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Some of you leave us food, supplies, power cells at dead-drops, and we leave you shadow currency and ore in return. We always pay, because if we didn’t, you wouldn’t smuggle us in sandwiches, noodle bowls, jerky—and we pay you ten times what the supplies would be worth on the surface. So that’s a profit for those that take the risk bringing it in, even given what the Company store charges you. Beef costs next to nothing to grow, once the initial outlay of tanks and nutrients is covered—those little cells just keep on dividing and dividing and dividing as long as you keep the nutrients coming. It’s highway robbery what they sell it for on these backwater mining worlds.

Debt’s a way of keeping people under control. So I don’t grudge you anything you can do to pay down what you doubtless owe the Company. After two local years, I’d do just about anything to get out of my own debt to the Syndicates and go home. My kids are growing up without me . . . though they’re well-housed and well-fed and well-educated, which is more than I could have done for them by staying upstairs.

Everybody downstairs is here because we owe. And they have ways of making sure that no matter what we do, we owe more and more.

We ghosts don’t dare leave downstairs very often, because we have to be smuggled each way—which is dangerous and uncomfortable and expensive. I came in disguised as an ore extractor. That was cramped, even after the mods they do to cut us down for the carapaces and the narrow tunnels. I had to build that extractor into my carapace while protected by nothing but a skinsuit, and nearly died when a filter jammed. First-degree burns all over my hands and if I still had feet I’d have had them there, too. That memory’s enough to keep me down here until I’m ready to leave for good.

It’s not too hard, staying down. We get the food off you, and piggyback for air and water and fuel. And you lot . . . you don’t dare come after us, even your guards. In the mines we can feel you moving a long way off. We have better wetware than you do, though both of us sold ourselves to get it.

Yours comes from the Company store. Ours comes from the Syndicates. And when I say better, well—that’s theoretical. Quality assurance is not the illegal economy’s strong point, if you know what I mean, and it seems like one out of five of everything they send us is defective somehow.

So your job is safer—at least theoretically. Ours (theoretically) pays better. But neither one of us can ever earn enough to quit. We kid ourselves before we sign—we’ll be disciplined. We’ll be careful. We won’t make those mistakes everybody else makes, because we’re better than them.

Human psychology is the biggest confidence game of all.

But even more than that, you don’t come after us because the Company doesn’t like you having weapons. There would be no end of trouble with the insurers.

And we, on the other hand—we are
very
well armed.

I’m working a side tunnel in the far reaches, sketchy as hell and twice as isolated, when you stumble across my . . . well, I can’t really call it a claim, can I, when I’m jumping it? I know you’re a Company miner the instant I catch sight of you, because you have the running lights all up and down your carapace. Ghost miners don’t run with lights—not visible-spectrum lights, anyway. And what an archaism that is, that we’re still talking about the electromagnetic spectrum in terms of physiological imitations that haven’t mattered in five hundred home-years. I heard you coming, of course—metal clicks on stone, grates over tracks. This far down, there are no elevators—we move in our carapaces, feeling the rock with fingertips made of titanium alloys, ceramics, carbyne laced with dynamic returns. It works better than flesh; pinpoint sensitivity.

And best of all, it cannot burn.

So I heard you coming. And I’m still surprised to see you. You’re off the beaten path, even for us. I’m down in a side tunnel we dug in particular, working to set up the refiners—dangerous and nasty, but we’re not hauling ore upstairs when we can haul metal, given the value per kilogram of each. So nobody who knows they’re here and doesn’t have to should want to come down, and none of your folks should be this deep in ghost territory. And yet, here I am with my claws locked around the release bolt of a damned jammed pressure relief valve, and here you come: blundering along, lit up in sixteen different wavelengths, using your floods to find your way instead of picking through the dark on ambient thermal as one of us would.

In my gray unlit carapace, I let go of the valve, hunker down into the rocks and pretend you can see right through me. I don’t feel like shooting anybody today.

Wonder of wonders, it works. It also turns out to be a great big mistake, but if I could see the future, I wouldn’t be out here on this fucking serial number growing old in a roach shell, now would I?

You pass over the tunnel ceiling with a click of grippers on stone. Your carapace flows with the motion of the body bonded to it. I wonder if you, like me, left anybody behind. Or if you, like me, got left behind by somebody.

If you miss the warm contact of flesh to flesh. If you make do with simstim, like so many of us. If you look forward to a day when you can buy your way out of the carapace and maybe feel that touch again. If maybe, like me, you figure that you’re better off with simstim.

Programmed lovers never let you down.

I have plenty of time to wonder. You pick your way slowly, carefully. It occurs to me that you’re sneaking. You can’t miss the refiner beyond me, though, once you come around the corner. And then I figure you’ll do one of several things.

The most likely is to slip back the way you came, and pretend you never saw any of this, and count yourself lucky you didn’t find ten armed ghosts looking for a little sport. Some of my colleagues aren’t the nicest.

But that’s not what happens. You get to about where I guessed you would spot the refiner I just finished building and loading—it chugs away contentedly, turning ore into bright metal and toxic sludge—and you stop. Through the dark, I see your antennae twitching, sensors processing. I pull myself closer to the rocks. I’m armed—of course I’m armed—but where’s the point in picking a fight if I don’t have to? Too many risks.

I want to get back to my kids, one of these years. That’s why I’m out here in nowhereland working these refiners alone. Bigger dangers, sure, but no split of the credits—and bigger margins, too. And you know, if I’m here alone, nobody else is going to disappoint me.

It’s a risk, I admit. But it’s a calculated risk.

Starting a shooting match with an unknown quantity? There’s nothing calculated about
that
risk at all.

And you’re alone, and I figure you’re here by accident. Lost, malfunctioning, caught a funky nav trail or something. I hope you find a way out. I’ve never known it to happen personally, but there’s tales of hauntings, of miners who got lost down here in all these klicks and klicks and klicks of corridors and oxy-starved or just never found a way out.

I don’t know what I’m going to do if you go for the refiner. The Syndicates would charge me for it. And I can’t afford that kind of debt. I don’t want to bring my weapons live—you’ll notice that for sure. Especially if I try for an IR lock—but even chambering a round makes a sound that carries, down here in the close spaces and thick gas.

So I wait.

You suspect I’m here. I can tell because your lights dim, your floods die, and you go passive input only. Antennae still twitching, you in turn press close to the rock.

Well, this is entertaining. I hope we’re not going to be here all day. Night. Whatever the hell this is.

I have to clamp down on the urge to jump out from behind my rock and yell BOO! Shit, that’s tempting.

So tempting that I’m still wrestling with it when the refiner whose pressure release I hadn’t finished unclogging . . . explodes.

Remember what I said about the twenty percent rate of defectives?

I guess you and me, we got lucky.

The carapaces take the worst of it. And the fact that both of us are huddled behind rocks, ridiculously hiding from one another, means that the worst of what they soak up is something both carapaces can survive. The atmosphere burns—it does that down here sometimes, something to do with toxic volatiles—but not methane because nothing on this planet except for us has ever been alive—and the fire sweeps over and between us in a wall of blue and violet and sickly green.

Yep, working alone, nobody else is going to disappoint me. I have to do all the disappointing for myself.

Guess it’s lucky I’m so good at it.

I lose external sensors about then. Which is just as well, because I’ve already watched my whole world burn the one time. Though this iteration is both prettier and more dramatic, well. I don’t have a lot of stomach for the instant replay.

Something’s tugging at my carapace. At my manipulators, to be precise. A fritz of static; a shiver of IR. I can see, sort of; the carapace is repairing itself. Just the way it’s supposed to. At first I think,
Pity about living through; this is going to be one hell of a hangover.
Then I think,
Don’t you dare die. Myah and Koral are counting on you.

They’d be better off without me. The Syndicates have a pretty good insurance policy. They call it, “We take care of our own.” I die, and Myah and Koral wind up in a top-ranked creche, being raised alongside the kids of the Syndicates seniors.

It’s so comforting that I almost want to shake off the tugging. But as I swim back up to myself, I realize that it’s a little more complicated than that. Because the truth is: I die, and they wind up in debt to the Syndicates in their own names. And saddled with a family loyalty to the next generation, too.

That’s upsetting. Because given the situation, I’m not quite sure I can manage to live.

I take a moment to assess. Systems reporting surface damage, scouring, burned sensors. Repairs underway. One of my primary manipulators is spot-welded to the rock by a melted chunk of refiner—or maybe a big old blob of what the refiner was refining. That’s going to be a problem.

Inside the carapace, though, my wetware indicates the meat is more or less okay. Bruised up, trickling some fluids from places they’re not normally supposed to flow. But functional, and not losing anything critical critically fast. I dial up my hydration, and focus on what’s tugging me.

It’s you. Specifically, you’re trying to drill the rock around my fixed manipulator away without breaching my carapace, or me. You’re scorched, but don’t seem hurt, and your running lights are back on. They illuminate a lot of billowing dust and smoke, mostly. Your diamond-tipped bit is making short work of the stone, too. I think I’m impressed.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Not leaving you here to die,” you answer. “Do me a favor and don’t explode or electrocute me, Ghost.”

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting. “The refiner overpressurized,” I said. “My fault.”

There’s a shrug in your voice as you continue drilling. “Accidents happen.”

“If your colleagues are going to come looking, you should head back.” I don’t want to be found here by them, pinned down. And what the hell is a blackleg doing chiseling me out, anyway?

I realize I said that last out loud when you grab my manipulator and twist, cracking the last thin column of stone. I look at it, then at you. Your sensors reflect my carapace with a resounding blankness of expression. But that’s what I’m giving you.

“Tunnel’s collapsed,” you reply conversationally. “And nobody’s going to be looking for me. I’m jumping indenture.”

Oh. Well, that explains what you were doing out here in the ass-end of nowhere. One mystery solved!

I wish I felt more cheerful about it.

After a long pause, you let go of my manipulator.

“I’m Chi,” you say. Dryly, you add, “I guess it’s a pleasure.”

You extend a manipulator. I reply with my ruined one, still bonded to a lump of stone. We tap claws tentatively, making sure no metal touches metal to avoid any potential spark. I probably burned off the volatiles by blowing up the refiner—great planning!—but you never know.

“I’m Kely,” I say. “I’m really sorry to meet you.”

Then it’s quiet and dark and hot, and we separate to explore the limits of our de facto prison. The tunnel was about two meters at its widest, and half a meter tall. It’s irregular, and the segment we’re sealed into is about two meters long—so we don’t get far. Not very big, in other words, though it takes us some poking about and shifting piles of rocks to determine where the cave-in is. In the course of our conversation, I learn that, apparently, I was under some rubble before you shoveled me off.

Thanks, Chi. Next time I’m hiding from somebody who’s not actually a threat, remind me to finish servicing the equipment first.

By the time we run out of tunnel, we’ve fallen into conversation. We’ve realized that nobody is coming to look for us—the Syndicates don’t expect to hear from me any time soon, and you snuck off at the end of a shift-set, after punchout. It’s your weekend.

We’re limited to the consumables we have on board. I suggest drilling out. You point out that neither one of us is packing enough hydrogen to run our fuel cells long enough to make that happen. And if the cooling in our carapaces quits, we’ll cook.

That seems like a bad death.

The bad news is that we’ll oxy-starve before anybody notices us missing. The good news is that if we sit still, we’ll run out of oxy before we do hydrogen. Suffocation is a better death than broiling in our shells like old Earth lobsters—and it’s even a better death than thirst.

In the bottom of a mine, you harvest your mercies young and tender if you want to get any.

We settle in, side by side, to contemplate our options. I find myself worrying more about your hypothetical plans for the increasingly hypothetical future, somehow. I know I’m avoiding thinking about dying down here when I ask, “What were you going to do for a body if you got out?”

It seems like a fair question: the carapaces aren’t well adapted for life outside the mines. And they take a lot of us off to prep us—all those nerve trunks that used to run nonessential systems like legs and so forth, they’re used for other stuff after we’re rebuilt.