Before the column formed in the eastern railway trench, Len Vey made one final descent to Tier Four with Foreman Geth Marr.
They walked the haulage drift alone. That left their heavy haulage packs on the Tier Two staging platform. Len carried only his jointed ash sounding pole and a single brass copper-flame lantern, its hood adjusted down to a narrow slit that cast a pale, greenish-yellow oval across the crushed limestone ballast between the rails.
The air in Tier Four had transformed in the seventy minutes since the subsidiary keys had been turned.
The thick, greasy chemical sulfur mist that had pooled in the drift for twelve years had thinned, replaced by a slow, steady draft of cold mountain air filtering down from the high air-flow shafts on the western rim. The damp limestone walls were no longer sweating that strange, oily water drops that tasted of battery flux and zinc oxide. The stone was dry, cold, and chalky to the touch.
They reached the granite pillar where the bunkhouse breach had been sealed.
The four-foot bonded limestone wall stood silent, massive, and iron-hard in the shadows of the haulage tunnel. Along the base of the new stonework, where Geth’s drillers had driven the blister-copper wedges into the rock layer seam, the lead caps had cooled into solid, dull gray seals that showed no sign of heat discoloration, flaking, or clockwork creep.
