MiNRS (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Forked Roads

We took the next few
days to clean up, take baths, and organize the food and water. Elena suggested we store food at different locations in all the tunnels. That way, if our home base was counterattacked and we had to leave our food behind, we wouldn’t lose it all. She and Jimmi volunteered.

I tried to help Elena load up her digger, but she just shook her head. “Jimmi and I can handle it, sir,” she said, reaching down to pick up a box of food. I reached out at the same time and grazed her hand by accident. She pulled hers away without looking at me and walked away with the box.

“You should probably be working on plans for an
attack,” she called over her shoulder. “Time is running out, sir.”

Jimmi walked up behind me, his hands filled with boxes. “What are we planning?” he said. “Sir,” he added with a sly smile. At least he was now willing to talk to me.

“We need to slow the Landers down. We need to keep them here. And that means we need to attack their ability to move the ore from storage to the ship.”

“Why not just attack
them
?”

“Good question,” Elena said under her breath as she returned to the storeroom and grabbed another box.

I frowned. “Because we don’t actually have any real weapons. Attacking a fully armed group of soldiers is a great way to get killed.”

“So a surprise is best?” Mandeep asked, walking in and grabbing a box of medical supplies.

Finn was right behind her. “Surprises? I love surprises! Is it somebody’s birthday? Is there cake?”

Darcy appeared out of nowhere and began chanting, “Cake, cake!” Then she stopped in front of me and stared expectantly, a huge grin spreading from ear to ear.

The mere mention of cake seemed to draw everyone else like a magnet, and within seconds I was surrounded.

“You know something,” Julio said. “I’ve never had cake.”

“Me neither,” said Nazeem. “I can’t wait!”

“Yes!” said Therese.

I stared at their rough hands and thin bodies, and I believed them.

I rubbed my temples. “I hate to say this, but there
is
no cake.”

Darcy frowned, stamped her foot, and marched back to wherever she’d come from.

Julio and Nazeem looked at each other and then at me. They looked deeply disappointed.

I had an idea. “There’s no cake, but there are some pies left over from the first raid.”

Darcy reappeared out of nowhere with the same big fake grin firmly pasted on her face again.

Julio, Therese, and Nazeem gave each other high fives and dramatically licked their lips.

A few minutes later we were all sitting against the tunnel walls, munching on pies.

I noticed with a bit of alarm that, without planning it, the grinders sat against one wall, and the minrs were up against the other.

I sat in the middle of the floor and tried to feel part of both.

I heard Darcy giggle and looked to see what was so funny.

Julio had stuffed a whole slice of pie into his mouth,
and seemed delighted despite the sticky bits of blueberry and apple that now dribbled down his chin.

Jimmi looked a little disgusted by this and made a show of using his fork to very carefully break apart his slice and lift the bites to his mouth.

Nazeem seemed to find this hilarious and began mocking him, sticking his nose in the air and lifting his pinkie as he picked a blueberry off Julio’s shirt and plopped it into his mouth.

Maria gave an audible gag and put her pie down.

Therese and Fatima started laughing so hard, they had to grab their stomachs.

Pavel stood, looking like he was going to walk over and start a fight. I figured it was time to change the subject, fast.

“While we’re all sitting here happily,” I said, “let’s go over some ideas for our next raid.”

Maria groaned, but she stayed.

Pavel sat back down, and Fatima motioned for Julio and Nazeem to settle down. She actually cupped her hand over Therese’s mouth to get her to stop giggling. Therese didn’t stop, but at least Fatima kept it muffled.

I looked at Alek, who got the hint and led Darcy back down the tunnel. I waited until they were out of earshot.

“We’ve been lucky so far. The Landers haven’t clued
in that there are survivors, or if they have, they don’t care about us.”

Elena jumped in before I could continue. “But we can’t hide any longer. We need to move on to the next phase. It’s a risk, but a strategically defensible risk.”

“Agreed. Our best plan is to slow them down, make some small targeted strikes against their equipment.”

“Make them suffer,” Elena said. I watched Maria shudder, but Elena went on. “We target containers trucks, vehicles, any equipment they are using to take the ore from the storage silos and to the ship. We just need to locate them accurately.”

“There is a labyrinth of tunnels that runs underneath the storage areas. There’s actually a large hangar where the ore containers are stored,” Fatima said.

“Can you guide us there?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve been there. It’s carved out of volcanic rock so that it’s impossible for diggers to break through by accident.”

Maria looked confused and a little scared. “Won’t the ore be in containers up top, with them?”

Elena shook her head. “The ore gets dumped in the storage silos, loose. The containers don’t get filled until a silo is full. They get filled down below, then the container and the truck get lifted to the surface.”

“By an enormous elevator,” Fatima said.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to attack the elevator?” Finn asked.

Everyone looked at him. He slumped back against the wall. “I mean, trying to take out the containers individually seems like it will take a long time. The containers are stuck if we attack the elevator. Sorry, dumb idea.”

I looked at him and smiled.

“It’s a great idea. That’s our target,” I said. “By a show of hands, who agrees?”

It was unanimous. I breathed a sigh of relief. Finn sat back up, beaming.

•   •   •

Fatima and I sat in the cockpit of my digger, focused as we drove away from the camp. I had volunteered us to be the team to destroy the elevator, but I was nervous. We didn’t say a word the whole time.

I used the disrupter to burn a straight line through the rock until we reached the large hall near the grinders’ cage.

Maria broke through the wall behind us. She turned off her digger and opened the cockpit. Her job was to wait here in case we got into trouble. What she would do if that happened was a little unclear. Rescue? Fight? Run and warn the camp? It was hard to predict. I knew
Maria wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the Landers, and I was just happy she’d agreed to come this far.

Jimmi was above us, looking out for Landers. To my surprise, he’d volunteered.

I promised I wouldn’t forget to send him a “head home” message this time.

According to our schedule, he was just arriving at his post.

I waved at Maria and began driving away.

The tunnels were totally confusing to me, but Fatima had no trouble navigating us all the way to the storage area. We drove down a narrow one until a red sensor began blinking on my screen. It was coming from a few feet ahead, through what looked like a wall of rock.

“The elevator shaft,” Fatima said, grinning. “It’s picking up the movement.”

I turned off the engine and waited for the movement to stop. A few minutes later the sensor went off, and I tapped my microphone two times, waiting for an all-clear signal from Jimmi.

“Fatima, what will you do when you get back to Earth?” I asked, trying to fill the time with something other than my racing heartbeat.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, help people. Or
maybe a politician. I could start a grinders party, work for equal rights. As long as we’re dreaming. You?”

“I wanted to be a scientist,” I said. “Like Melming. Now, well, I don’t know. What’s taking Jimmi so long?”

As if on cue we heard three taps come through the speaker.

I took a deep breath and turned on the engine.

“Don’t blow anything up,” Fatima said, giving my hand a squeeze.

I eased the digger forward. We reached the concrete shell of the elevator shaft, and I fired up the disrupter. It was too noisy in the cockpit to talk, so we watched the rock ahead of us split apart.

Finally we broke through, just underneath the huge floor of the elevator compartment. The disrupter shut off. We turned and smiled at each other.

I drove forward and buried the nose of the digger into the elevator’s giant hydraulic piston. Oil and metal flew all around, clanging off the walls and covering the cockpit window with thick black goo.

“We can’t see!” Fatima yelled.

“No worries.” I flicked a switch, and a tiny infrared camera in the hood turned on. “It sees through all that stuff using heat and radiation.” A screen showed us what was happening outside as the digger continued
to maul the mechanism that lifted the elevator.

It finally broke completely, and Fatima and I gave each other a high five.

I then angled the nose up slightly and began cutting into the elevator compartment. The borer was taking forever, so I tried firing up the disrupter. It burned against the metal for a short time before turning off. But it had left the beginnings of a hole.

I hoped the borer could finish the job quickly.

Sparks and smoke filled the screen, but the digger was barely moving forward.

“It’s too thick!” I yelled. The digger was never going to cut through. And I was worried. The noise of the drill was amplified a hundred times as it rose up the elevator shaft. The Landers must have heard it. They couldn’t call the elevator to come get them anymore, but I didn’t want to stay in any one place too long to test that theory. I put the digger in reverse.

“Time to go!” I yelled over the noise.

Fatima nodded.

I reversed, and then we stopped. We didn’t stop, the digger did. The lights all went out and the engine and drill went dead. I quickly felt for my helmet and flicked on the headlamp.

“What’s the matter?” Fatima whispered. Her cold
hand grabbed my arm. I ran my fingers over the entire console. Nothing even flickered.

“We’ve run out of power. But that’s impossible. The power cell was full when we left!” I had checked it, but somehow the long slow drilling with just the borer, and then the attempt to drill into the metal floor, had drained it. “The power got drained faster when we didn’t use the disrupter to dig,” I said.

It was a hard way to learn that lesson. We were stuck with no power, and no way to tell Jimmi or Maria to come save us.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said. I pushed the button to release the cockpit, but it was dead as well.

“There has to be some way to open it manually,” she said.

We searched for anything along the seam that might be a release latch or switch. Then I reached under the seat, and my fingers wrapped around a handle. I pulled it, and the roof opened.

Fatima and I crawled out. I heard noises from the shaft up above—muffled yells.

“I can get us out of here,” Fatima said. “Follow me back down the hole.”

I started to follow and then stopped. I turned and stared at the digger.

“We can’t leave it behind. All the Landers would have to do was recharge the power cell, and then they’d have a working digger. They’d also have a map of everywhere we’ve been. They could come after us.”

There was a loud bang as if someone in heavy boots had landed on the elevator floor.

“We need to go now,” Fatima said.

“You go. I’ll be there in a second.”

“No,” she said.

I didn’t have time to argue. Something Fatima had said earlier clicked an idea in my brain.

The disrupter had its own power source. It wouldn’t turn on in open air, but maybe I could trick it.

I grabbed the tool kit from the storage area and hurried to the front of the digger.

“What are you doing?” Fatima said.

“Blowing something up.”

Fatima scurried down next to me. “What do you need me to do?”

“When I ask for a tool, get it to me quickly. Wrench.”

She handed me one. I was able to open up the hood with a few strokes. I said a quick thank-you to the engineers who had made the digger engine both practical and easy to access.

“Screwdriver.”

She dug around and then handed it to me. More boots landed on the elevator floor, and I could hear the loud hiss of something cutting through the metal.

I worked my way farther and farther into the engine block, taking out bits and pieces of the drive shaft and engine block that operated the borer. Finally I could see what I was looking for: a sleek box covered with yellow warning labels.

“The fusion core,” I said in a whisper. This little box held the miracle that allowed the digger to work.

“The core,” Fatima repeated. “That’s what you’re going to blow up?”

“Not exactly. Opening up the core won’t do anything but poison you and me. It’s not explosive, just radioactive.”

A laser beam shot through the elevator floor, scorching the rock near my feet. I had to hurry.

I looked for the wires that ran from the sensor in the nose cone to the battery that triggered the reaction inside this box. I spotted it quickly, just as sparks began to cut a line through the metal above our heads.

“Wire cutter.” Fatima handed it to me, and I snipped the wires.

I quickly jumped out from under the hood and reached into the cockpit. “Fatima, you get up into that hole now. I’m not sure how long we’ll have once I flip this switch.”

Fatima hurried away, and I got ready to run. I flicked the switch to ignite the disrupter. A high-pitched squeal filled my ears and the disrupter began to spin. A pale blue plasma enveloped the nose cone. It was beautiful, and deadly.

I bolted as fast as I could. Fatima held out her hand and pulled me into the hole. There was a loud clang behind us as the Landers cut through the floor, and a huge metal slab crashed into the back of the digger.

The squeal grew louder and louder, even as we crawled farther and farther away.