was wrong. But I’ll be damned if I ever let him know it.
“Idiot,” is his kindest comment.
“Manic! Bloodydamn manic!” Loran whoops.
“Minimal gas,” I say. “Drilling now, Uncle.”
The haulBacks take my pull when the whistle call comes. I push myself out of my drill, leaving it in the deep tunnel for the nightshift, and snag a weary hand on the line the others drop down the kilometer-long shaft to help me up. Despite the seeping burn on the back of my hand, I slide my body upward on the line till I’m out of the shaft. Kieran and Loran walk with me to join the others at the nearest gravLift. Yellow lights dangle like spiders from the ceiling.
My clan and Gamma’s three hundred men already have their toes under the metal railing when we reach the rectangular gravLift. I avoid my uncle—he’s mad enough to spit—and catch a few dozen pats on the back for my stunt. The young ones like me think we’ve won the Laurel. They know my raw helium-3 pull for the month; it’s better than Gamma’s. The old turds just grumble and say we’re fools. I hide my hand and duck my toes in.
Gravity alters and we shoot upward. A Gamma scab with less than a week’s worth of rust under his nails forgets to put his toes under the railing. So he hangs suspended as the lift shoots up six vertical kilometers. Ears pop.
“Got a floating Gamma turd here,” Barlow laughs to the Lambdas.
Petty as it may seem, it’s always nice seeing a Gamma squab something. They get more food, more burners, more everything because of the Laurel. We get to despise them. But then, we’re supposed to, I think. Wonder if they’ll despise us now.
Enough’s enough. I grip the rust-red nanoplastic of the kid’s frysuit and jerk him down. Kid. That’s a laugh. He’s hardly three years younger than I.
He’s deathly tired, but when he sees the blood-red of my frysuit, he stiffens, avoids my eyes, and becomes the only one to see the burn on my hand. I wink at him and I think he shits his suit. We all do it now and then. I remember when I met my first Helldiver. I thought he was a god.
He’s dead now.
Up top in the staging depot, a big gray cavern of concrete and metal, we pop our tops and drink down the fresh, cold air of a world far removed from molten drills. Our collective stink and sweat soon make a bog of the area. Lights flicker in the distance, telling us to stay clear of the magnetic horizonTram tracks on the other side of the depot.
We don’t mingle with the Gammas as we head for the horizonTram in a staggered line of rust-red suits. Half with Lambda Ls, half with Gamma canes painted in dark red on their backs. Two scarlet headTalks. Two blood-red Helldivers.
