Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(17)

Beck nearly turned it down. She was still mulling over Eshton’s offer, and the analytical part of her mind told her that taking a shift on a job requested by the Deathwatch might influence her decision. But the idea of easing back into work by operating alone was powerful, so much that in the end it won. There would be many days ahead of her where dealing with other people would be unavoidable. She would have to smile and say the right things, learn to bear the burden of making other people feel better about her tragedy. Putting off those exchanges while she got used to being here sounded like a brilliant idea.

“Yep. Send me the work order and I’ll read it on the way up,” Beck said.

Carl got everything ready to go, then paused. Beck saw the set of his shoulders, the tension in his jaw. It was the body language of a man about to say something deeply uncomfortable. She braced herself for incoming platitudes. Carl had always been good to her. She could endure it from him.

“Glad to have you back,” he said, surprising her. “Not gonna harp on it, but if you ever need to talk, I’m here for you, kid. Day or night.”

The bright blue eyes were earnest beneath his tousled mane of iron-gray hair. There was no sense of pressure from him, only honesty. “Thanks. That means a lot to me. I’m...doing okay. Staying with a friend for now. We’ll see how it goes, but I feel like I’ve done all the talking I want to for now.”

Carl nodded sagely. “The wife went through it about twenty years back. Her sister and her family. It’s a lot to deal with. Just don’t want you thinking you’re alone. We all got to watch out for each other.” He gave Beck a small nod, then hunched over his terminal again.

That was Carl. Straightforward and without unneeded flourishes. Beck left the office and made her way to one of the many lifts.

Getting to the work site without dealing with other people was easier than expected. Most everyone else had already moved to their own. Beck wasn’t running late, but the mine was huge. Even with ten minutes until the start of shift, being in the central hub at that point was the same as being late for anyone below a supervisor. There were no Loops here; transit required taking a lift and walking the rest of the way.

She was technically late when she arrived at the very top of the mine and stood in front of her new assignment. Beck stopped two feet away from the lift exit for a solid thirty seconds after the platform descended. Carl had left a few things out, probably assuming she would read the file on the long ride up.

A few things stood out as odd. The first was that the lift only went here. There were no branching tunnels or connecting sections. The site was completely isolated. The second was the fact that the entrance to the section was sealed with a heavy door. Usually the round portals were saved for creating firewalls between whole branches of the mine, not single tunnels. Whatever the Watch was looking for must have been extremely valuable. Having seen the way Eshton and the others virtually lived in their suits, the caution made sense.

The biometric scanner on the door let her through and locked heavily behind her. Beck glanced at the quiescent drones, took a seat at the work station, and settled in. “Let’s see what this is all about.”

*

The drones worked for an hour before Beck began to grow bored, and boredom was the space in which her recklessness grew. The security measures were odd but not suspicious in their own right. The door was only part of it; the ore and spoil was ground by a series of secondary drones into coarse powder and dropped down a tube too small for a person to climb through. A quick check of the schematics showed an unmanned processing station directly below.

A real-time graph displayed compositional analysis on her terminal, and sure enough the drones found more than trace amounts of rare earth metals and other minerals priority flagged for the Deathwatch.

Had she been more engaged, had more work to occupy her other than babysitting a few dozen small robots working at peak, Beck might not have even noticed the oddities in the work itself. At first she thought the glacially slow pace set by the job parameters was a function of the need to grind the ore so finely, but some quick math showed this not to be the case. For the tunnel to have grown to this length in the span of time given, the work would have had to move along much faster earlier in the process.

Which meant that the drones could do the work more quickly and achieve the same results. Beck pulled up their specs, working out a quick and dirty formula to find optimal efficiency rates. She frowned at the results, then worked the equations twice more to make sure there wasn’t a mistake.

“You little guys could be moving three times as fast,” she mused out loud, leaning back in her chair and staring at the working drones thoughtfully. “What’s the limiting factor here?”

She checked every variable. The processing station below wasn’t the bottleneck, running at twenty-three percent of capacity. Nor was it potential wear on the drone cutting heads. The ground here was far less dense than what they were designed to work.

So Beck did what came naturally and accessed the drone’s programming. This was easy enough as every one of them was integrated into a network controlled by the station terminal. Or it should have been; she was locked out. A quick series of inquiries on the system brought up the job file and its parameters.

“Any programming changes, including repairs, must be signed off on by the foreman and Deathwatch liaison,” she read out loud. “What the hell?”