Chapter 2
If you want to kill six people in a hole, overload the rear differential. It takes four hundred kilograms of bad math and ten seconds of steep grade.
I stood on the greasy concrete of Hangar Nine with my boots planted two feet apart and a spring scale hooked to my belt. Through the open service gate, I could still see two scouts from the Third Mountain Division patrolling the perimeter fence in their drab green field tunics, carbines resting across their chests. They were watching the staging yard, but for now, they were outside.
Buggy Three sat in the center of the bay like an armored beetle with a split personality. It was a six-wheeled diesel-electric hauler built to carry four technicians and eight hundred kilos of sensible gear.
Right now, piled against the rear fenders, sat two metric tons of academic arrogance.
"We are not leaving the centrifuge," Dr. Lórágy Folyosy said. He marched across the bay with a heavy brass-bound crate in his arms, his jaw set like an iron vise. "The sporulation cycles at Station Two require immediate thermal isolation. If the samples sit at ambient cave temperature for more than fifteen minutes, the cell walls collapse."
"Leave it," I said.
He stopped three inches from the tailgate. His breathing came fast and shallow, fogging the cold mountain air. "I beg your pardon?"
"You heard me, Doctor. The crate weighs forty-two kilos. The mounting bracket weighs another twelve. That is fifty-four kilos of dead brass and lead lining." I jabbed a thumb toward the suspension springs behind the rear tire. "Look at the leaf pack. It is already bottoming out on the bump stops, and we haven't even loaded Margit's drill bits yet."
"This is precision field equipment," he said. He didn't drop the crate. His knuckles were pale against the dark wood, the sleeves of his gray work shirt rolled up to his elbows.
Under the hangar floodlights, the corded muscle in his forearms stood out with unexpected sharpness. For a man who lived behind a desk in the capital, he possessed an infuriating amount of wiry strength.
I looked away from his arms. He was still a liability with a clipboard.
"It is scrap metal if the axle snaps on the descent ramp," I said. "Drop it on the staging mat or I will drop it for you."
"Director Ványzsa!" Lórágy called out without taking his eyes off me. "Explain the baseline requirements of the consortium charter to our guide."
Margit Ványzsa emerged from the tool crib behind the fuel pumps. She dragged two heavy vulcanized cases on a hand dolly, her steel-toed boots clacking against the wet floor. Her silver-streaked hair was tied back in a brutal knot, and she looked about as eager to compromise as a granite bluff.
"The charter guarantees equal payload distribution between Geo-Stabilization and Bio-Extraction," Margit said, parking the dolly against the front bumper with a metallic clatter. "My team requires four acoustic sounders, the primary pneumatic drill rig, and thirty replacement carbide heads. If Dr. Folyosy cannot fit his glass jars into his assigned volume, that is a matter for his department."
"Your acoustic sounders weigh three hundred kilograms each, Margit," Lórágy snapped. He turned his glare on her, veins pulsing at his temples. "You are bringing heavy quarrying machinery into a fragile biological preserve. You are treating a delicate cave ecosystem like a gravel pit."
"The upper shelves are shifting, Lórágy. If I do not anchor the transit stations, your delicate moss will be buried under five thousand tons of basalt."
"Enough," I barked.
Both of them froze.
I unclipped the spring scale and slammed it onto the open steel tailgate. The metal rang like an alarm bell across the vaulted hangar.
"Neither of you is running this deck," I said. "I am. My contract gives me total authority over transit weight, cargo distribution, and route safety. If you don't like it, you can take your chits back and walk down the shaft on your own two feet."
I touched the heavy pouch at my hip. The two thousand brass chits gave a dull, reassuring clink against my thigh.
Margit narrowed her eyes. "Orsolyzsa, be reasonable. We cannot drill emergency anchor pins with hand chisels."
"You get two acoustic sounders and ten carbide heads," I said. "The rest stays in the locker."
"That cuts my structural margin by sixty percent!" Margit protested.
"And it keeps the buggy from flipping over backward on a thirty-degree slope. You want a sixty percent margin on paper, or do you want to arrive at Station One with your spine inside your neck?"
Margit pressed her lips together into a thin, bloodless seam. Her expression made it clear she didn't like the tone. But she looked at the sagging leaf springs, then at the grease on my hands, and stepped back toward the tool crib without another word.
Score one for gravity.
Lórágy, however, remained rooted where he stood. The brass crate was still clamped against his chest. He looked like a man preparing to defend a religious relic from barbarians.
"The optical microscopes," he said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, clipped register. "The secondary containment vessel. And the field incubator. Those three are non-negotiable."
"Put the crate on the scale."
He hesitated. Then, with exaggerated care, he lowered the box onto the steel plate. The spring groaned. The needle swung past thirty, forty, and shuddered to a halt at fifty-four kilograms.
I reached out with my boot and nudged a polished mahogany chest resting near his boots. It had brass hinges and a brass plate engraved with Folyosy Herbarium - Royal Institute.
"What is this?" I asked.
"My reference herbarium. Dried specimens from the 1898 expedition."
I kicked it. The mahogany slid across the oil-slicked concrete, spinning twice before bumping into a stack of empty oil drums.
"Hey!" Lórágy lunged forward, his face flushing crimson. "That collection is eighty years old!"
"Then it has survived eighty years without riding in a buggy," I said. "It stays here."
"You are being deliberately vindictive."
"I am doing math, Doctor. You should try it sometime."
He stepped in close. Close enough that I could smell the sharp, clean scent of crushed mountain mint and shaving soap coming off his collar. It was absurdly out of place in a hangar that smelled of sulfur, old grease, and damp exhaust.
"You think this is a game of physical posturing," he murmured, his dark eyes fixing on mine. "You think because I wear spectacles and read journals, I don't understand risk."
"I know you don't understand risk," I replied, leaning in until our foreheads were barely four inches apart. "Because if you did, you wouldn't bring dried flowers to an active cave-in."
His throat worked. Just for a second.
A tiny flicker of heat flared between us, sharp and sudden as a match head striking rough stone.
I backed up immediately. Getting close to clients was a rookie mistake. Getting close to an uptight academic who looked at me like a feral dog was an even bigger one.
"Ten minutes to sort the bio-crates," I told him, grabbing a three-quarter-inch socket wrench from my belt kit. "Anything over two hundred kilos gets thrown onto the scrap pile."
I rolled under the buggy chassis on my back.
The cold concrete bit through my canvas field jacket. Above me, the underbelly of Buggy Three was a tangled maze of hydraulic lines, twin driveshafts, and heavy cast-iron differential housings. I shone my work light along the central torque tube.
The factory had rated the chassis for rough road work, but the Hasadék transit line wasn't a road. It was a vertical fissure linked by suspended steel ramps and damp rock shelves. If the middle axle took the brunt of the load on an incline, the U-bolts would shear like dry pasta.
"Pass me the nineteen-millimeter socket," I muttered under my breath, reaching a blind hand out toward the tool tray beside the front left tire.
Metal clicked against metal. A hand slid the exact socket into my open palm.
I blinked and tilted my head back.
Lórágy was crouched on his haunches by the wheel well. He had stripped off his gray wool vest, leaving only his white shirt with the sleeves pushed high on his forearms. His dark hair was falling across his forehead, damp with sweat from hauling crates.
"The nineteen," he said quietly. "You were checking the U-bolt torque on the middle trunnion."
I stared at the wrench in my hand. It was the exact size.
"How did you know that?" I asked.
"I read the maintenance schematics for the heavy transport series while we were waiting for the train from the capital," he said, adjusting his round wire-rimmed glasses with the back of his wrist. "The middle axle uses metric twelve-grade fasteners with a nineteen-millimeter head. The outer hubs use twenty-two."
I gave a short, dry snort. "Congratulations. You can read a book."
"And you can torque a bolt without looking," he countered. "We all have our primitive parlor tricks."
"Hand me the cheater bar, Professor, before I use your neck for leverage."
He handed me the steel pipe without another sarcastic word.
I slid the bar over the wrench handle and pulled. The U-bolt groaned under forty foot-pounds of extra pressure, locking the axle housing tight against the reinforced frame. My right shoulder twinged where the old military shrapnel scar pulled across my collarbone. It was an old ache, familiar as a bad habit. I tightened my grip and finished the turn.
When I slid out from under the running board, Lórágy was still there. He held out a hand to help me up.
I looked at his outstretched fingers. Clean, long-boned, with ink stains around the cuticles.
I ignored his hand, grabbed the rear fender, and hauled myself upright.
"I don't need a hand," I said, wiping black grease across my trousers.
"Clearly," he said, pulling his hand back and dusting off his knees. "God forbid you accept assistance from a man with clean fingernails."
"Your fingernails won't stay clean past the first station, Folyosy."
"We shall see."
Across the hangar, the clock on the control booth wall clicked over to 13:35. Twenty-five minutes until the descent gate opened.
Margit was supervising two hangar mechanics as they hoisted her primary seismic stabilizer toward Buggy Three's roof rack. The stabilizer was a massive steel cylinder six feet long and ten inches thick, packed with hydraulic damping fluid and acoustic sensors. It hung from an overhead electric gantry winch, swaying gently as the chain rattled through the ceiling pulley.
"Careful with the swing arm!" Margit barked at the winchman. "Keep the nose tilted up ten degrees or the fluid seals will flood!"
Lórágy stepped behind the buggy's tailgate, bent over a crate of borosilicate culture flasks. He had them cushioned in shredded paper, checking each seal with obsessive care. He was completely deaf to the world around him. When he focused on his work, the rest of the hangar might as well have ceased to exist.
That kind of focus will get you killed underground.
High above us, deep within the rock ceiling of Hangar Nine, something made a sound like a rifle crack.
It wasn't gunfire. It was the sharp, hollow report of a subterranean thermal fissure venting pressure through the mountain's granite teeth.
The concrete floor beneath our boots gave a sudden, sickening shudder.
The light fixtures overhead swung in wild arcs. Dust showered down from the steel roof trusses, drifting through the floodlight beams like gray snow.
"Earthquake!" one of the mechanics yelled, scrambling away from the lift line.
"Hold the cable!" Margit shouted.
The overhead gantry lurched sideways on its rail. The electric winch brake, worn smooth by five years of heavy consortium abuse, gave a high-pitched screech as the drive teeth slipped.
The three-hundred-kilogram seismic stabilizer plummeted four feet, jerked to a violent halt at the end of the slack chain, and began swinging in a wide, lethal pendulum directly toward the open bed of Buggy Three.
Lórágy was still standing in the drop zone. He had his back turned, his hands wrapped protectively around his culture flasks.
"Lórágy! Move!" Margit screamed.
He looked up, frozen by the blinding glare of the swinging floodlights. The steel cylinder was descending like a battering ram, aimed straight for his skull and his precious crates.
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