“No, but they’ll wish they had been by the time their punishment is over.”
“I will need to examine them, too,” I said firmly. “But first, if you wouldn’t mind following the light with your eyes.” I held the light up before she could protest and she tracked it. I quickly shined it in each of her eyes, then clicked it off. “I don’t see any signs of illness,” I said.
The elevator opened and Ms. Imbor breathed out a silent sigh of relief. She might be feeling better, but once Ian and I descended, we’d be trapped. I reached out for the signals flying through the air, but they were just typical base messages, nothing to indicate they were on to us.
We stepped into the elevator and Ms. Imbor pressed the only button. The ride took nearly twenty seconds. Just how deep underground were we? Ian—Noah, I reminded myself—was tense beside me.
The doors opened and I half expected a platoon of soldiers to be waiting for us. Instead, we were greeted by a wide stone and plastech corridor. Two meters in was a guard’s station with a body scanner. It was protected behind thick metal bars. A wide metal door was set into the wall on our right.
Ms. Imbor strode forward toward the guard and waved her arm over the chip reader. The gate popped open. She held it and gestured to the chip reader. “Scan in, please,” she said. I waved my right arm over the reader and Ian—Noah—scanned his left arm. The guard briefly looked at our IDs before he waved us through the scanner.
I passed through cleanly, but Ian wasn’t so lucky. “Please hand over your weapons,” Ms. Imbor said. “They’ll be returned to you when you leave.”
Ian grumbled under his breath, but removed two blasters and a long knife. When he went through the scanner again, it didn’t go off. I didn’t know how many weapons he had left, but the loss of two blasters hurt.
Ms. Imbor led us to her office. I made sure she caught me peering closely at the few people we passed. Her office was a small room, sparsely furnished, but nicer than most front-line bases. She settled behind her desk and waved me to the chair in front of her.
“You think I have a rogue virus spreading through my base,” she said without preamble. “One that can overcome nanobots.”
I held my hands up in a placating gesture. “No one is saying that,” I said. My voice was still muffled by the filtration mask I hadn’t removed, underscoring the inherent lie in my words.
“There might be a small issue with a few of the workers,” I continued, “that might result in erratic behavior. MineCorp sent me to be their canary. I hired Noah here”—I hiked a thumb over my shoulder at Noah—“to protect me if there is a problem. And of course you will be compensated and the workers replaced. If needed.”
“You expect me to shut down mine operations while you play doctor because of a rumor?” she asked, an impatient edge in her voice.
“No, of course not,” I said immediately. “Give me the locations of the last two shipments of workers and I will go to them. And I wouldn’t be here if the executives didn’t think it was worth checking.”
“Did your bosses tell you exactly how deep our miners are?” she asked with a skeptical frown.
“Err, no, not exactly,” I said. “They decided expediency was preferable to in-depth knowledge.”
“It’s over an hour trek to get down to the working mine levels,” she said. “Then anywhere from ten minutes to three hours to get to the active work sites.”
“And the miners who attacked? Where are they being held? I should start with them.”
“They are in the hole. On the mine level. I hope you’re not claustrophobic, Ms. White.”
Chapter 24
Ms. Imbor gave me a list of mine locations, but the list didn’t include names—the MineCorp workers were just numbered. She also gave us each a canteen of water before directing a young, dark-haired corporal to take us down.
As she walked away, I caught the message she sent from her com. She asked about the status of my identity verification from MineCorp. The response said they were still waiting. If they had FTL communication on XAD Six, then we had less than two hours. We’d be buried even deeper in the ground when she found out I was a fake.
I set a ninety-minute timer on my com. Now two times ticked away in the corner of my smart glasses—one counting up the time until we could jump, one counting down the time until our ruse was revealed. The vast chasm between them heightened my anxiety.
The corporal led us back out the way we’d come, but instead of heading for the elevator to the hangar, he took us through the metal door. It did not escape me that an identity chip was required to open the door from either side.
The room beyond the door was rough-hewn stone with none of the plastech niceties included for the rest of the base. A bank of six elevators, three per side, and another thick, metal door were the only options. The corporal swiped his chip over the elevator control, then pressed the button.
The first doors on our left opened, revealing a large, industrial elevator car, big enough to fit over forty people. The corporal ushered us inside. “I’m Rivers. Did the lieutenant general explain the descent?” he asked.
“No. Is there something we need to know?” Ian asked. It was the first time he’d spoken and his clipped accent was gone, replaced by a working-class brogue.
“It’s a three-stage descent,” Corporal Rivers said. “The reason it takes over an hour is because we have to move horizontally at each stage before we descend again. Every time they ran out of mineral, they just dug deeper.”
“What if there’s an emergency?” I asked. “Is this the only way up?”
Rivers nodded, then corrected himself. “There are stairs, but each descent is nearly a kilometer. There’s nothing between the levels except occasional shelter rooms.”
I drew a purposefully slow breath and told myself that the elevator walls were not closing in on me. I could climb three kilometers of stairs if I had to. I would do anything to save my brother.
Breathe. Save my brother. Breathe.
Five minutes later, the elevator reached the bottom. The hallway was three meters wide, cut out of the planet’s stone. The light panels strung along the ceiling pushed the darkness to the edges of the hallway.
Still, doorways to rooms or tunnels—it was unclear which—lurked in the shadows, dark maws ready to gobble us up. I shivered as I followed the corporal. Ian touched my back, a gentle reassurance. I gave up on mentally calling him Noah. We were buried in the ground; I had larger concerns.
Along the way, we passed through three gates. They were as wide and tall as the tunnel, and folded flat against the wall to allow equipment to pass through. Each gate required a chip swipe to unlock. It took twenty minutes to reach the next elevator bank.
“It gets rougher from here,” Rivers said. “Are you sure you want to keep going? The lieutenant general said I could bring you back up if you couldn’t handle it.”
“I can handle it,” I assured him.
He shrugged and called the elevator. The trip took a little longer this time, closer to eight minutes. When the doors opened, the hallway was more roughly hewn and the light panels were farther apart.