Mac Cole spit a mouthful of black diesel soot into the floodwater.
“Don’t count your scrap metal yet, tin man,” Mac growled under his breath.
His ears rang from the electrical explosion. Across the refinery floor, the severed conduit was still glowing cherry-red where Captain Laminate’s crimping iron had sheared through the copper. Blue sparks hissed as cold seawater lapped against the copper core, filling the sub-basement with the stench of fried insulation and burnt machine oil.
Above them, the Titan-84 press stood frozen.
The heavy four-foot rollers had stopped dead. Without four hundred and eighty volts running through the main bus, the machine was just five tons of motionless bronze and cold steel. The temperature gauge on the side of the housing kept dropping.
Two hundred and forty degrees.
Two hundred and twenty degrees.
Two hundred degrees.
