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Helldiver
The rst thing you should know about me is I am my father’s son.
And when they came for him, I did as he asked. I did not cry. Not
when the Society televised the arrest. Not when the Golds tried him.
Not when the Grays hanged him. Mother hit me for that. My brother
Kieran was supposed to be the stoic one. He was the elder, I the
younger. I was supposed to cry. Instead, Kieran bawled like a girl
when Little Eo tucked a haemanthus into father’s left workboot and
ran back to her own father’s side. My sister Leanna murmured a
lament beside me. I just watched and thought it a shame that he
died dancing but without his dancing shoes.
On Mars there is not much gravity. So you have to pull the feet to
break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.
I smell my own stink inside my frysuit. The suit is some kind of
nanoplastic and is hot as its name suggests. It insulates me toe to
head. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. Especially not the heat.
Worst part is you can’t wipe the sweat from your eyes. Bloodydamn
stings as it goes through the headband to puddle at the heels. Not to
mention the stink when you piss. Which you always do. Gotta take
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in a load of water through the drinktube. I guess you could be t
with a catheter. We choose the stink.
The drillers of my clan chatter some gossip over the comm in my
ear as I ride atop the clawDrill. I’m alone in this deep tunnel atop a
machine built like a titanic metal hand, one that grasps and gnaws
at the ground. I control its rockmelting digits from the holster seat
atop the drill, just where the elbow joint would be. There, my
ngers t into control gloves that manipulate the many tentacle-like
drills some ninety meters below my perch. To be a Helldiver, they
say your ngers must icker fast as tongues of re. Mine icker
faster.
Despite the voices in my ear, I am alone in the deep tunnel. My
existence is vibration, the echo of my own breath, and heat so thick
and noxious it feels like I’m swaddled in a heavy quilt of hot piss.
A new river of sweat breaks through the scarlet sweatband tied
around my forehead and slips into my eyes, burning them till
they’re as red as my rusty hair. I used to reach and try to wipe the
sweat away, only to scratch futilely at the faceplate of my frysuit. I
still want to. Even after three years, the tickle and sting of the sweat
is a raw misery.
The tunnel walls around my holster seat are bathed a sulfurous
yellow by a corona of lights. The reach of the light fades as I look up
the thin vertical shaft I’ve carved today. Above, precious helium-3
glimmers like liquid silver, but I’m looking at the shadows, looking
for the pitvipers that curl through the darkness seeking the warmth
of my drill. They’ll eat into your suit too, bite through the shell and
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then try to burrow into the warmest place they nd, usually your
belly, so they can lay their eggs. I’ve been bitten before. Still dream
of the beast—black, like a thick tendril of oil. They can get as wide
as a thigh and long as three men, but it’s the babies we fear. They
don’t know how to ration their poison. Like me, their ancestors
came from Earth, then Mars and the deep tunnels changed them.
It is eerie in the deep tunnels. Lonely. Beyond the roar of the drill,
I hear the voices of my friends, all older. But I cannot see them a
half klick above me in the darkness. They drill high above, near the
mouth of the tunnel that I’ve carved, descending with hooks and
lines to dangle along the sides of the tunnel to get at the small veins
of helium-3. They mine with meter-long drills, gobbling up the
cha. The work still requires mad dexterity of foot and hand, but
I’m the earner in this crew. I am the Helldiver. It takes a certain
kind—and I’m the youngest anyone can remember.
I’ve been in the mines for three years. You start at thirteen. Old
enough to screw, old enough to crew. At least that’s what Uncle
Narol said. Except I didn’t get married till six months back, so I
don’t know why he said it.
Eo dances through my thoughts as I peer into my control display
and slip the clawDrill’s ngers around a fresh vein, melting and
scraping away the rock to isolate the mineral without destroying it.
Eo. Sometimes it’s dicult to think of her as anything but what we
used to call her as children.
Little Eo—a tiny girl hidden beneath a mane of red. Red like the
rock around me, not true red, rust-red. Red like our home, like
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Mars. Eo is sixteen too. And she may be like me—from a clan of Red
earth diggers, a clan of song and dance and soil—but she could be
made from air, from the ether that binds the stars in a patchwork.
Not that I’ve ever seen stars. No Red from the mining colonies sees
the stars.
Little Eo. They wanted to marry her o when she turned fourteen,
like all girls of the clans. But she took the short rations and waited
for me to reach sixteen, wedAge for men, before slipping that cord
around her nger. She said she knew we’d marry since we were
children. I didn’t.
“Hold. Hold. Hold!” Uncle Narol snaps over the comm channel.
“Darrow, hold, boy!” My ngers freeze. He’s high above with the rest
of them, watching my progress on his head unit.
“What’s the burn?” I ask, annoyed. I don’t like being interrupted.
“What’s the burn, the little Helldiver asks,” Old Barlow chuckles.
“Gas pocket, that’s what,” Narol snaps. He’s the headTalk for our
two-hundred-plus crew. “Hold. Calling a scanCrew to check the
particulars before you blow us all to hell.”
“That gas pocket? It’s a tiny one,” I say. “More like a gas pimple. I
can manage it.”
“A year on the drill and he thinks he knows his head from his hole!
Poor little pissant,” old Barlow adds dryly. “Remember the words of
our golden leader. Patience and obedience, young one. Patience is the
better part of valor. And obedience the better part of humanity. Listen to
your elders.”
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I roll my eyes at the epigram. If the elders could do what I can,
maybe listening would have its merits. But they are slow in hand
and mind. Sometimes I feel like they want me to be just the same,
especially my uncle.
“I’m on a tear,” I say. “If you think there’s a gas pocket, I can just
hop down and handscan it. Easy. No dilldally.”
They’ll preach caution. As if caution has ever helped them. We
haven’t won a Laurel in ages.
“Want to make Eo a widow?” Barlow laughs, voice crackling with
static. “Okay by me. She is a pretty little thing. Drill into that pocket and
leave her to me. Old and fat I be, but my drill still digs a dent.”
A chorus of laughter comes from the two hundred drillers above.
My knuckles turn white as I grip the controls.
“Listen to Uncle Narol, Darrow. Better to back o till we can get a
reading,” my brother Kieran adds. He’s three years older. Makes him
think he’s a sage, that he knows more. He just knows caution.
“There’ll be time.”
“Time? Hell, it’ll take hours,” I snap. They’re all against me in
this. They’re all wrong and slow and don’t understand that the
Laurel is only a bold move away. More, they doubt me. “You are
being a coward, Narol.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
Calling a man a coward—not a good way to get his cooperation.
Shouldn’t have said it.
“I say make the scan yourself,” Loran, my cousin and Narol’s son,
squawks. “Don’t and Gamma is good as Gold—they’ll get the Laurel for,
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oh, the hundredth time.”
The Laurel. Twenty-four clans in the underground mining colony
of Lykos, one Laurel per quarter. It means more food than you can
eat. It means more burners to smoke. Imported quilts from Earth.
Amber swill with the Society’s quality markings. It means winning.
Gamma clan has had it since anyone can remember. So it’s always
been about the Quota for us lesser clans, just enough to scrape by.
Eo says the Laurel is the carrot the Society dangles, always just far
enough beyond our grasp. Just enough so we know how short we
really are and how little we can do about it. We’re supposed to be
pioneers. Eo calls us slaves. I just think we never try hard enough.
Never take the big risks because of the old men.
“Loran, shut up about the Laurel. Hit the gas and we’ll miss all the
bloodydamn Laurels to kingdom come, boy,” Uncle Narol growls.
He’s slurring. I can practically smell the drink through the comm.
He wants to call a sensor team to cover his own ass. Or he’s scared.
The drunk was born pissing himself out of fear. Fear of what? Our
overlords, the Golds? Their minions, the Grays? Who knows? Few
people. Who cares? Even fewer. Actually, just one man cared for my
uncle, and he died when my uncle pulled his feet.
My uncle is weak. He is cautious and immoderate in his drink, a
pale shadow of my father. His blinks are long and hard, as though it
pains him to open his eyes each time and see the world again. I
don’t trust him down here in the mines, or anywhere for that
matter. But my mother would tell me to listen to him; she would
remind me to respect my elders. Even though I am wed, even
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though I am the Helldiver of my clan, she would say that my
“blisters have not yet become calluses.” I will obey, even though it
is as maddening as the tickle of the sweat on my face.
“Fine,” I murmur.
I clench the drill st and wait as my uncle calls it in from the
safety of the chamber above the deep tunnel. This will take hours. I
do the math. Eight hours till whistle call. To beat Gamma, I’ve got
to keep a rate of 156.5 kilos an hour. It’ll take two and a half hours
for the scanCrew to get here and do their deal, at best. So I’ve got to
pump out 227.6 kilos per hour after that. Impossible. But if I keep
going and squab the tedious scan, it’s ours.
I wonder if Uncle Narol and Barlow know how close we are.
Probably. Probably just don’t think anything is ever worth the risk.
Probably think divine intervention will squab our chances. Gamma
has the Laurel. That’s the way things are and will ever be. We of
Lambda just try to scrape by on our foodstus and meager comforts.
No rising. No falling. Nothing is worth the risk of changing the
hierarchy. My father found that out at the end of a rope.
Nothing is worth risking death. Against my chest, I feel the
wedding band of hair and silk dangling from the cord around my
neck and think of Eo’s ribs.
I’ll see a few more of the slender things through her skin this
month. She’ll go asking the Gamma families for scraps behind my
back. I’ll act like I don’t know. But we’ll still be hungry. I eat too
much because I’m sixteen and still growing tall; Eo lies and says
she’s never got much of an appetite. Some women sell themselves
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for food or luxuries to the Tinpots (Grays, to be technic about it),
the Society’s garrison troops of our little mining colony. She
wouldn’t sell her body to feed me. Would she? But then I think
about it. I’d do anything to feed her …
I look down over the edge of my drill. It’s a long fall to the
bottom of the hole I’ve dug. Nothing but molten rock and hissing
drills. But before I know what’s what, I’m out of my straps, scanner
in hand and jumping down the hundred-meter drop toward the drill
ngers. I kick back and forth between the vertical mineshaft’s walls
and the drill’s long, vibrating body to slow my fall. I make sure I’m
not near a pitviper nest when I throw out an arm to catch myself on
a gear just above the drill ngers. The ten drills glow with heat. The
air shimmers and distorts. I feel the heat on my face, feel it stabbing
my eyes, feel it ache in my belly and balls. Those drills will melt
your bones if you’re not careful. And I’m not careful. Just nimble.
I lower myself hand over hand, going feet rst between the drill
ngers so that I can lower the scanner close enough to the gas
pocket to get a reading. The heat is unbearable and the air in my
lungs nearly too hot to breathe. This was a mistake. Voices shout at
me through the comm. I almost brush one of the drills as I nally
lower myself close enough to the gas pocket. The scanner ickers in
my hand as it takes its reading. My suit is bubbling and I smell
something sweet and sharp, like burned syrup. To a Helldiver, it is
the smell of death.
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