Free Spin 01 - Spin State by Chris Moriarty Page B

explosion risk. I don’t give a shit what the local spins say, I wouldn’t send one miner into a pit I thought was ready to blow. That’s not the way I do things.”
    But he had sent miners into the pit. And it had blown thirty hours later.
    It blew hard enough to demolish the Pit 3 headframe and breakerhouse and light a fire that was still smoldering ten days later. The orbital field AI went down again, just as it had in the last explosion. Only this time it never came back on-line.
    It took three days to put out the fires and evacuate the desperately small number of survivors. The damage, when they finally had time to assess it, was extensive: one mine fire, cause unknown; one Bose-Einstein relay failure, cause unknown; two hundred and seven dead adult geologists, mine techs, and miners; seventy-two dead children, working underground under an industrywide opt-out from the UN child-labor laws. And, of course, one famous dead physicist.
    “There’s one thing I’m still not clear on,” Li said when he had finished. “What caused the original fire? The one in the—” She checked her files for the name. “—The one in the Trinidad?”
    “Nothing.” Haas shrugged. “This is a Bose-Einstein mine. Flash fires are part of business. And most of the time you never find out where they started, let alone what caused them.”
    Li looked at him doubtfully.
    “Christ!” Haas muttered. “I thought you were from here. I thought you were supposed to know something.”
    Li tapped her temple where the faint shadow of wires showed beneath the skin. “You want me to know, tell me.”
    “Right. Bose-Einstein condensates don’t burn, Major. But coal does. And the crystals set the coal on fire sometimes. We don’t know why. It’s just one of the things you have to account for if you want to run a Bose-Einstein mine. It’s dangerous and it’s inconvenient. And sometimes—this time being one of them —it’s deadly.” He snorted. “But this time the crystals had some help. This time they had fucking Sharifi.”
    “What do you mean, Sharifi? You think she caused the fire? What was she doing that’s any different from what AMC does every day?”
    “She was cutting crystal for one thing.”
    “So? AMC’s cutting every day. You don’t have flash fires every day.”
    “Yeah, but where are we cutting, Major? That’s the question you have to ask. And where was she cutting?”
    “I don’t know,” Li said. “Where was she cutting?”
    “Look,” Haas said. “A Bose-Einstein bed is like a tree. You have to prune it, trim it, manage it. But if you cut too hard, or in the wrong place, you’ve got problems. And when you cut too hard in a Bose-Einstein mine you get fires.”
    “Because … ?”
    He shrugged. “TechComm has armies of researchers out here, year in year out, clogging up the gangways and wasting our time and slowing down production. But when it comes to actually giving us useful information they’re hopeless. Hell, they don’t know things any miner over twelve could tell you. Like that you don’t mess with live strata unless you have a death wish. The Beckies don’t like it. And when the Beckies don’t like a man, bad luck has a way of finding him.”
    Li stared. Becky was Shantytown slang for Bose-Einstein condensates. It was a miner’s word, resonant with myths about singing stones, haunted drifts, glory holes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of word you heard in AMC’s orbital executive offices. Either corporate culture had taken a sharp left turn in the last decade, or this fire was even stranger than Haas was admitting.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Haas said. “Poor dumb miner, seeing singing Beckies and the Blessed Virgin down every mine shaft. But I grew out of church a long time ago. And I’m telling you, Sharifi was courting trouble down there.”
    “Did you voice your concerns about the Beckies—uh, the condensates—to Sharifi?”
    “I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture,