The breach in the high-pressure blast door released a wave of choking, chemical heat that hit Arthur Vance’s face like an open blast fire.
Arthur stepped through the ragged three-foot opening onto the suspended iron narrow high walkway of Refinery Fourteen’s central cracking chamber, his tactical boots ringing against the rusted diamond-plate steel. Behind him, Grimm, Titus, and Vesper moved into position with disciplined hungry silence.
The underground gallery that opened before them was huge—an underground cathedral of heavy industry and living madness.
The chamber was five hundred feet across and eighty feet high, lit up by the sickly purple soft glow of forty thousand gallons of boiling aether sludge that filled the lower basin. Three huge tube-shaped catalytic cracking towers—each thirty feet in width and six stories tall—rose from the chemical soup like stone-hard iron sea monsters. Their riveted steel seams wept dark, skin-burning grease.
Above their heads, vast spiderwebs of high-pressure steam pipes, armored spark cables. Then they rusted through crane gantries spanned the cavernous roof, dripping water drops that hissed as it struck the purple water below.
And in the center of the flooded basin, sprawled across a vast artificial island of stone-hard timber, crushed oil drums, and shredded boiler plates, lay the nest.
