the hatch.
Inside the hold, all hell had broken loose, as well as several partitions meant to guard the contents against shifting. One barrier had given way in the worst possible place, near the bow, where all that mass suddenly piling starboard added to their list and worsened the rudder’s lumberous response. Dim electric bulbs, running on reserve batteries, swung wildly and cast dervish shadows as Maia grimly traversed a creaky catwalk straddling huge bins half-filled with chunky coal. Black dust rose like spindrift, clogging her throat and causing her nictitating membranes to close over her eyes, just when she needed more light, not less!
Stumbling down a crumbly talus, Maia came upon an infernal scene, where shattered boards let tons of coal pile rightward in great sloping mounds. Other vars had already joined the men below, toiling to tame the rebel cargo, tossing it morsel by morsel over groaning walls into yet unbroken compartments. Someone handed Maia a shovel and she dug in, adding what she could to the pitiful effort. Through the suffocating haze, she saw that a trio of clones were also hard at work—first-class passengers whose clan must have taught its daughters that dirty hands were less objectionable than dying.
More helpers arrived carrying buckets. An officer began shouting and pointing, organizing a human chain —women in the middle, passing plastic pails, while men shoveled and filled at one end, heaving coal over a partition at the other. Maia’s job was to keep one shoveler provided with fresh buckets, then send each laden pail on its way. Although desperation lent her strength, and danger hormones surmounted her nausea, she had trouble keeping up with the frantic pace. The male sailor’s wedge-shaped torso heaved like some great beast, emitting heat so palpable she dimly feared it might ignite the flying coal, sending everyone to patarkal hades in one giant fireball.
The rhythm accelerated. Agony spread from her hands, up her fatigued arms, and across her back. Everyone else was older, stronger, more experienced, but that hardly mattered, with all lives at stake together. Only teamwork counted. When Maia fumbled a bucket, it felt like the world coming to an end.
It didn’t end, not yet. No one chided, and she did not cry, because there was no time. Another pail took the fallen one’s place and she bore down, striving to work faster.
Bucket by bucket, they chewed away at the drift. But despite all their efforts, the tilt seemed only to increase. The black mountain climbed higher up the starboard bulkhead. Worse, the bin they had been loading, on the port side, began to creak and groan, its straining planks bowing outward. No telling how long that partition would hold against a growing gravitational discord. Every pailful they tossed just added to the load.
Suddenly, a startling, earsplitting crash pounded the deck overhead. Something heavy must have come loose from the rigging, at last. Through the ringing in her skull, Maia heard sounds of distant cheering. Almost at once, she felt the freighter slip out of the wind’s frustrated clutches. With a palpable moan, Wotan’s tiller finally answered its helmsman’s weary pull and the ship broke free, turning to run before the storm.
In the hold, a var near Maia let out a long sigh as the awful list began to settle. One of the clones laughed, tossing her shovel aside. Maia blinked as someone patted her on the back. She smiled and started to let go of the bucket in her hands—
“ ’Ware!” Someone screamed, pointing at the mountain of coal to the right. Their efforts had paid off, all right. Too quickly. As the starboard tilt gave way, momentum swung the ship past vertical in a counterclockwise roll. The sloping mass trembled, then started to collapse.
“Out! Out!” An officer cried redundantly, as screaming crew and passengers leaped for ladders, climbed the wooden bins, or merely ran. All except those nearest the avalanche, for whom it was already too late. Maia saw a stupefied look cross the face of the huge sailor next to her, as the black wave rumbled toward them. He had time to blink, then his startled yell was muffled as Maia brought her bucket down upon his shoulders, covering his head.
The momentum of her leap carried her upward, so the anthracite tsunami did not catch her at once. The poor sailor’s bulk shielded Maia for an instant, then she was swimming through a hail of sharp stones, frantically clawing uphill. Grabbing for anything, her hand struck the haft of a shovel and seized it spasmodically. As her legs and abdomen were pinned, Maia just managed to raise the tool, using the steel blade to shield her face.
A noise like all eternity ending brought with it sudden darkness.
Panic seized her, an intense, animal force that jerked and heaved convulsively against burial and suffocation. Terrifying blindness and crushing weight enveloped her. She wanted to maul the enemy that pressed her from all sides. She’wanted to scream.
The fit passed.
It passed because nothing moved, no matter how she strained. Not a thing. Maia’s body returned to conscious control simply because panic proved utterly futile. Consciousness was the only part of her that could even pretend mobility.
With her first coherent thought, finding herself blanketed by tons of stony carbon, Maia realized that there were indeed worse things than acrophobia or seasickness. And there was yet one item heading the catalogue of surprises.
Not yet. In darkness and battered agony, straddling a fine zone between fainting and hysteria, Maia clung to that fact and worked at it. The press of warm, rusty steel against her face was one clue. The shovel blade hadn’t kept the avalanche from burying her, but it had protected a small space, a pocket filled with stale air, rather than coal. So perhaps she’d suffocate, rather than drown. The distinction seemed tenuous, yet the tangy smell of metal was preferable to having her nostrils full of horrible dust.
Time passed. Seconds? Fractions of seconds? Certainly not minutes. There couldn’t be that much air.
The ship had stopped rocking, thank Stratos, or the shifting cargo would have quickly ground her to paste. Even with the coal bed lying still, nearly every square inch of her body felt crushed and scraped by jagged rocks. With nothing to do but inventory agonies, Maia found it possible to distinguish subtle differences in texture. Each chunk pressing her body had a sadistic personality so individual she might give it a name… this one, Needle; that one under her left breast, Pincher; and so on.
As fractions stretched into whole seconds and more, she grew aware of one, unique point of contact—a tight, throbbing constriction that felt smooth but rhythmically adamant. With shock, she realized someone was holding onto her leg! Hope coursed through Maia that she had been tossed upside down, leaving a foot exposed, and those pulsating squeezes meant help was coming!
Then she realized.
His hand must have connected with her foot at the last moment, while she swam the carbon tide. Now, whether conscious or dying, the man maintained this thin thread of human contact through their common tomb.
How ironic. Yet it seemed no more bizarre than anything else right now. It was company.
Maia felt sorry for Leie, when the news came.
As she pondered that, the pulsing grip around her ankle tightened abruptly, spasmodically, clenching so hard that Maia moaned in fierce new pain. She felt the sailor’s terrible convulsions, and his reflexive strength yanked her downward, stabbing her in a hundred places, making her gasp in anguish. Then the fierce grip began subsiding in a chain of diminishing tremors.
The throbbing constrictions stopped. Maia imagined she heard a distant rattle.
See? she told herself, as hot tears swept her eyes in total darkness.
