The tremor began thirty feet above their heads. They ran through the pre-Cataclysm ceiling of the storm-water chamber like a fracture through old ice.
It wasn’t caused by earth-shaking shifting. It was the backup high-pressure recoil of an unguided tiny mortar battery exploding on the surface directly over the railway embankment. The heavy concrete ceiling groaned, hundreds of years of lime dust cascading down into the knee-deep water like a nearby blizzard.
Then came the hiss.
At the northern end of the vaulted chamber. There, the backup wagons carrying eighty elderly nomads and young children were moored, an eight-inch cast-iron chemical drainage pipe burst. The pipe had been rusted through paper-thin by decades of hydrofluoric waste. The blast above had snapped its rusted pipe rim clean off the stonework wall.
From the cut channel, a thick, high-pressure torrent of glowing violet sludge poured into the chamber, atomizing upon impact into a dense, oily fine mist that smelled of rotting meat, rancid bitter pine-resin, and sharp chemical vinegar.
Within forty seconds, a blinding bank of purple fog rolled across the water, engulfing the third and fourth wagon lines.
A child’s shrill, panicked scream cut through the darkness.
“Spore leak! Overhead rupture!” Kira Jansen’s voice cracked across the tactical radio from the forward sandbag berm. “Arthur, the pipe is venting raw incubation sludge! It’s drifting straight into the family wagons!”
