Miner Six

I want to thank my friend Joe and all my beta readers whose honest appraisal helps me get better. Thanks to all of you, dear readers, who are my coaches and critics. I want to thank Smashwords and Mark Coker for providing authors with an alternative to an increasingly monopolized publishing world. My family provides me with joy, support, and a model for what tribal life should look like. There are not words enough to thank my wife.

1. Miner Boy

DUMP 346729,

WORLD CITY

The drones hung low in the gray sky over the dump, watching with a faint hum that mingled with noise of the Miners below. Six daydreamed on the Miners’ winch. It was a familiar daydream: a long vein of old electronics, sandwiched in with newspaper for easy sifting. Miner boy Six would trade them for so many food bars that the whole tribe couldn’t ever eat them all. They could cover themselves with bars like blankets. He smiled at the thought even as his stomach rumbled.

Something chirped, snapping Six back to reality. He rolled upright and held onto the winch cables as he leaned out over the lip of the garbage tunnel and listened. He had heard it! The hazard roaches were chirping their little heads off. Leaping to his feet, Six ran back to the winch and started up the ancient solar motor. Like everything else in Dump 346729, it was patched and ragged, created by parts scavenged from the deeps.

Six braced both feet against the motor as he yanked upward. After three vicious yanks, the winch spluttered to life. He flipped the winch to maximum power. The rusted cable screeched a protest as it rewound. Six looked nervously at the winch’s footings. The winch’s steel feet were sunk deep into the rock-hard garbage crust and still they creaked and shifted. Six had seen the feet tear free before at maximum power, heard the screams of the Miners below as the winch toppled down to crush them. If there was any chance of that, Six had to sever the cable. He fingered the emergency hacksaw hung next to the cable and said a prayer to Our Lady of Demolition that he could use it in time.

The winch rocked and shook, but held. Six knocked his fist against his forehead three times in honor of the Lady. Slowly the digging platform pulled up into view, crowded with filthy Miners. The hazard roaches quieted, and the crew hauled themselves wearily off the platform, already preparing for the next hole. The last Miner off the lift was Plug, who ruffled Six's matted hair in thanks for their rescue. No grumbling! He called to the other Miners. Our Lady was good to us in that hole. The Sifters got enough electronics to trade for the week. Not every hole can lead to deep rich heart metals. He whistled a three-note work song as he started measuring paces from the tunnel for a new dig.

Six knew that the richest loads were always deep down, below the burned wreckage of the Corporate Wars in the amazing, loosely packed garbage of the Beforers. He could imagine the darkness of the garbage tunnel stretching above, and the excitement of finding a Beforer vein, one heavy piece of electronics after another, all rich in rare metals. Every piece worth two food bars or more! Six’s chest swelled at the thought of being a named Miner, going down surrounded by his tribe mates, traveling with his precious warning roaches on his very own work belt. He dreamed of riding down with Plug into the depths to find untold wealth.

Thanks, Six. Plug said to him softly as he walked in measured paces past the winch. That was a good, quick save. You’re like a named member of the tribe already. He grinned at Six as he made the spiral path out away from the dig hole demanded by the Lady.

Six was over the age to be named. Age of ten and no amen, had been the old rule. But since the tribe had lost so many named young Miners in the last great cough, the rule had been changed. Now Zeke, the tribe chief, had made a looser rule, age of twelve and can dig like hell. It meant that Six had to be old enough and healthy enough to be a named Miner. Six still had a cough from when he was little and the cough had taken so many. Six kept it under control by always sipping water, but Zeke watched him from under his eyebrows and shook his head every time Plug brought up Six’s naming ceremony. It ate at Six like the hunger in his belly. He longed to be part of the tribe rather than one of the numbered Unnamed who played in the sorting piles and gave nothing to the tribe.

Plug was Six’s sponsor, so he was the one who would name Six and teach him the ways of mining as his own sponsor Zeke had taught Plug. Wiry and quick, Plug had spent more time under the dump crust than even Zeke, venturing as far down as the great glowing Lake. Plug had a nose for metals and the other Miners in the tribe trusted him to make the call on the next dig site. There was no better sponsor in the world, Six had decided, not in any of the other tribes and not even in any of the great two milers that looked down on the plain of the dump.

Six watched as Plug marked out paces to the new dig site, shuffling his feet in their nearly indestructible Tuff boots across the garbage plain. Plug found his spot and circled his boot. He crouched down and said a prayer to The Lady before straightening and calling out, Here the Lady has made straight! Let’s get down through to grass before dark! Long ago, Dump 346729 had been covered in fake grass, and patches of it still poked up here and there among the sorting mounds of previous digs. To make the grass sit evenly, the Beforers had rolled the garbage flat, so that nothing stuck up. After the Corporate Wars, the victorious World Corp, had used huge machines to smash another crust into rock hardness over the burned and shredded losers. Zeke said it was their way of burying the past. But for the Miners, it made the first part of the dig the hardest. The Miners hoisted pick axes and brought forward their most precious tool, the solar hammer.

Without thinking, Six began saying the prayer of the hammer. Let it be strong, my Lady, let it be sharp… He knew that the hammer was nearly done, long past when it should have been placed at rest in an old dig hole like a member of the tribe. But the tribe couldn’t buy a new hammer. They had barely enough for food bars.

Everything the Miners owned was provided to them by the bounty of the dump or was traded for at a loss from World Corp, whose great two-miler scrapers shadowed much of the dump. All the Miners knew that World Corp paid the Miners much less than the metals were worth, and paid them almost nothing for the other things the Miners unearthed. For precious things like their hammer, the tribe had to save for years. But, praise the Lady, the hammer had served them well all of Six’s life. Only Zeke remembered the years of near starvation when the old hammer failed.

Six watched as the hammer was presented to Plug, along with the precious Black Juice that let it move. Plug applied three drops to the rusted junction where the blade met the housing. Then the tribe took a moment of silence while the drops went to work.

To an outsider, even the desperate unemployed Wanderers, mining seemed impossibly hard. But mining was one of the few honorable professions left, and the only one free of World Corp’s power. The Miners had rights on the dump sites they worked. They couldn't be caught like Wanderers by the Cullers and shipped off-world as long as they stayed on the dump’s crust. World Corp employees, even Cullers chasing Wanderers, couldn’t set foot on the dump surface without permission.

To Six, there was no other life he could imagine. Miners had always worked surrounded by the old city and shadowed by the two-miler scrapers. In the morning it was a long time before the sun peeked its grey head through the scrapers to light the Miners at work, and the Miners continued to work long after the sun disappeared behind the two-milers in the west. No one, not even the One, the President of World Corp, worked harder than the Miners.

Plug signaled to start the hammer, and Six prayed the solar panels had built up enough power. Once one of the Miners had forgotten to plug the hammer in, and it had cost the tribe a day's work, earning that Miner the nickname Donor for months afterward.

The Donors were World Corp employees who lived a lazy, useless life of ease because their only purpose was to be spare parts for other people. An old, small skyscraper above the tribe's current digs had a Donor colony. Six had seen them sunbathing in their bubbles and shook his fist at them any time they saw him and waved down at him. Dumb as a Donor, was the harshest criticism any Miner could face. It meant you were useless, worse than the littlest Unnamed.

Six heard a faint buzz and glanced up, shading his eyes. A red World Corp drone had dropped down to observe the new dig. It scanned where Plug had paced out the new hole and returned upward. World Corp liked to track the tribe’s progress.

The drones were everywhere. They hung high in the sky during World Corp’s work day, scanning the whole dump. If the Miners found something really fine, the whole tribe might celebrate with a victory dance. Then the drones would hang lower down, and a World Corp representative would come out the next day to trade for the find.

Six glanced upward. Right now there were three other drones, circling lazily high above. Six stuck out his tongue at them. He hadn’t been afraid of the drones until one had buzzed him. It happened when he was little, long after they normally left the sky. It had swooped down at him, scanning him with its bright light as he made a midnight journey to the potty pit. Six’s screech had brought Plug running, but the drone had already sailed up and away into the night. The next day the tribe had seen a cloud of drones hovering over another tribe’s dig area. No one in that tribe was ever seen again. Six had nightmares about the drones after that.

The drones made Six mad. He wanted to fight them, knock them out of the sky with a punch and stomp them with his Tuff boots. But Six knew the stories Zeke told about a Miner tribe rebelling against World Corp. They sat down on the job and stopped digging. Instead of food bars, that tribe ate the dump creatures, feathered crust burrowers the Miners called Rateons. Zeke’s tribe never touched them, but other tribes did. After a few days of no work, a World Corp representative went out to the tribe and asked them nicely to start again. They didn’t, and they’d gotten droned.

In his nightmares Six saw the drones in the distance, thick and black in a swirling cloud over the other mining site. At the end of the nightmare, the drones were getting closer. Six would wake up crying into his fist, trying not to disturb the other Unnamed as they slept in the center of the tribe tents.

The hammer started pounding. It squeaked and shook, giving off the Black Juice smell and a faint puff of smoke. Six knew it needed more Black Juice to keep it working. Black Juice was precious, and without it the hammer would seize up and the Miners would be reduced to the pick axes. That had happened to another tribe, and their strength had quickly broken from the effort of getting through the crust. A broken tribe was worse than being a Donor, because World Corp didn’t want the Miners for Donors. A broken tribe meant you got droned. It might be a while before the drones came, but sooner or later they’d come.

Zeke was watching the hammer and brought out the precious Black Juice container. Six watched as Zeke walked, watching the wind blow his grey hair and Tuff clothes tight behind him. Zeke was so thin you could see every rib, but his voice was strong and he led the tribes. He was always trying to save for Black Juice, but it seemed the tribe never had even enough food bars to eat. So everything they made from their trades went for food, and saving for Black Juice kept getting put off. Zeke complained that the food bars were much smaller than he remembered when he was young, but Zeke also said the Rateons used to be bigger, so some in the tribe doubted his memory. The whole tribe kept hoping for a big find, something that would get them both food bars and Black Juice, with a little something for when the rains came and they had to huddle under the shelters or get burned. Only the Wanderers went out in the rain, and their skin was burned black as they hurried across the dump far from any Miners’ site.

The Wanderers had been thrown out by their tribe or World Corp for breaking the rules, and they stayed wide of Six’s tribe. But even from a distance, Six could see how blackened their faces and skin had become where it showed through the old World Corp suits and ragged, burned coats.

Six watched while the Diggers struggled to open the crust. A ragged cheer went up as soon as they made it through, and the tribe worked faster. Pullers with most intact Tuff gloves hauled loose bits from the hole, setting them gently on the crust edge, while the Sifters took the items and sorted them into at least a dozen piles. Being a Sifter like Zeke or Plug looked easy, but it was the hardest job. Most things could be reused, and the tribe prided itself on finding new uses for odd bits. Even the nothing piles sometimes yielded something a Sifter had missed. Once Six had found a piece of electronics in the clothing pile, hidden inside a blanket so old it had to be from a Beforer. Six had taken the blanket for his own, wondering what wonders it might have done when it worked. The Sifters let him keep the blanket, but taken the electronics. Its mechanism had been worth a whole food bar.

Six ran down to the potty pit, then got a drink and refilled his bottle from the World Corp. fountain. The fountain was one thing that World Corp supplied for free. World Corp had told them the fountain processed the potty pit and gave out fresh, sweet-tasting water. Within a few minutes of drinking it, Six always felt much better. It was a peaceful feeling, and for a while afterward Six didn’t worry as much about the winch or the Miners.

Lately, Six had been drinking far more than he needed even for his cough. The water even helped with the hunger from not enough food bars. When Six had been younger, he had discovered that the water helped with the coughs. Sometimes the whole tribe caught a cough. A bad enough cough could take an Unnamed. When Six had the cough really bad, he sat by the fountain all day and drank every time the cough bent him over. Six had lived, but that cough had taken his friend Two. Six had seen five Unnamed wrapped in newspaper that year and buried in the used mining shafts with the tribe’s gifts given to all Unnamed. Once they were buried the tribe was supposed to forget them, but Six could still see Two's pale face wrapped around with newspaper. He took another drink from the fountain. It didn’t erase Two’s face, but Six didn’t hurt as much in his chest.

Wandering away from the fountain, Six made his way around one of the mounds. Before him stretched the flat, open reaches of an unmined area. Who knew what wonders existed under the crust? Six imagined his deep vein of electronics, sandwiched between appliances from the Beforers and a thick newspaper vein that made the digging easy and the tunnel wide. A boy could dream.

Six felt so good now he took off across the open stretch. His Tuff boots lifted little puffs of dust behind him and he whooped in the air. He turned around and around, lifting his arms up to the gray sun and grinning. Laughing, he jumped again and again as high as he could, landing with big puffs of dust as he grasped at the gray sun.

As he landed, Six went through. Straight through, not a partial crack, but a straight drop. He plummeted for what felt like forever and landed hard. Six lay gasping in the darkness, not daring to move. He’d fallen. How far? The dump crust had shattered under him and dropped him down into the depths. He was a broken thing, a useless Unnamed, but he must not move until the other Miners came to find him.

Six shifted and felt for his water bottle gingerly with one Tuff-gloved hand. The bottle was gone! It must have been torn free in the fall. Six felt the rising panic of not having his bottle. He’d lost it once before when one of the other Unnamed took it while he slept. She was Seven, one of Six’s favorite Unnamed, and had only been using it to wash off her Tuff boots before they healed themselves and embedded the grime. But Six had woken up and missed his bottle. After that he’d taken to sleeping next to the World Corp water fountain, so near the edge of the Miners’ shelter he risked getting burned if the rains came suddenly. Now Six felt the familiar tightness rising up in his throat. He was trapped in blackness, far below the crust, without any water to soothe him.

Somewhere in the darkness to his left Six heard something move. He prayed it was just bits of the hard crust sliding down along with him. Six listened. He could almost hear the hammer, with its weak and stuttering thump. The hammer stuttered and fell silent for a moment before it started up again. If the hammer failed, the tribe would starve. Under his breath, Six whispered a prayer to our Lady of Lubrication, and listened to the thumping. It pounded like the pumping of his heart.

They would look for him soon, wouldn’t they? Six calculated. First the hammer would need to break up all the crust. Then the crust would need to be cleared. When it was clear the Sifters would start throwing the garbage into piles. Only when they got down below an arm's height would the Diggers put the winch into place. Then the great old winch wouldn’t be used until the ladders couldn’t reach. Only when they needed the winch to go down would they look for their winch-watcher, Six. Depending on what they found and how fast they dug, it could be hours before Six was missed. That was why he’d been playing on the crust, chasing dust demons under the grey sky.

Six knew that the World Corp drones had seen him fall. He had a mad hope that maybe a World Corp representative would take a hover out to the camp. But World Corp didn’t care about Miners, and they certainly didn’t care about Unnamed.

Something slithered again in the darkness. It had a distinctly live sound, a scrabbling. Six tried to keep thoughts of what it might be away. Most likely it was a Rateon, one of the furry, feathered, crust scavengers. If he was stuck down here a long time, he might try to catch it. When the hammers had failed for other tribes, they’d eaten Rateons before they starved. But the Rateons were little more than bones, and they drank from the hazard pools. So Six’s sponsor, Plug, had told him only a dumb Donor would eat Rateon.

Six whispered to himself, dumb as a Donor. He’d known he was playing on unchecked crust. That was why the dust was so thick there. The tribe moved as a group, and when Plug found a new dig point he always stepped carefully around it first, then stomped as hard as he could to make sure the crust could take the Diggers’ weight before he committed the tribe. But Six had wanted to explore, and had figured he was light enough he wouldn’t do more than crack the crust. He was just as stupid as those Donors, the human animals that sunned themselves in the smaller scraper next to the dump, waiting to be harvested by their Owners.

Whatever it was moved again. It didn’t sound like a Rateon. Six tried to keep away visions of the other things that lurked under the crust. Around the newspaper fires at night, Plug told stories to the tribe about his time under the crust. He’d escaped a rival tribe by hiding in one of their dig holes, and when they tried to bury him alive he’d managed to crawl his way through the under layers of the dump until he reached his own tribe’s dig. Plug told of a luminous, enormous hazard lake and a creature so large it defied imagining. But the Unnamed squealed loudest when Plug told of the other creatures, strange ones with spines for eyes, all teeth and claws. And still other creatures with no bones to speak of, that could slip through the tiniest crack but who had wormy long arms that could choke an Unnamed in a moment. Six shuddered and felt again for his water bottle. But it was gone, and the movement was getting louder.

Six knew the rule. Unnamed don’t move. If an Unnamed fell into the crust, they stayed put. One of the Diggers would find the hole and would be able to tell by the angle of it