The brick barrel-vault of the Sump Road drainage under-road drain echoed with the rhythmic, sloshing splash of twelve pairs of heavy leather waders wading through four inches of greasy under-road drain runoff.
Melli Dorn walked at the head of the file, her unshielded acetylene torch hissing like an angry viper as its intense, white-hot hardened carbon-iron flame carved a blinding circle through the cold sulfur fog. In her thick right hand, she carried an iron sounding bar four feet long. In her left, she held the brass valve wrench she had used to assemble the bypass pipe hub on Tier Four.
Behind her, twelve veteran salt-glass riggers moved in pairs. It carried four zinc-lined crates of replacement bronze couplings suspended from ash-timber litters. The crates weighed two hundred pounds apiece, the cast-bronze flanges clinking softly against their pine spacers every time the riggers stepped across an iron check grate.
They stopped at the lip of the Central Sump Pit.
The pit was a huge stonework metal tube, thirty feet in width and twenty feet deep, lined with glass-fused blue building brick that had been laid fifty years ago to collect the waste animal fat and refining grease from the country oil depot.
