there.
They drove in tense silence, the electric whirr of the golf cart’s battery-powered engine echoing off the rock walls, which were lined with a tightly strung net to support the structure and reduce the impact of cave-ins. The air was heavy and cloying, thick with the industrial smells of diesel, sulfur and rock dust. In some stretches the lighting was so dim that the miners they passed didn’t seem to appear until they were almost at her side, blue boiler suits surging out of the darkness, faces shadowed to inhuman blurs beneath the brims of their hard hats.
Roger stopped the golf cart outside a room dug into the tunnel wall, one of many designed to double as administrative spaces and refuges in a collapse. As they climbed out of the golf cart she squinted up into one of the ventilation shafts in the ceiling.
“Where are the evacuation ladders?”
Roger exhaled peevishly. “They kept rusting so we took them out. It’s not like they’d be much use in a mine this deep anyway. That part of the safety code is more relevant for old sites, not new ones like Hambani.”
Nicola gritted her teeth. She was getting very close to fed up with Roger’s slipshod safety management and bad attitude. “You shouldn’t be operating without ladders. Even if someone couldn’t make it all the way to the surface, they could survive a rockslide or a blast in that shaft, then climb down to a refuge. I need those ladders installed today. And I want to see your personnel logs. If you have extra people in the elevator, you may have extra people on shift.”
Roger’s narrowed eyes let her know exactly how he felt about her demands, but he stalked off to a filing cabinet at the other end of the room.
“There are way too many code violations here, especially for such a new operation,” she fretted aloud, turning to Warren.
“And there was no security check on anyone boarding that elevator,” he agreed. “All they do at the gate is glance at the ID, but it would be easy for someone to stow away in one of the bunkhouses or pass someone their ID through the fence.”
“Roger boasted to me this morning that they do end-of-shift strip searches to make sure none of them are stealing gold. I know theft is a big problem in this industry, but you can’t treat your employees like criminals. They have to be kept safe, too.”
They shared a second or two of considered silence, watching Roger rifle through a drawer. Then Warren pivoted to survey the rest of the room, plucking at the front of his boiler suit.
“Is it always this hot?”
“Believe it or not, it’s air conditioned down here.” Nicola lifted her ponytail off the back of her neck and fanned the exposed skin. “Slurry ice is pumped through the tunnels to keep it cool, otherwise it would be about a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. And you might notice the higher pressure at this depth. Most people feel sluggish and heavy, like you’re walking underwater. It also means you bleed faster, so be careful.”
“How much gold do you get from the rock?” he asked, running his fingertips across the rough surface of the tunnel wall.
“Very little. A ton of rock usually only produces about an ounce of gold. That’s why we have to keep developing the technology to go deeper.”
“Or trade a different, renewable resource.”
She opened her mouth, primed for an argument, then reconsidered. She’d learned to love this industry the long way around—so would he.
“Three billion years ago this was a lake. The land we were walking across this morning was underneath the water.” She leaned down and picked up a pebble from the floor, and then reached for his hand and held it open, palm up. His hand seemed big and strong beside hers as she placed the stone in the center of his palm, electric pulses of yearning shooting along her nerves with every feather-light brush of their flesh.
“This stone is ancient.” She pushed his fingers closed around it. “It’s billions of
They drove in tense silence, the electric whirr of the golf cart’s battery-powered engine echoing off the rock walls, which were lined with a tightly strung net to support the structure and reduce the impact of cave-ins. The air was heavy and cloying, thick with the industrial smells of diesel, sulfur and rock dust. In some stretches the lighting was so dim that the miners they passed didn’t seem to appear until they were almost at her side, blue boiler suits surging out of the darkness, faces shadowed to inhuman blurs beneath the brims of their hard hats.
Roger stopped the golf cart outside a room dug into the tunnel wall, one of many designed to double as administrative spaces and refuges in a collapse. As they climbed out of the golf cart she squinted up into one of the ventilation shafts in the ceiling.
“Where are the evacuation ladders?”
Roger exhaled peevishly. “They kept rusting so we took them out. It’s not like they’d be much use in a mine this deep anyway. That part of the safety code is more relevant for old sites, not new ones like Hambani.”
Nicola gritted her teeth. She was getting very close to fed up with Roger’s slipshod safety management and bad attitude. “You shouldn’t be operating without ladders. Even if someone couldn’t make it all the way to the surface, they could survive a rockslide or a blast in that shaft, then climb down to a refuge. I need those ladders installed today. And I want to see your personnel logs. If you have extra people in the elevator, you may have extra people on shift.”
Roger’s narrowed eyes let her know exactly how he felt about her demands, but he stalked off to a filing cabinet at the other end of the room.
“There are way too many code violations here, especially for such a new operation,” she fretted aloud, turning to Warren.
“And there was no security check on anyone boarding that elevator,” he agreed. “All they do at the gate is glance at the ID, but it would be easy for someone to stow away in one of the bunkhouses or pass someone their ID through the fence.”
“Roger boasted to me this morning that they do end-of-shift strip searches to make sure none of them are stealing gold. I know theft is a big problem in this industry, but you can’t treat your employees like criminals. They have to be kept safe, too.”
They shared a second or two of considered silence, watching Roger rifle through a drawer. Then Warren pivoted to survey the rest of the room, plucking at the front of his boiler suit.
“Is it always this hot?”
“Believe it or not, it’s air conditioned down here.” Nicola lifted her ponytail off the back of her neck and fanned the exposed skin. “Slurry ice is pumped through the tunnels to keep it cool, otherwise it would be about a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. And you might notice the higher pressure at this depth. Most people feel sluggish and heavy, like you’re walking underwater. It also means you bleed faster, so be careful.”
“How much gold do you get from the rock?” he asked, running his fingertips across the rough surface of the tunnel wall.
“Very little. A ton of rock usually only produces about an ounce of gold. That’s why we have to keep developing the technology to go deeper.”
“Or trade a different, renewable resource.”
She opened her mouth, primed for an argument, then reconsidered. She’d learned to love this industry the long way around—so would he.
“Three billion years ago this was a lake. The land we were walking across this morning was underneath the water.” She leaned down and picked up a pebble from the floor, and then reached for his hand and held it open, palm up. His hand seemed big and strong beside hers as she placed the stone in the center of his palm, electric pulses of yearning shooting along her nerves with every feather-light brush of their flesh.
“This stone is ancient.” She pushed his fingers closed around it. “It’s billions of
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