Eighty Miners Still Holding Drill

Efua Falconer bars the main drift with an iron strike-pad. Behind her, eighty miners have held a twenty-tonne bore-head three millimetres off the basalt floor since breakfast.

No cutter teeth may touch the rock until the memorial thud struck for surveyor Hemi finishes its forty-minute decay through the stone. The asteroid is dense. It rings like wet lead.

"The seam is still speaking," Falconer whispered, ear pressed to the rock rib. "He had sensitive ears."

Shift boss Wiremu Uchenna stood braced beneath a hydraulic arm, his knees shaking under seventy kilos of manual lift. Setting the steel down against stone would damp the tone, which shaft custom considers desecration.

At minute thirty-eight, driller Lior Silveira sneezed into his sleeve.

Falconer raised her hammer and struck the iron pad again.

The count restarted.

Uchenna did not swear. He merely leaned harder into the casing and signalled for two apprentices to take his left shoulder.

"Keep the teeth clear," Uchenna rasped through clenched teeth. "We do this right."

The crew has now suspended twenty tonnes on bare muscle for seven hours without cutting an ounce of ore. A relief shift just crept into the drift in woollen socks, carrying sandwiches nobody is allowed to chew.