Sixty feet down in the freezing limestone depression of Quarry Ward, Edda spat a mouthful of bitter gray stone dust into the black slurry churning around her knees. Her right hand was bound in stiff willow splints where the double’s iron fingers had crushed her knuckles two nights earlier at the nursery feeder. But her sound left arm hauled on the hemp tag line of the four-ton derrick with the practiced, ruthless fury of a thirty-year pit miner.
“Keep that bucket swinging, you deaf bastards!” she roared through the hissing clouds of steam and the ear-splitting clatter of four air-powered rock drills. “If that sump backs up when the brake cracks, forty thousand gallons of boiling jacket-water will blow straight back into the lower wards! You’ll be swimming in sulfur gravy before you can drop your shovels!”
Above her, balanced on wet timber staging slick with grease and crushed shale, thirty quarrymen with steel prybars and twelve-pound sledges were levering at the edge of a massive, fractured limestone slab that blocked the central drainage throat. The sump was the ultimate heat sink for the entire country release. The deep underground fissure that had to absorb the heat runoff when twelve years of tightly packed solar energy were dumped through the cooling jackets.
