She and her engineers had understood that opening a haul road between the adit mouth and the smelter would be a battle. On Donovan, trees moved. And this was deep forest. Kalico and her people had barely won the fight to keep the relentless forest from overrunning her measly seven acres of farmland and its contiguous smelter. Fortunately, she had been able to secure enough terrestrial pine trees from Mundo Base to establish a line. Something about the chemistry in pines repelled Donovanian plant life. Her road would have to be lined with pines, which meant she was harvesting every cone that matured down at Mundo Base. Once sprouted, the seedlings were nurtured with extra care. Armed patrols planted the seedlings where aquajade, chabacho, and ironwood was cut for shoring. Meter by meter, the haul road was being established. Might be another three years before enough pines could be grown to line the entire route.

Next came the problem of the adit. Her engineers, Desch Ituri and Aurobindo Ghosh, had carefully surveyed the slope, determined the angle and distance, and begun driving the Number Three adit. What they hadn’t counted on was the zone of shattered rock they hit two hundred meters into the mountain. This was, after all, the edge of a crater. One caused by an asteroid impact powerful enough to penetrate the planet’s crust. Shattered rock wasn’t a big surprise. And it was remarkably rich in valuable metals, so it was profitable to extract. On the downside, it also crumbled the moment it was undercut. The technical term for the roof collapse was goafing. Problem was, once excavated, the tunnel roof just kept goafing its way up through the shattered rock zone. What Ghosh called “void migration.” Like hollow rot eating its way up through the mountain’s guts, or a bubble of empty space rising through ever-collapsing rock. Leave it go for long enough, and the whole volume above the adit would consist of loose fill that had to be supported.

The solution was that shoring had to be built bit by bit as the adit was drifted into the mountain. They fought a constant battle to keep the adit roof, or head rock, supported.

Structural stability wasn’t the only problem with shattered rock. Unlike higher in the Number One and Number Two mines, the shattered rock in the Number Three had the porosity of a sponge. Water trickled out of it by the bucketful. Because of the incline, Ituri had cut a ricket, or gutter, into the floor that now ran a full stream of toxic heavy-metal-rich water. What Ituri called the “water-make” was now just over one hundred and twenty gallons a minute.