Beyond the flooded mangrove forest lay the true heavy-duty artery of the underworld: The Great Mantle Siphon.
Arthur crawled up the wet dark rock incline. His Zeiss monocle was locked on long-range sight zoom. Beside him, Valerie Koslov lay flat in the mud, her sniper rifle resting across a fold of damp canvas, her scarred face lit up by the distant glare of heavy-duty floodlights. Down below, the dark waters of the underground lake channeled into an excavated gorge lined with rusted sheet-pile walls.
Five hundred meters below their watching post, the clean underground lake was violated by a sprawling, fortified heavy-duty complex.
Massive steel caissons had been driven directly into the flooded ruins of a pre-Cataclysm research work-yard. Huge diesel-high-pressure pumps, each the size of a three-story tenement, thudded with ear-splitting, rhythmic clatter, sucking hundreds of thousands of gallons of black slurry from the depths and vomiting it into a series of settling ponds carved from the limestone. The air smelled of burnt grease, hot diesel exhaust, and raw aetherite sludge.
“Look at that operation,” Valerie spat, her fingers tightening on the bolt of her rifle. “Silas Kane isn’t just panning for scrap metal. He’s running a full-scale corporate mining operation right under the Federation’s nose.”
