On Level Four of the Quarry, fifty feet above the flooded floor of the main heat sink, Geth Marr was running along the narrow timber narrow high walkway of the intermediate gallery with the driving force-driven speed of an enraged bear.
His heavy six-pound sledgehammer was gripped in his right hand. He swung in time with his strides. His sheepskin vest was unbuttoned, flapping open against a coarse wool undershirt soaked through with cold sweat. Despite his sixty winters and a body carrying forty years of quarry scars—broken ribs from falling shale, a stiffened left ankle from a derrick collapse—the old foreman moved across the wet timber planks without a stumble, his hobnailed boots biting into the rough fir with rhythmic power: THUD-THUD.
Behind him ran two quarry riggers, Jarek and Benn. He carried coils of heavy hemp rope and three-foot iron pinch-bars. Their boots slipped repeatedly on the lime slurry that coated the planks. That forced them to trail twenty paces behind the foreman’s furious charge. Above their heads, the four-foot lead-copper water chute was shaking with a high-pitched, metal shriek that sounded like an iron rail being twisted on an anvil.
The narrow high walkway spanned a cavernous limestone drift, suspended seventy feet in the air by iron tie-rods anchored into the ceiling rock. Below the planks lay the black void of Level Five. There, the green-tinted lanterns of Edda’s rigging crews flickered through rising plumes of sulfur steam. The air was blistering with drafts—freezing air falling from…
