Chapter 5 - Slave v4

"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.