Chapter XXI: Descent Approaching
The entrance to the mine had not even been properly sealed. Still, making their way down the mine shafts had been slow going with only their palm beacons lighting the dark. Navigating had been relatively simple, at least - the mine had been laid out simply so far, one long corridor with several smaller transverse tunnels, minimizing the search pattern they had agreed upon.
It had been two hours of slow, stumbling work with nothing to show for it but quietly decaying abandoned equipment.
Semil's tricorder beeped as some new feature entered the periphery of its scan range. "Just a few dozen more meters..."
K'vot, a few paces ahead, had already come to a stop. "You don't say."
Semil joined him, realizing in the dim illumination that the tunnel had given way to a much larger cavern. Even with his limited sight, he noticed K'vot standing before a precipice, his torchlight unable to illuminate a floor, or opposing wall in the darkness.
K'vot had already reached for an illuminator beacon, activating the warm incandescent glow with a flick of his thumb. It was the kind of light that did not burn to look at, even with their eyes adjusted to the dark, but surprised with its ability to cast a broad radiance.
Semil could see now that they were on a broad ledge extending many meters in either direction. It was clear that K'vot intended more comprehensive measures to get his bearing. K'vot lightly tossed the glowbeacon several meters out from the ledge, illuminating the sheer face of the ledge they were on as it travelled down.
In the dark, Semil could just make out the opposite ledge, equally precarious. There had been some sort of heavy lift machiinery in the cliff face they were on, though that had largely collapsed in great chunks at intermediate intervals on its way down.
No longer to distinctly make out the blurry flicker of the glow beacon through his muddy eyesight, Semil returned his focus to his tricorder - letting K'vot follow through with his own plans.
Semil's tricorder managed to return an approximate plan of the cavern they were in. "There's another ledge several hundred meters down, by where that broken lift is affixed. Can you see it?"
"Barely. Still, that lift doesn't stop nowhere. It's a better option than turning back now."
Semil reached into the cloak pockets before shucking it off, bails of synthcable balled up in his fist. "You know, we head down there, it's likely we'll lose all contact with the Vaq'ghol. This is much coarser baakenite, and we won't be able to get communications through, much less transporter signal."
From his utility belt, he pulled a pneumatic
fusing piton into the ledge floor, several meters safely shy of where the zenith terminus of the industrial mining lift had been. He threaded the synthcable through the harness points that had been foresightedly built into the rudimentary field armor he was wearing.
To his side, he could see K'vot was working on securing his own harness quite a few meters away - perhaps out of distrust. K'vot had not yet planted his own anchor piton. "Colonel, descending down that route - there's a particularly less stable face several dozen meters down. The rock is especially..."
"Noted." Even being corrected, the Colonel could be awfully curt. At least he was taking helpful suggestions, Semil considered. K'vot came closer to Semil's piton, still allowing for a generous safety margin between their lines, before planting his own anchor.
"If it will give you some relief, I'll start down first." Semil cast his rope down the rock face, checked his harness and descender connections, and bracing himself into a studied, if not practiced abseil position. "For what it's worth, I didn't think you were a miner."
Semil started cautiously down the sheer rock face, K'vot shortly behind.
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"My parents forged bat'leths." Unprovoked, most of the way down, K'vot spoke up, apropos of nothing immediately particular.
"Artisans of bat'leths are revered among the Klingon castes, if not quite held to the same status as the warriors." Semil nodded his basic textbook understanding of Klingon social hierarchy, just before affixing another piton into the rock face.
"It's how I know about how miners live. We dealt with many of them directly, rather than go through merchants and smelters."
"Among them, but not of them..." Semil trailed off, unwilling to make obvious allegorical connections out loud. "Tell me, then. Your father chose to go outside normal channels. Surely this wasn't a mark of shame of any sort."
K'vot couldn't tell whether the Vorta was trying to bait him again. "The warriors who came to him did not care. What mattered was the fine blade of his bat'leths. He gained more respect than some of the warriors that came knocking on our door."
Semil conjectured those relationships were how K'vot had the privilege of enrolling in the warriors' academies, being the son of a nuH chenmoHwI', even an esteemed one. He thought it better to not share this idea with K'vot, even if it were true.
Semil thought it best to try and instead give the Colonel a chance to instead focus on the more honorable aspects of his father's arrangement. "If he was in such demand, I imagine he didn't do the initial smelting and refinement himself."
"My brothers and cousins and I were taught to smelt the baakenite using the old ways. Father always believed only traditional metallurgy could give Klingon weapons the tang and sting of true honor. That a weapon could only be as honorable as the honor that went into its forging."
While grateful for even this slight, guarded glimpse into the Colonel's story, Semil was also growing slightly sorry he'd brought on such pedantry. The Vaq'ghol's databanks could fill him with endless reading on Klingon honor and its infinite consequences, permutations, and vagaries.
Semil was relieved to hear his tricorder beeping the end of their descent approaching from its holster on his belt.
