The Mines of Tarnus

The humans living on Tarnus maintain a powerful appetite for the value and power that can be dug out of the skin of the planet. The great stability of the bedrock in which all the underground cities are found may explain the nerveless confidence with which the great corps, such as ArCorp and RhoCorp, burrow recklessly into the mountainous geography south and east of the City to extract metals for reactors and specialized industrial applications. The risks the corps take usually have their consequences visited upon the hapless andros who work in these mines, andros easily replaced whenever a cave-in or an explosion or a combination of the two has destroyed many lives.

The andros bear more than just these sudden catastrophes. The mines for actinides, fueling the City reactors, are rank and toxic with dust carrying much radioactivity, and between the respiratory stresses and the impact of radiation, pneumonia and cancer cause much added suffering and early death. Even worse, the treatment of the andros as chattel by their human superintendents (who rarely enter the mines themselves unless absolutely necessary) makes the andro plight worse than any other form of slavery.

In some mines, particularly at Transellas, deeper secrets are buried in the most-remote excavations and tunnels. Two zones in the complex, Signo 943 and Signo 945, reached out westward from the most-productive sectors, Signo 808 and Signo 4. In the early Fourth Dynasty, the search for lanthanides, scarce in other mines but more plentiful at Transellas in westward-leading veins, broke through into a smooth round vertical shaft the diameter of a large City airshaft, running down at least a kilometer and a half straight into the rock. The miners summoned engineers and scientists, who descended past numerous tunnels fanning off northwestward, westward, and southwestward from the shaft at multiple levels, a pattern very similar to that of the City streets and the aswals where the streets come together.

Some explorations of the upper levels of this newly-discovered complex showed that it had been mined for a variety of metal ores already, but the explorers returning from the complex began reporting physiological and psychological problems that worsened over time no matter how they were treated or sequestered. Medical tests revealed nothing. The most common reported symptoms were of highly-lucid dreams, visions, or hallucinations that shared one factor: the walls of the complex were alive and trying to speak. The language in every case was unknown, but a few of the afflicted were able to mimic or replicate some sounds they remembered hearing in the dreams. None of this made any sense or fit any pattern.

Attempts to retrace the paths of the afflicted met with the same kind of infection or poisoning of those trying to see what had happened. Finally the mining concerns walled off the shaft, named Presigno 7, and closed access to Signo 943 and Signo 945.