The entrance to Refinery Fourteen’s underground drainage chimney pipe was a jagged, gaping breach in the side of a massive cast-iron under-road drain, rusted into a jagged maw of peeling orange scale and weeping black slime.
The air billowing outward from the passage was thick, greasy, and suffocatingly hot.
It didn’t smell like the open salt marshes outside. It carried the reeking, chemical stench of boiling petroleum wash, scorched stone oil, rotting organic waste. The razor-sharp, lung-searing bite of packed sulfuric acid mist.
Arthur Vance stood at the threshold of the concrete chimney pipe. He pulled down his heavy rubberized breathing mask until the brass intake valves clicked into their airtight seals over his nose and throat. Across the nape of his neck, the cooling-oil cooling rig hummed with a low, turbine-like whine, venting a steady stream of odorless white vapor from the dual copper exhaust ports on his shoulders to counteract the underground heat.
He reached up with a gloved hand, rotating the quartz filters of his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle, the glowing green tracking data cutting through the heavy yellow fog:
“Eighty-four point five parts per million sky aether,” Arthur muttered through his breathing mask chest muscle, his voice muffled by the charcoal filter. “The catalytic vats above are leaking active mutagen into the drainage channels. The surrounding heat wave is speeding up the growth rate of every living organism in this sump. Grimm, stay tight against my left thigh. Titus, take point.”
