Jakes eyes lit up in understanding. “Feel up to a trip, Abby?”
“Sure. How can I help?”
“Tom’s people are going to need to know if the mine’s safe to enter, where the structure’s been compromised. Anything you can tell them would be a big help.”
“I can do that. Let me just grab my bag and my computer. If you get me the mine coordinates, I can download a map of the area and set up for the mine on the way. Jake, I’ll get you as much information as you need, but is anyone going to follow my advice?”
“You let me handle that part of it. Tom and I go way back. He owes me. If he won’t listen, I’ll call in a few of my markers with him. Then, once this is over, he’ll owe me one more.” Jake pulled out his phone again and called his pilots. They were already getting the plane ready to take off soon, but they needed to file a new flight plan, arrange for hanger space in Montana, and calculate their required fuel. Jake also had them hire a helicopter to take us from the plane hotel to the mine site.
For my part, I called dad to let him know where I’d be and that I’d be gone at least until tomorrow afternoon. Before we left for the airports, I ran back inside to see Jenny and get one of our portable VR rigs. I could hook up to the VR server using my satellite phone or through wifi and I didn’t want to miss the programming session that we’d planned for tomorrow.
The flight took a little less than four hours and Montana was two hours behind the east coast, so it was a little after six in the evening when we got in the helicopter. This was my second helicopter ride in the past month and I loved it just as much as the first time. This time, however, the trip took an hour and I had enough time to look in the cockpit and ask the pilot and co-pilot some questions about how everything worked. They walked me through almost all the instruments and showed me how the controls worked. With a field around the pilot, I was able to get a feel for handling the aircraft and I decided that I should ask Gerry to print some helicopter pilot instruction manuals for me. I hoped that Howie would be able to find a decent VR helicopter training simulator for me to practice on as well.
We landed on a helicopter pad a few hundred feet from the mining offices. Thomas Carver met us once we’d finished our duck walk and cleared the rotor blades. Thomas was a tall, broad shouldered man with dark skin and a well-groomed beard that had more grey than not. Dressed in jeans, and a lumber jacket, he looked more like a miner than the CEO of a mining company. Jake made quick introductions all around and Tom led us to the command center for the rescue operations. I had a quick flashback to the ranger rescue command center from three weeks earlier. The ranger command center didn’t have the feeling of desperation that this one did. It also didn’t have any family members in it. Thomas explained that the families of the trapped miners were waiting in another building, where there was more seating and food and coffee could be provided.
I soon learned that there was a problem with the air in the mine and the command team was trying to feed in more air though one of the exploratory holes that had been drilled when they were searching for the ore. It wasn’t a very wide hole, five inches in diameter, and it went deep into the earth. The twenty miners were trapped in one of the new side tunnels and their air was fouling faster than fresh air was coming in. They wouldn’t survive the night.
In all the chaos of the command site, I slipped outside and shifted to R1. I made my way to the mine entrance and positioned myself off to the side, where I wouldn’t be noticed if I had to return to reality. Having gotten a look at the map of the mine in the command center, I had an idea of what the mine had looked like before the cave-in. Now, I sent out my field to see how things had been changed by the earthquake.
It wasn’t pretty. The mine had twelve levels, all of them running out from a central shaft and the levels connected to three large veins of silver. The first two veins were mostly played out while the third seemed like a more recent addition. The new vein was farther out from the others and deeper, with the tunnels running out to the ore being much longer than the others. The cave-ins had occurred on the bottom two levels, with the earthquake shifting the tunnels in those areas and collapsing them for twenty feet near the center. The workers on those levels were trapped behind all that loose rock and they were running out of good air.
I scanned the entire mine and beyond, carefully inspecting every part of it, noting any structural weaknesses. It wouldn’t do to have the rescuers get trapped in another mine cave-in while they were trying to get their friends out. I spent the next half-hour inputting as much of the information as I could into my mining program, slowly re-creating the mine and it’s new configuration. I marked off the areas of instability and made notes on where to place the shoring. Finally, I placed markers for where the twenty miners were situated. There were twelve on the second to last level and eight on the bottom-most one.
Those two tunnels were offset from the rest of the tunnels and from each other by about five feet, due to the ore vein having shifted down and to the right at some point in its history. That meant that there wasn’t a good way to drop down into those tunnels by digging a hole through the floor of the tunnel above. I didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to know how they’d get the miner out and I worried that my map wouldn’t be of any use at all, except to show them how impossible it was to get the miners out.
The most frustrating part for me was that my field wasn’t useful for this situation, except for the mapping aspect of it. I hadn’t encountered this problem before. Usually, it was case of having to figure out how to use my field to get the job done or of finding a way to use my field without anyone else noticing. This situation was entirely different. My ability didn’t work in a mine. My power wasn’t the ability to phase through things, rather it was the ability to shift to a different layer of reality where those things didn’t exist. In this case, and in the case of every mine, the rock existed in all the layers that I had access to, so I couldn’t go through it. Most of my usefulness was being sidelined for this rescue and I’d have to hope that other people could do what I couldn’t.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Putting my self-pity aside, I came back to reality and headed back inside. I heard Mark call out to me and I made my way to him.
“Were you able to get anything?”
“I have the entire mine mapped out, but I can’t figure out how they’ll be able to get to them.”
“Can I see?” I opened the computer and walked him through the newly created weak spots and the cave-ins. Instead of being downcast at the fate of the miners, Mark got more excited as I explained.
At the end of my briefing, Mark kissed the top of my head and ran to get Jake.
Mark showed the map to Jake, only needing to explain my notation marks. “Abby, you’re incredible. That’s exactly what we needed.” Within seconds, Jake was gone again, taking the computer with him into the other room to bring everyone there up to speed.
“Where did you get that map, Jake?” Thomas asked.
“It’s new experimental ground penetrating technology. It’s still in the development stages. They’re planning to start commercialization in a year or two.”
“Is it accurate?”
“Tom, did you think I flew down here at the drop of a hat because I thought I could mount a better rescue than you could? This is why I came. If it wasn’t accurate, I wouldn’t be here staking my reputation and the lives of your miners on it.”
“Jake. The technology you’re talking about isn’t possible. You know that. I know every company on the planet that’s working on that type of technology and not one of them could get anywhere near that level of depth, detail, and precision.”
“Tom, your guys are running out of air. It’s your call. Do you really care about the impossible map or do you want to save their lives?”
Tom turned to his foremen. “Get the guys together. We have work to do.”
A cheer went through the workers and they started organizing the work. In what seemed like no time at all, a few of the engineers were sent off to shore up the weaknesses in the mine and the rest started working on the best way to dig the miners out, given the new information. Ideas were put up and shot down and in the end Jake came to me with a plan.
“I’d like your opinion on this Abby. I know that you’re not a mine engineer, but no one knows this mine better than you do right now. If we dig here, and here, do you think the rock will hold?”
I studied the plan and reviewed my mental image of the rock in that area. Pointing to the first area he’d pointed out, I said, “This site is very stable. The other one is good, but not great. The quake put some pressure there and caused slight micro fissures. Normally, they wouldn’t be a structural problem, but with all the digging you might weaken it and cause it to collapse. If the idea would still work, then this area right here would be a better choice.”
I pointed to an area twenty feet away and Jake thanked me and went back to the group. Ten minutes later, the room was almost empty. Only Jake, Mark and I were still inside. Every available worker was busy making the rescue happen.
“Now what do we do?”, I asked.
“We wait and we pray. We’ve done all that we could do.” Jake let out a breath and took a seat at one of the now empty desks.
I had a hard time accepting that. I had all this power and I couldn’t do more. Maybe if I could get to L4 or L5, assuming they existed, then I’d be able to get the miners out myself. What would L4 even look like? Would mountains disappear? Would L5 mean that the Earth’s outer crust faded away? Would successive layers of earth’s seven layer disappear until the earth was no longer there? What would happen to me then? If a layer disappeared and I fell down it, how would I get back to surface? When the earth was gone, would I drift into space? Would there be any air at all?
Air! The miners. There was something I could still do. I sent out my field to see how the miners were holding up. No so good. Some were coughing and having trouble breathing. A few had passed out and the rest of them were lethargic, at best. I didn’t know how long the rescuers needed, but it didn’t seem that the miners had a lot of time left so I shifted them all to L2. I hadn’t been able to hold twenty fields six months ago when I’d needed to shift the bombs away. However, all my practice with scanning the actions of entire surgical teams simultaneously had paid off and I was able to do it now with the miners. It helped that I only needed to concentrate on the twenty individuals for a few seconds. Once they were safely in L2, I set a field around the area to warn me if the rescuers were getting close. Once they tripped my field, I get alerted and bring the miners back before the rescuers could get close enough to see that the miners weren’t there. The workers themselves would never realize they’d been away.
Waiting is boring and nerve-wracking. I hated it. Not being able to do anything sucked. I was able to follow the work crews and see that they were doing, but compared to the speeds that I usually worked with, it seemed glacial. When my pacing grew too annoying for him, Jake suggested that I map out the rest of the property. That didn’t take me very long to do and when I finished that, Mark borrowed a car and we drove to Jake’s neighboring property. Can you call a mine that’s ten miles away a neighbor?
I was a little nervous at the distance involved, now that I’d sent the miners to L2. What if they rescuers made it to the trapped miners and I was too far away to feel the alert that I’s set? Instead of relying on my field, I sent out a powerful pulse, pairing it with a field shaped like a hardhat, and was able to see where the workers were. I thought that I would have time enough to get this job done and more.
After mapping Jake’s property in detail, Mark drive me around so I could continue to scan all around his and Thomas’s properties. I set my alarm for five-minute reminders and I sent out a pulse every time it buzzed. We were almost back to the mine when I felt the rescuers pass through the field I’d set. I immediately brought the miners back from L2 and let out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t messed that up. How would I have explained the miners not being where they were supposed to be and having to ‘find’ them later? As it was, the rescued minors would have a time gap that I hoped would be explained away by the bad air messing with their minds and causing them to be confused. It was also possible that those miners with watches would notice that their watches were off by several hours.
Everything seemed to go into fast-forward once the rescuers reached the trapped miners. In short order, the rescued miners were brought up and reunited with their families. It was a touching scene and it played out very well for Thomas on the local news channels. A cave-in of this size rarely had such a happy ending. Not one miner was injured enough to require hospitalization. The mine itself would be shut down for the next week, as engineers pored over it, making sure that it was safe to mine again. Thomas and his crew were ecstatic that everyone was ok and announced a celebratory picnic for the following day, for all those that wanted to come with or without their families.
Thomas extended that invitation to us and we accepted, especially as we had already accepted his invitation to stay the night at his house.