Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Good shift change,’ Delvinge said, strolling into the room, and making for an empty seat about halfway between me and the planetary defence force delegation. He was a large man, so much so that I had difficulty picturing him in the confined space of a mineshaft, and it wasn’t until he’d cleared the door that I noticed Proktor had accompanied him. The governor’s envoy nodded a greeting, without specifically directing it to anyone, before settling himself carefully opposite Delvinge.

‘Thank you for joining us at such short notice,’ I said. Delvinge and I had exchanged a few words since our arrival, although Broklaw had had the dubious privilege of liaising with him for most of our time on Drechia. According to the major he seemed content to let us get on with things without getting in the way, so long as we returned the favour and disrupted the running of the mine as little as possible. Which, given that the eldar were causing far more trouble than we were, wasn’t that difficult. ‘We were about to consider our options in the lower levels.’

‘Well, that’s easy.’ Delvinge chuckled throatily, his jowls wobbling, and once again I found myself reflecting that it must have been years, if not decades, since he’d last had his hands on a pick. Those certainly weren’t clothes you’d want to risk getting grubby, not with all that ­brocade and fancy needlework. ‘You don’t have any.’

‘Would you care to explain that?’ the woman accompanying the lord marshal asked, taking her attention off me now there was somebody new to butt heads with.

‘There’s nothing down there, except firedamp,40 flooded galleries and rotted props. If you so much as sneeze, you’ll have half the roof coming down on your head.’ He chuckled again, as though the prospect was a highly amusing one.

‘Nevertheless, they should be secured,’ I said, recalling at least one occasion when a tunnel complex we’d been guarding turned out to have an unexpected exit behind enemy lines – not to mention an even more unpleasant surprise lying in wait for us beneath it.41 I turned to the lord marshal. ‘Perhaps some of your people could mount a guard where they connect with the main workings.’

‘I’m sure that could be arranged,’ he agreed, no doubt enormously flattered at being asked to make a serious contribution to the defence of the mine. Which is how we’d sell it to whichever militia trolls eventually got lumbered with the job of hanging around in the dark waiting for nothing to happen. At least it would free up our own troopers to get on with something useful, and in the unlikely event of something ravening up out of the depths we’d be alerted without losing anybody important.

‘Why are they so irregular?’ the lord marshal’s aide asked. ‘The higher galleries are far more structured.’ And indeed they were, forming a rough gridded pattern, with the odd exception slashing through the rock in a random direction, presumably following a seam of ore.

Delvinge chuckled again; I was beginning to suspect that it was more of a nervous tic than any sign of genuine amusement, although it seemed to be irritating the sharp-faced woman, which was fine by me. ‘Some of them are worked-out seams. In the early days the diggers just followed where they led. Now we’ve got a better refining plant, or those smart buggers on Ironfound have anyway, so we can just send them any old dross and they’re happy. Makes more sense to take out the lower-grade stuff methodically, see?’

Proktor and I nodded, as much to encourage him to continue as to indicate any particular level of understanding. Delvinge acknowledged the gesture with a nod of his own, which left his jowls oscillating for a moment. ‘The others are natural fissures. Part of the reason the mine’s here in the first place is because the stuff was easy to get at, way back when.’

I began to feel a premonitory tingle in the palms of my hands. ‘And were these fissures ever mapped, beyond the bounds of the mine?’

Unexpectedly, it was Proktor who answered, before the corpulent overseer could get a word in. He shook his head.

‘If they were, there are no records of the fact. I made a thorough search of the archives at Major Broklaw’s request.’

‘Why would there be?’ Delvinge asked, in what seemed to be genuine bafflement. ‘Once the seams ran out, who cares?’