Len dropped instantly to both knees on the damp gravel. He pressed his bare right palm flat against the cold steel of the narrow-gauge cart rail. The shaking was humming through the metal with sickening clarity. A rhythmic, high-hum patter that felt like the stroke of steel ball bearings rolling over glass. There was no friction, no slide, and no weight. Only the pure, terrifying driving force of an uninjured duplicate running at full speed along an iron rail no wider than a man’s thumb.
“Edda!” Len roared, his voice tearing through the steady hiss of the water pipe hubs like a foghorn. “Clear the narrow high walkway! Drop the bypass clamp and get to the ladder! Geth! Douse the flares! It’s on the line!”
High above on the North Rim overhead frame, Geth Marr’s head snapped down, his eyes widening. He heard the panic in the young courier’s voice. Without hesitating to ask for an explanation, the veteran quarry foreman swung his heavy iron hammer against the copper mid-air brackets of the two nearest coal fire bowls, tumbling forty pounds of glowing hard coal into the flooded diversion ditch. The flares hissed and died in an eruption of black smoke and boiling steam. It plunged the northern side of the pit into deep, murky shadow.
