Chapter Text
Mine Foreman Kateryna Zuo hated desk work.
They promoted her to foreman because she was the best at her job, but now she had an entirely different job. She wanted to be down in the mines, with her workers, where she could use her experience and muscles to help them, not up top, breathing recycled, but clean air, sipping on coffee, and signing forms. She sighed as she looked over the current piece of paper on her clipboard, and after finding the one spot where she had forgotten to put her signature, she signed it.
“Here, William,” she said, handing the scruffy, carbon-stained miner his form. “You’ve got three days, go be with your new one.”
“Three days?!” he whispered as loudly as he could in disbelief.
Kateryna sighed. “That is the most I can cover for. They don’t want to be handing any time off.”
The worker nodded and sighed as well, but made sure to stop and salute at the door to her office. “Glory to the Nation, foreman!”
“Glory to the Nation, worker,” she half-heartedly replied, only barely returning the gesture.
She took a sip of black coffee and clicked through the virtual reports on the mining machines through her compute. She found each one operating under normal parameters, until she got to the last drill, whose temperature was getting dangerously high.
She instantly grabbed her radio and tuned it to the frequency of the team in charge of that piece of equipment. “Srdja! What are you doing?! Shut it down!”
Once she took her thumb off the talk button what came through from the other side was just a never ending stream of strained metal and rock grinding noises, shouts, and electrical snaps.
“It’s seized! We can’t turn it off!”
Kateryna stood up and shouted into the radio, “Cut the power!”
But there was only more shouting coming from the other end.
So, swearing to herself, Kateryna donned her helmet from the rack once more and ran as fast as she could to the mineshaft elevator. However, just before the elevator reached the bottom, she heard an explosion in the distance, and felt the entire structure of the elevator shake as alarms flared up. She ran toward the source of the boom and found an active cave-in in progress. The drill machine had blown to pieces, sending metal and rock shrapnel in all directions. At least a dozen miners lay dead or severely wounded from the injuries across the area of the pit, and there threatened to be more as sections of the rock ceiling started to come down.
“Shvydshe, shvydshe!” she shouted as her and two other workers ran into the collapsing section to pull out as many injured workers as they could before it collapsed entirely. Kateryna saw a pair of workers limping their way through the section from the end of the excavated tunnel and ran in one more time to try and get them out. She picked each up under her arms like a basket and ran as fast as she could, dodging fallen rocks left and right. But just as she was getting to the awaiting arms of her other workers by the entrance, she felt a secondary rumble travel up her body, she didn’t have much time left.
She would make it. These were her workers, her miners, her family.
She got the two to the safe, reinforced area of the mine past the connecting tunnel, but as she took a look back, she saw one last miner on the ground she thought was dead struggle to get to her feet. Acting purely on instinct, she ran back inside over the shouts and protestations of those behind her.
“Kateryna, no!”
“Foreman, stop!”
She made it three steps before the ceiling came down in full.
…..
“...Minimal brain activity. She’s alive, but only on a technicality.”
“Is there a chance she might wake up?”
“Very low. Ten percent, maybe.”
“...Salvage what we can. Keep her on the ventilator and keep her vitals stable.”
“Sir?”
“...I need to make a phone call to AEON Command.”