Mac Cole shifted his boots on the vibrating grating, his shoulder muscles tightening under his heavy oilskin coat.
He didn’t like standing three feet from six hundred RPM of spinning tungsten teeth.
The Mud-Boss reeked like a flooded engine room that had stayed locked for twenty years. It was a sour, oily stench of burnt diesel fuel, hot laminating plastic, and grave-silt dredged from the ocean bed. Every time the three-cone drill bit whined, it threw a shower of fine grey grit that stung Mac’s scarred neck and clattered against the iron deck.
“Ain’t taking off my boots, you ugly pile of junk,” Mac growled. He brought his left arm up, the naval brass spanner attachment clicking into locked position with a solid mechanical snap.
“These work boots drove the Route Four line for twenty years. You want them, you’ll have to pull them off my cold ankles.”
The machine didn’t care about transit drivers.
Its head was an antique copper-and-brass diving helmet, green with verdigris and bolted directly to the shoulders of a bloated rubber diving dress. Across the rectangular wire-mesh faceplate, two dim yellow vacuum tubes glowed behind the screen, flickering with a steady fifty-eight-hertz line hum.
“INDIVIDUAL DEFENDANCE NOTED,” the spliced chorus barked through the rusty horn speaker mounted on its collar. Twenty voices, layered like old recordings over a scratchy phonograph, rattled the steel bulkheads. “OPERATOR MARCUS COLE.
