Mallet, Nathalie
THE DIGGING CREW
Nathalie Mallet
LTD Books 2005
e-Book ISBN#
1-55316-143-2
In the far future, life-on-another-planet
scenario, life is not so good. The many-planet laws of the Dominion
are so harsh that teen heroine Samantha Chang got ten years of hard
labor at the prison-mine on the desert world of Carmel 5 just for
stealing a watch. And when she pushes a droid into a destructive
fall, that sentence is commuted to a life-term.
They dig for tallac ore, a mineral used in the
cooling systems of engines in old space craft: ergo, tallac ore is
not that valuable so neither are the lives of the prisoners who
procure it. Sammy's position on the digging crew, because she is
the smallest, is that of "worm", that person who crawls into deep
crevices to place the charges. There are cave-ins. Starvation and
fighting are common. The other women on Sammy's crew are fierce.
Those on another crew are viciously mean. And just when Sammy
settles into a sort of camaraderie, she stumbles upon a secret. Her
crew escapes their place in the mine. The other crew follows.
Carmel 5 is a dangerous world, even without the added problem that
you can't trust the person hiking next to you.
THE DIGGING CREW covers the extensive breadth
of this escape in writing that is totally present and full of
action. There's some pretty cool science in the story, both
technological and biological. The characterization is good. The
prose is clean, efficient, and well tensioned. These dangerous
women plot behind each others backs while supposedly helping each
other through this escape . . . but the trouble they run into is
even worse than what they plot. A good read.
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