THE MINES


THE CRIMSON LUNAR DUST lay everywhere; upon equipment, in the door sills, in the mechanics of the mining vehicles. It rose in great billowing clouds at the slightest breeze, choking anything without either adapted lungs or breathing apparatus. "The Red Mist", they called it. "The Silent Death". It was soundless, merciless, inveigling its way into any fissure or uncovered receptacle. Jamming machinery and highly dangerous, the powder was so fine it could almost have been mistaken for some alien, scarlet gas.
Larcen checked the valve on his filter-mask and placed his bare hand against the door panel. As white light pulsed through the pad, Larcen replaced his titanium-plated glove and sealed it off.
He stepped into the magna-lock to activate his suit's magnetic field, then left the building. Streams of dust poured from the crevices in the door to add to the mounds at its base.
The veteran miner picked his way through the uneven craters and canyons of the lunar landscape. Nobody cared enough to terraform the living zones - Central Command had decided it was enough to provide passable roads and flat sites for structures. Larcen's magnetised boots made perfect prints in the dust; the magnetic field repelled the powder, preventing it from coating him. The sterile, dust-free air, efficiently filtered by his mask, was clean, but tasted lifeless. The atmosphere of this satellite lacked oxygen, and so two great generators had been set up to recycle what precious oxygen there was held within the biospheres surrounding the mine and living compounds, noisily pumping out breathable, safe, but dead air.
Dead. What else do you expect from this place, Larcen thought bitterly. He had been assigned here three Terran years ago, and had grown weary of the empty living very soon after. He had applied for reassignment - but that had been nearly eighteen months back. He knew men who had been here six years, despite constant requests for relocation. But the influx of new workers was slow, and the quotas had to be kept... Larcen was sick of excuses. He wanted, more than anything, to be off this desolate moon and back in civilisation. He was tired of the mines and all their hazards.
Especially the Seekers. Larcen shivered involuntarily at the thought. He had seen the corpse of a Seeker victim two weeks ago, and the memory chilled his blood. One of only two species indigenous to Tenar, the predatory Seekers, or Tarinesh, were a terrifying menace. They sucked the very life from their prey, leaving nothing but withered husks. Few men had ever seen a Seeker and survived to talk about it; those who had were incurably insane. The creatures had poor vision, but that deficiency was made up for by an acute sense of smell. Once on the scent of a victim, a Seeker would trail its chosen prey through the mine shafts until it made its kill or the intended victim moved above ground. The Tarinesh were apparently a subterranean species; no Seeker had ever been seen on the surface. Although, Larcen reflected, the Tarinesh had never been sighted anywhere without the observer coming to a sticky end.
Quickening his pace, Larcen headed for the Lunar Transit Buggy - commonly known as an LTB - he had left outside the previous day.
He hooked his miniature flashlight to his belt and checked to see that his pistol was at full charge. It was not far to the mine in the LTB, although every time he made the ten minute journey, Larcen could have sworn it seemed to take longer.
He left the vehicle in the bay outside the mine, not bothering to secure it. There was the one advantage to Tenar - crime simply did not exist. It was a mining colony, with no more than three thousand men living there at any one time. For the most part, there was nothing to steal. There was nothing available from which alcohol could be distilled, and no currency to gamble with. The colony's single security officer was idle most of the time.
Larcen was used to the warren of shafts; he had worked in far dingier, more claustrophobic mines than the one here, but the beacons on the walls lent an unnatural, flickering light to the perfectly even walls. He could not quite shrug off the feeling that he was being watched, or worse still, smelt. He rested his left hand on his pistol, to reassure himself, and continued, his footsteps echoing weirdly around the flawless, circular walls.
Larcen soon reached the broad mine face, and relaxed a little. Five hundred miners chipped and dug at the diamond-hard, porous lunar stone; battering away the rock in search of the elusive veins of Duraldium, that priceless mineral to be found only on this moon. The workers had found a thick deposit and were easing it cautiously from the surrounding gangue. Their movements were tentative and their struggles aided only by the servo-mechanisms built into their bulky mining suits. Heavy equipment was forbidden in the mine. Duraldium was the ore from which galactic spacecraft fuel was refined; in this state, it was highly volatile. The electromagnetic aura around standard mining equipment was enough to ignite the mineral.
Larcen turned off his suit's magnetism; there was almost no dust in here. Then he picked a spot at the mine face and knuckled down to work.

Deep within the mine, something terrible was stirring.
Its blind eyes were pools of darkness. Its lumbering body was malformed, yet its grotesque head was uplifted, alert. It sniffed almost delicately, nostrils vibrating. The sound stopped. The thing swung its head around. The sniffing resumed, more rapid now. The sightless eyes stared.
It threw back its disgusting head and bellowed.

"Earthquake!"
The supervisor's warning cry was barely out before the mine face began to crumble. Miners ran towards the exit, clumsy in their cumbersome suits, leaving the stacks of ore. Everybody knew what an 'earthquake' was on a planet with no natural seismic activity.
Larcen was unlucky. He was hit full in the face by a chunk of lunar rock the size of his torso. The red stone bowled him over, pinning him down. Men hurried to safety all around him, but nobody stopped to help. Struggling to rise, Larcen dislodged more rubble; it poured down, burying his arms and legs and rendering him unable to move at all.
The mine entrance began to contract as the huge titanium doors slid into place. One man, desperate to escape, tried to climb over the bottom hatch as the doors ground together. His agonised cries were abruptly cut off as his body was severed in two by the metal jaws.
For a few moments the mine was plunged in darkness, but almost immediately, flashlights began to flicker into life as the men remaining in the mine collected their wits. Larcen yelled for help, and soon someone pulled off the rocks pinning him down. He felt a few seconds of relief as the weight on his chest was removed, but his filter-mask was damaged, the face plate smashed.
His nose was sore and swollen. The suit had protected him from the brunt of the blows, but he was wheezing painfully in the suddenly dusty air. He counted himself lucky that the Silent Death did not lie in such quantity here as it did outside. But when he touched his smarting face, his glove came away red and sticky. His nose was almost certainly broken. Since there was no way he could treat the wound, he did the next best thing and tried to ignore it.
There were maybe forty men trapped in the mine with him, a dozen of whom were injured, minimally or otherwise. A group of miners were pulling rocks off another man. He was buried far deeper than Larcen had been, and all that showed of him was one smashed arm, outstretched as if in supplication. Larcen knew immediately that there was no hope; the unfortunate was already dead.
Larcen joined the main force of the survivors by the door. They were milling around in confusion and panic, some of them pounding on the door as if they could break it down. Larcen had worked mines for a quarter of a century, and he knew just how solid those doors were. "Stop wasting your energy," he said loudly, the effort making his face burn. "We can't afford to be in here for long."
"How do we get out?" someone asked. He sounded very young, and even more afraid.
Larcen pushed at the control pad by the door. It flashed red - locked out - not that that surprised him. "I'm going to have to override," he muttered, half to himself. "Someone get me a lever."
A miner located a metal bar and handed it to the older man. Larcen wedged it under the panel and pushed down hard on the end with his augmented strength. The casing crumpled and loosened, and Larcen was able to pull it off.
The mess of wires inside daunted him. His technical knowledge was limited. "Anyone know any electronics?"
A man stepped out of the crowd. "I did a course on mine system engineering two years ago, but..." He held out his hands, crushed in the earthquake. His face was very pale beneath the face plate of his mask, and Larcen thought he must have been in dreadful pain.
"What's your name, son?" he asked, as kindly as he could.
"Robert Pfohl, sir."
Under different circumstances, Larcen might have been amused at being addressed as 'sir'. "Talk me through what I have to do."
Pfohl nodded quickly. "Splice together the two red wires, and you'll need a power source. Your pistol..."
Larcen twisted the wires together, cursing silently at the clumsiness of his mining gloves, then drew his pistol. "It's on full charge, but it won't emit a steady beam for more than three minutes."
"You need to alter the phase-inducer - open up the casing, there's a chip - that's the one. You have to scrape off the coating."
Larcen carefully scratched off the hard black coating with his knife, revealing the silvery chip beneath. "Now what?"
"Sever the...the green connection." Pfohl swayed suddenly, and two men caught his shoulders to steady him.
"You alright, son?" Larcen asked, cutting the connection.
Pfohl nodded, although Larcen wasn't convinced. "That should work. Set it by the panel, to hit the meshing of the wires."
Larcen did so, positioning the pistol carefully, and touched the fire button. They all watched as the pistol emitted a rapid series of energy bursts. "How long before we get this thing open?"
"Five minutes, ten. The circuitry has to overload."
"That's too long. The Tarinesh'll be here sooner than that." Larcen's words provoked a moan from the miners, and he swore under his breath. He snuffled through his broken nose. His face was throbbing, his lungs already burning from the dust. How was he supposed to know when the Seekers would arrive? Hope for the best - prepare for the worst, he thought, but the philosophy did nothing to comfort him.
For a time, the only sound was that of the intermittent bursts from the pistol. The miners were silent, as if any sound they made would draw the Tarinesh to them. Larcen was not sure when the rumbling began. He felt it first, under his feet, a barely perceptible trembling underfoot that quickly increased in volume.
Instinctively, he groped for his pistol. "How long?" he asked tensely.
"A few minutes," Pfohl replied.
But there was no time left for Larcen to answer. With a pop and a shatter, a thing emerged from the wall.
It was a sickly grey-white wave of oozing flesh, possessed of no distinct shape or form. It rolled down the mine face, gathering at the bottom, and then a head rose from that vile pool. The blind black eyes blinked open. Men looked into those eyes and went mad: inexplicably, terribly insane.
Larcen felt sick to the gut. He snatched a pistol from someone and fired on the awful creature, screaming at the miners not to look at its eyes. Some of the men had the wit to draw their own weapons, but the pistols seemed to have no effect on the Seeker; no marks showed on its grey flesh. It continued its relentless crawl towards them.
Larcen backed up, the others automatically following his example. In his haste, he nearly tripped over a stack of Duraldium ore. An idea came to him then, so ridiculously simple he wondered why he had not thought of it before. "Pfohl! How long!"
"Half a minute," the younger man reported, panic in his voice. Larcen grabbed up a piece of ore some half metre long and rushed over so that his back was to the door. "Get over here and get ready to run like hell!"
"Ten seconds!" Pfohl called.
Wisps of smoke rose from the panel, and suddenly the circuitry sputtered, throwing out fat sparks. The hatch began to judder open. The Seeker moved closer. Larcen stood his ground as the miners began to clamber through the opening. The five men who had met the Seeker's fatal gaze were gibbering insanely, apparently unaware of what was going on around them.
Larcen made his decision, and climbed through the door with the last of his men. Some of them hesitated, waiting for him. "Run! Run!" Larcen screamed.
The miner threw the piece of ore back into the mine, directly at the Seeker, and fired off two precise shots with his borrowed pistol. The first hit the door panel, crisping the circuitry. The doors began to close. The second shot struck the Duraldium.
Larcen was running even before the fireball ignited. He heard the agonised bellow of the Tarinesh as it was incinerated, the roar dislodging the perfect ceilings of the corridors. Finally, as Larcen staggered into the open at the mouth of the mine to join his men, the creature fell silent. Pfohl, finally able to give in to the pain of his injuries, was on his knees. He raised his head to say something to Larcen, but then he stopped, staring at him in horror. Larcen did not understand for a moment, still amazed that he had escaped with his life.
Then he began to cough. His eyes bulged, his nose streamed blood; he clutched at his throat as his lungs exploded into agony.
He had escaped the Seeker.
But the crimson lunar dust lay everywhere.
Everywhere.

This started out as a story assignment in an English class nearly three years ago. Since then, every time I've read through I've changed something - be it a word, a name or a phrase.
Bit of a perfectionist, aren't I?

Faye Upton

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