STEELDRIVER

Don DeBrandt

   "Jon'll get us out," Billy said. Carl could hear the panic in his voice.

   A quake triggered the cave-in. Five men and a Toolie died within a second, buried under a mountain's worth of rock. The rest of the tunnelling crew got clear--all except for Billy Swenson and Carl Yamoto. They were trapped behind the rockfall, Carl's right leg crushed so completely it didn't hurt a bit. He was even grateful; he knew that pressure from the rocks that pinned his leg were keeping him from bleeding to death. He also knew he was in shock, which was fine with him. It let him calmly accept that he and Billy were most likely going to suffocate to death in the dark. Billy wasn't taking things so well. He was a rail worker, laying track for the maglev, and wasn't even supposed to be this deep in the tunnel. He'd walked down to talk to a friend of his on the steeldriving team, and they'd been sharing a drink from a thermos when the ceiling gave way.

   His friend was dead now. Billy was young, no more than twenty; Carl was twice his age. He kept the kid talking, figuring words were better than screams. He could hear Billy breathing in the dark, using up the air with fast, panicky gasps, so he kept his voice low and calm.

   They started out swapping firsts: first sexual experience, first drunk, first time thrown in jail. After that they went through Billy's school record, Carl's first two wives, the relative merits of beer to whisky, and which boss they most regretted never having taken a swing at.

   Somewhere between Carl's first and second wife they'd felt the rumbling vibration of drilling equipment on the other side of the rockfall, and Billy had started to relax. Carl hadn't. They should have gotten a borehole through a long time ago, to pipe in air and communications. He could guess why they hadn't: seismic shifting must have kept collapsing it, so they finally stopped trying. They'd have to dig a man-sized tunnel and shore it up as they went.

   And there wasn't enough time. "So," Carl said, trying to put relief he didn't feel into his voice, "how the hell did you wind up here?" He coughed, almost choking on the hot, thick air. Wouldn't be long now.

    "Buried alive, you mean? Well, I've been having this streak of luck lately." Neither man laughed.

   "No, I mean here, on the planet, working on this goddamned tunnel. You local?"

   "Yeah, I grew up here." "Here" meant Landing City; the spaceport was the only permanent settlement on Pellay. "My mom was one of the first people the company transferred here, and she was already pregnant. She got tired of Kadai shipping her all over the galaxy, so she signed up for their pioneer program. Of course, that meant she wound up here for life, but she doesn't seem to mind. I've never been off-planet."

   "What made you sign up for tunnel work?" Carl shifted slightly and wished he hadn't. Even though his leg was still numb, he heard something make a wet, pulling-free sound. He told himself it was cloth.

   "What else is there? Only way off Pellay is to sign a twenty-year work contract with the Kadai Group, and they can send you worst places than this. You can't even get a job in Landing City unless you sign a contract with TKG. The only other work on Pellay is the mine or the tunnel, and either way you still wind up working for Kadai--but at least you don't have to sign over your freedom. I figure after the tunnel's finished I'll wind up hauling platinum ore in the mine." Billy didn't sound bitter, just tired and scared.

   "I know, they got you comin' and goin'. I'm a company man myself, just signed up for my second term. Twenty-one years I've given the bastards so far. Maybe in another nineteen they'll let me retire. Maybe."

    I can't believe I just said that! I must be in worse shape than I thought. You didn't complain about the company to employees under you or above you. That was how senior executives became juniors, and vice versa. Carl had no illusions about his career; he knew he didn't have the kind of cutthroat aggressiveness the higher-ups rewarded. But others did, and it was this kind of stupid remark that they'd use against you--

    Stop right there. He was talking to a kid, a scared kid trapped in a hole in the ground who'd had to be forced into working for the company in the first place. Carl swore softly, cursing his own paranoia. His fear of the company was a more effective trap than the tons of rock overhead; even knowing he would likely die here didn't free him. And Billy was just as trapped as he was--if you didn't play by their rules, you didn't play. And if they decided to ship you to a planet on the back end of nowhere, you went. If they told you to do an impossible job with outmoded equipment, you did it. Even though you knew modern equipment could do the job in half the time and with half the casualties. You did it because they ran everything, and one multiplanetary corporation was as bad as the next. Planets, whole star-systems, were traded every day; but an individual trying to change jobs was called a defector, and defectors were executed. They owned everyone. Everyone except Jon. The hell with them. If he was going to die, he wouldn't die scared. He tried to curse them, louder than before, but inhaled a lungful of dust and bad air that started him coughing so hard he almost couldn't stop. By the time he did, his head was spinning and his lungs were on fire. "Jon'll get us out," Billy said. It must have been the tenth time he'd said it. "He won't leave us here." Carl just nodded his head in the dark, too exhausted to even reply. He didn't want to argue with the kid, but he knew the facts. They'd been tunnelling through a batholith, a huge column of igneous rock standing upright in the earth. The tunnel had cut the column in two. The rock surrounding the chunk overhead should have been strong enough to hold it in place, but the quake had ripped it loose. It had slammed down like a piledriver, crushing the arched tunnel supports as if they were made of paper instead of concrete and steel.

    Carl and Billy were trapped in the short section of tunnel that extended past the batholith. The batholith was made of basalt, 6.0 on the Mohs' Hardness Scale, four below diamond and two above granite. It had a compressive strength of almost 22,000 pounds per square inch. Those familiar with it called it traprock.

   The rescue crew wouldn't be able to blast their way through; they'd have to use roadheaders. That was the vibration Carl could feel in the rock against his back. A roadheader had caterpillar treads and a spiky, rotating cutter ball at the end of an extendable hydraulic shaft. Carl had told Jon once he thought they looked like marital aids for dinosaurs, and Jon had laughed so loud and hard it had echoed from the tunnel face to the shaft entrance, five miles away. The next day, someone had spraybombed "DinoDildo" on every machine.

    The problem with roadheaders was that they were almost useless against really hard rock. Their upper limit was around 20,000 pounds per square inch of compressive pressure; if the rock was harder than that, the work would become agonizingly slow. The cutter head would still bite through the rock, but he and Billy would be long dead by the time it broke through.

   "He won't give up," Billy insisted. Have I been talking out loud? Carl wondered. He felt like he was falling, blinded, through the airless heart of a sun.

   "Remember the time that Toolie ate a blasting cap and it exploded?" Billy asked. "Everybody thought for sure it was dead, except Jon. He picked the Toolie up, jumped in a manrider and took off. I heard he almost ran the cart off the rails getting to Boomtown, and then threw a lady tourist out of the examining room--naked--'cause he wouldn't wait."

    Carl didn't say anything. Both of them knew the Toolie hadn't made it. It might have, if there'd been a Toolie doctor close by, but the only doctor this side of the mountains that knew anything about Toolies was Doc Pointer in Boomtown. The infirmary on-site at the tunnel was designed for human emergencies--Toolie injuries just weren't that important. Not to the company, anyway.

   Billy didn't say anything for awhile, and Carl didn't try. The blackness seemed to be spinning, and he thought he could see faint, sparkling lights far away. There was a roaring in his ears, like the ocean.

   The roaring got louder and louder. Carl's body started to shake and he wondered if he was dying. The roar built to a chattering howl--there was a blinding flash of light and Carl was suddenly showered with pulverized rock.

    "They did it! They broke through!" Billy gasped. Carl blinked the rock dust out of his eyes and squinted into the light. There was a rush of fresh, cool air on his face. He smelled hot metal and machine oil. The whirling ball of a roadheader's cutter pulled back from the hole, and a helmeted head took its place. A strong voice called out, "Hold on! We'll have you out in a second!"

    Carl gave a weak little gasp of laughter. There was no way; the rock was too hard and there hadn't been enough time. Carl Yamoto and Billy Swenson should be dead--except someone had done the impossible, and Carl knew who it had to be. Billy had been right. "Jon Hundred, you miraculous bastard," Carl managed to croak, and then he could finally let himself pass out. A deep, easy laugh drifted into the dark with him, and he knew everything was going to be fine.

   *

    It took seven hours of microsurgery, but they were able to save Carl's leg. Jon was grateful for that, but it still left him with six deaths to drink down. He stopped at home to pick up his instrument case and then headed for the Blue Cat.

    The Blue Cat wasn't the most popular bar in Boomtown, but it was Jon Hundred's favorite. It was on the end of the last platform car, the one everyone called Cabooseville, located on the west side of No Name street. No Name was the only street Boomtown had, running the length of eighteen block-long platform cars. Each car was as wide as a highway and straddled two sets of maglev tracks. Boomtown had followed the track-laying crew from Landing City to the tunnel site, and was now parked at the foot of the mountain, about a mile from the tunnel itself. Jon Hundred had called it home for the last four years, first as a track-layer, then as a driller, and finally as a foreman.

    The Blue Cat was a blues bar, a smoky little hole-in-the-wall joint. Like most of the buildings in Boomtown, it was a two-story box with a flat roof, wedged between two other two-story boxes with flat roofs. The face of the building was painted a dark, rusty red, and the double doors of the entrance flat black. The outline of a cat's head glowed in blue neon overhead.

    Inside, it was crowded with off-shift workers holding a drunken wake for the victims. Half the drunks were solemn or weepy and the other half were celebrating the fact that they were still alive. Jon Hundred didn't hold that against them; the longer you worked under a mountain the more the pressure built. You started thinking about all that rock overhead, and how much it would like to come crashing down. It was your will against the mountain's, and the mountain had been around a few millenia longer than you had. They had a right to be relieved; it wouldn't last. The weight of those dead bodies would get added to the twenty-four other corpses already pressing down on them, and that was far worse than a million tons of stone.

    The whole room went quiet when Jon walked in. He wondered what their reaction had been when they heard the news. Had they cheered for the survivors, or fallen silent for the dead? A hundred hands patted his broad back or squeezed an arm as he made his way through the crowd, surrounded by the solemn murmur of countless voices: "Thanks, Jon. Way to go, Jonny. Good job, man. Thanks. Thank God for you, Jon. You did it, Jon. Jon."

    He made his way to the front and sat down, putting the long black case he had with him on the table. It was his regular table, with a padded steel chair they'd built just for him. Katy brought him a beer in a gallon stein without being asked. He drank half of it back and then just sat there, facing the small empty stage and fingering the clasps on the case.

    There were friends of his in the bar, but none of them approached him. He knew why. What he'd done was impossible, and while they all appreciated it, none of them quite knew what to make of him now. Jon had always stood out; a man eight feet tall with cobalt blue skin can't help that, and he'd never made any secret about the fact that he wasn't exactly a factory original. But nobody on the planet had ever seen anything like what he'd done in that tunnel. On a good day, a roadheader can eat through fourteen to sixteen feet of medium-hard stone in an eight-hour shift. The batholith Jon Hundred had tunnelled through had measured twenty-one feet, seven inches of extremely hard rock--and he had done it in six and a half hours.

    That was amazing enough. But exactly how he had done it was nothing short of unbelievable.

   He got another steeldriver to take over the roadheader's controls, and told him to keep the cutter arm pointed dead ahead. Then he walked around the machine, put his back to its behind, dug in his heels--and pushed.

    For six and a half hours.

    They wore out nineteen cutter heads. Hoses on the hydraulic arm burst twice. Jon Hundred didn't even break sweat--but then, he never had. His skin wasn't designed for it.

    He took another long pull on his beer, emptying the mug. Katy had another one waiting. He gave her a thank-you smile, and she gave him one back, but there was a look in her eye he hadn't seen before. He knew what it meant, too.

    Just who--and what--the hell are you, Jon Hundred?

    He took another big swallow of beer and stared at the empty stage.

   *

   Jonathon Hundred remembered the day he was born.

   It was the visions he recalled most clearly, the strange things that skittered across his brain as the medical techs wired up his cortex. He saw the sun race backward across the ceiling of the operating theatre, heard a thousand wolves howling in lonely harmony, smelled dust and steel and his own blood. He saw faces, too, faces he knew but couldn't quite remember: an old man with long white hair, a pair of stout middle-aged women who looked like sisters, a young, pretty blonde woman. Each face had a feeling attached to it, so that was how he named them. The blonde woman's name was Regret.

   Thankfully, he didn't really remember the pain. He would never be able to truly forget, either, but his mind had put filters between himself and the memories; when he tried to think about it now, what mainly stood out was trying to scream and not being able to. They were testing his nervous system and needed him conscious, but had disconnected his muscles and vocal cords. They didn't want him thrashing around or screaming himself hoarse.

   Most of his body was gone by then. They let him keep a few internal organs they hadn't figured out how to improve yet, his brain, his sex, his tongue, his sense of smell, a little body fat and a few bones--and they tinkered with those. They replaced most of his skeleton with honeycombed steel, his muscles with fibre-alloy strands, his heart and lungs and stomach with fission-powered analogs. They gave him better eyes, better ears, better nerves. But all these new parts were incidental; they were just reworking the chassis so it would be strong enough to hold the engine they wanted to install.

    That engine was a force-field generator. It let him drive an invisible magnetic spike a hundred miles deep into the crust of a planet, let him anchor himself so solidly that it'd be easier to move the continent he was on than move him. That was how he anchored himself when he pushed the roadheader, forcing the drill bits into the rock with sheer muscle, pushing them past their limits without reaching his own.

    Sometimes, Jon Hundred scared himself.

   Even though his body was eighty percent artificial, Jon still considered himself more man than machine--but since he had no memories of his life before he'd been cyborged, he had to measure himself against other men to see how different he was. He stood near eight feet tall, his skin the same dark blue a sunset fades into at the far edge of the horizon. The muscles under that skin bunched and flexed the same way flesh did, though they were stronger than the suspension cables on a mile-long bridge. He had fingernails that would never grow or break, and no hair on his body at all. He wore a smooth, skull-fitted helmet that wouldn't come off, with a retractable brim that circled his head just above his ears. With just the front of the brim extended the helmet looked like a hardhat, which suited Jon Hundred fine. For the first six years of his existence the helmet had been mirrored chrome--until four years ago when he'd arrived on Pellay and paid a Toolie to paint it a flat white. He'd added a new coat of paint every year since; he knew a few layers of paint weren't enough to hide behind, but he did it anyway.

   Ordinary men, so far as Jon Hundred could see, liked to laugh and drink and eat and sleep; they liked to make love and win fights and get mail from home; they liked to gamble and cheer, and they liked to gamble and curse. But win or lose, they kept right on gambling.

    Of course, for most of the last four years the only men available for Jon to compare himself to had been steeldrivers and Boomtowners, and he suspected that neither one was exactly ordinary. Now he had tourists to measure himself against too, and that worried him more than anything.

    Not that he had anything against the tourists themselves. Sure, sometimes they were a lot like fish on bicycles, hopelessly helpless, but they poured a lot of money into the local economy. Of course, most of this money had to pass through the hands of the "players"--the hucksters and professional actors hired by the Kadai Group to portray "authentic" Boomtowners--first, but the players lived and worked and spent their paychecks in Boomtown just like the tunnellers and the support staff did.

   The company had started moving the actors and souvenir shops in about six months ago; the tourists had only started to show up in the last few weeks. Word was the Kadai Group had changed hands, and whichever multiplanetary consortium that now owned Pellay wanted to defray costs on the tunnel project. Jon had seen a brochure one of the tourists had left behind: "Experience life to its fullest on the untamed frontier, in the wildest town on a planet of live volcanoes! A town full of rugged men and women at war with the forces of nature every day, a town at the very edge of civilization itself--Boomtown!"

   Well, Jon had thought, at least they got the volcano part right. Mind you, most of the active volcanoes were at the equator, ten thousand miles away, but they did make life on Pellay a lot harder than it had to be. They spewed millions of tons of ash into the air, and generated thermal currents that clashed with the cold winds coming off the polar icecaps. As a result, frequent wind and ash storms made air travel on Pellay almost impossible. That was why the tunnel was being dug; the only way to transport ore from the mine now was to truck it around the mountains, which took up to six weeks. High winds, ash-filled crevasses and quakes made it a dangerous trip, too.

   He had hoped the danger would keep the tourists away. Didn't they understand how hard it was to land a ship on Pellay? That Landing City was the only place on the planet a ship could possibly touch down, and even then the conditions had to be just so? Didn't they understand this was the backwater end of the civilized universe? Jon Hundred understood all those things. They were a few of the reasons he'd come here in the first place. That was why the tourists worried him; unlikely as he knew it must be, he was afraid someone would recognize him. Not from his pre-cyborg days--he knew he had been changed far too much for that.

    But his former employers might still know him.

    Then again, it was a big universe. The only method of interplanetary communication was FTL mail ships, which slowed and condensed the flow of information. Humankind had settled on thousands of different planets and Jon Hundred was far, far away from where he had been five years ago. Dozens of different species and cultures had been discovered--including the Shinnkarien, who stood eight feet tall or higher and had bright blue skin. Jon wasn't Shinnkarien, but he hoped to pass for one if he had to. When you're eight feet tall you're going to stand out no matter how you disguise yourself, so Jon had dyed himself blue. If you're going to stand out, Jon figured, give people something to stare at that'll make them forget why they were looking in the first place. People had certainly stared at Jon when he arrived on Pellay, and talked about him too. That talk had turned incredulous when Jon had walked out of the Kadai office with a contract in his hand--one that ended when the tunnel was done. Kadai normally made all their labour sign long-term contracts; twenty years was the minimum. No one knew why they gave Jon special consideration--at least not at first.

    He finished his beer, and finally undid the clasps on the black case. Inside, cradled in crushed yellow velvet, was a curved silver horn almost six feet in length. A contra-bass saxophone. He picked it up gently, its metal skin cool and smooth against his fingers, fitted a fresh reed to the mouthpiece, and got to his feet.

   Somebody unplugged the jukebox as he stepped up on stage. The room didn't exactly fall quiet, but a lot of people stopped talking and started listening. Jon shut his eyes and let go of everything he'd been holding in for last seven hours. He let it out deep and slow and sad; he had the big, big blues. The loud drunks shut up, and the quiet drunks started to cry.

    Jon Hundred didn't have tear ducts any more, so he let his sax cry for him.

   *

   Jon Hundred wasn't the only one to do the impossible that day.

   A ship tumbled through Pellay's upper atmosphere, hurricane force winds tossing it from one giant, invisible hand to another. A million particles of grit pitted the hull, clogged the thrusters, ruined the instrumentation. Ash storms made flying a ship hell, and landing a ship suicide.

   The pilot's name was Hone. He knew the first process well and had no interest in the second, though circumstances would seem to contradict that. Landing a ship in a storm like this was insane--but Hone wasn't trying to land.

   He was trying to crash.

   He had powerful reasons to get to Pellay, and powerful reasons for not landing at the official spaceport. Landing anywhere else was impossible. So if the only way to get to the surface was to throw himself at it, that's what Hone would do. Whatever it took, he'd do it. Nothing had stopped him yet.

   Ever.

   The ship was small and cramped, with barely enough room for the pilot's couch. It was intended to be a courier ship, ferrying information too confidential or urgent to risk being sent by regular mail ship. It was fast, anonymous, and almost invisible. It fit Hone's requirements exactly--except for Jeremy.

   "Main engine inoperative," Jeremy said softly. "Port thruster inoperative. Navigation instrumentation down to seven percent of operating norms."

   "I guess that means we're going to die?" Hone asked. He had a deep, gravelly voice, and the smile on his face was not pleasant.

   "Safety fields incorporated into this ship's design will protect passengers from collisions with most space debris." The voice of the ship's computer was easygoing and friendly; over the last few months it had pushed Hone from irritation to anger to fury, and then right on through to hatred. It sounded like a caring human being--but it was neither. It didn't have feelings and it wasn't self-aware. It was only a clever program designed to produce the illusion of companionship, and Hone hated illusions. Every day for the last three months he had made a point of destroying that illusion by forcing the computer to give replies no human being would. He had spent one week telling Jeremy about his hobby of killing and eating small children. Jeremy had offered several recipes he thought might be useful.

    "We aren't going to be colliding with space debris, Jeremy. We're going to hit a planet. Think the safety fields can handle that?"

    "The safety field of this ship can absorb an impact equivalent to twenty-three times the structural strength of the ship itself. I can display stress limitations on screen if you like." The ship did a sudden violent roll to the right.

   "Impact is gonna exceed those limits by a factor of ten, Jeremy. What's going to happen to me, huh?"

   "If structural limits are exceeded, the ship will no longer be functional. Thus, you will have to find another means of transportation."

   The ship pitched to the left and began to tumble end over end. Hone chuckled. "That's not what I asked. What will happen to me?"

   "Since I don't have your medical history in my memory I can't project specifics, but it would seem likely your injuries would be critical."

   "Restate your answer, defining 'critical' in colloquial terms," he snapped.

   "You would probably die."

   "And what, do you think, would happen to you?"

   "I would certainly cease to function."

   "Well, well," he growled. "Good news at last." Those were the last words he spoke before the ship crashed, four minutes later.

   The seismic sensors that ringed the Kadai mining complex registered the impact as being about ten miles due east of the mine. The engineers on shift figured it was most likely a meteor strike, and assigned a crew to go check it out as soon as the ash storm blew over.

   The mining complex on Pellay was the most remote outpost on the planet. The number of people that staffed it was not large. So the engineers were more than a little astonished when, three hours later, Hone walked in the door.

* * *