The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (10 page)

Then it was on to the second cluster, where I checked on the first pipe with a failed thermometer by the simple expedient of looking at the portable thermometer that I'd placed into a temporary bracket mounted to the pipe. It took only a second or two to make whatever adjustment was required on the first problem pipe, and then I moved the portable thermometer over to the second problem pipe so that it would have a chance to adjust to the temperature on the surface there while I checked the rest of the cluster.

By the time everything but the second problem pipe had been checked, the portable thermometer was showing a fairly accurate read of the second pipe, which meant that I could adjust the corresponding valve and then move the thermometer back to the first problem pipe on my way back out to check on Del.

"You don't need to be out here every fifteen minutes looking over my shoulder."

I shrugged. "I don't
need
to look over your shoulder, but I do need to make sure that I'm staying hydrated. I also need to check on the temperature of the water inside the generation chamber, and as long as I'm out here I might as well take a quick look at the ticker tape. There's no telling when Beth might want me out here monitoring the telegraph—I still need practice reading the codes."

"Don't kid yourself. Beth isn't going to put you out here. There's a reason that she chose me for this job. Neither of us can read and you're obviously not capable of memorizing seventy different codes."

The more time I spent around Del the more she reminded me of Megan. Under other circumstances I would have showed her up, but I just gritted my teeth and gave her an obviously insincere smile. I'd spent so many years doing whatever I'd been told and never asking questions that responding to those kinds of slights with the aggressiveness they deserved was far from second nature. When you threw in the fact that telling anyone I could read was almost certainly going to blow my cover, I really didn't have any choice at all.

As I turned to go, the telegraph started punching holes in the ticker tape. This message was coming from the headquarters building. I counted the longs and shorts. Three longs, six shorts and then three more shorts, all split up into nice even groups.

My memory was good enough that I was almost certain that it was an order to increase power generation, but I looked up to the steel plates mounted above the telegraphs and confirmed my recollection against the notes stamped onto the list of signals.

"Get back in there and let Beth and the rest know that Brennan needs more power."

I forced a smile onto my face despite Del's tone, and then slipped back inside the pipe room. A quick visual inspection of the closest of my pipes confirmed that they were still down in the same temperature range as when I'd checked them last.

I hurried past my section—taking care to avoid any of the pipes that bent horizontally soon after exiting the floor—and found Beth.

"We just got a telegraph from upstairs. Brennan needs more power for something and wants us to push up the temperatures inside the generator."

That earned me a frown. "Then he should have sent Tyrell down to keep an eye on things—that or come down himself."

"Yeah, except then he couldn't have kept working on whatever project it is that has him pushing for more power."

"I know, that's my point exactly. He's rushing along too quickly."

"Are you countermanding the order?"

She shook her head. "No, there are risks, but while you've been keeping an eye on Del, I've been keeping an eye on you. You're doing a good job keeping things under control. You're making small adjustments and giving it time to settle into a new range before making another one. Billy would have said something by now if Jerome was having problems, so there's nothing to do but continue on."

Beth dropped down to check one more thermometer and then pulled herself back upright with a groan. "You can go back to your station, I'll tell the other two."

"It's okay. I've got the smallest batch of pipes, so I'll go tell them. You should save your knees, we've still got almost an entire shift ahead of us."

"Thanks, Skye, that's kind of you. Just remember to emphasize to Jerome that we want to make very small reductions to the water flow. It doesn't take much of a drop across all of these pipes to start pushing the inflow temperature up and really get the generator spinning."

I nodded and set off looking for Billy, who had the area furthest away from the control room. He listened to the orders I was relaying and then waved me on wordlessly as he reached for his first valve and turned it a fraction of an inch to the right.

Jerome started scowling as soon as he saw me approaching. "What do you want?"

"Wow, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed."

His forehead wrinkled as he tried to decide whether or not to take offense. "Hurry up and tell me what it is you came to say. Del doesn't like it when I talk to other girls, and I don't want to be in the doghouse again."

"Isn't it kind of hard to go all day without talking to Beth seeing as how she's our boss?"

"Beth doesn't count—she's old."

At least half a dozen responses were jostling each other on the tip of my tongue, but I just shook my head at him rather than pointing out how stupid that statement was.

"We've got orders to get the generator up to speed, so we'll have to reduce the water flow, but Beth said to tell you that it doesn't take much to have a big impact on the temperatures hitting the generator, so make smaller adjustments than you think you need—if Brennan has to wait to get his extra electricity then he has to wait. It's not worth risking our lives to ramp the turbine up instantly."

"I'm not scared. This is just a little hot water—I've been in much more dangerous situations."

I wanted to tell him he was being an idiot, that scalding water would kill him as quickly as a knife in the dark, but I was pretty sure that would just make him bristle and then do something stupid to prove himself.

"I'm just passing along orders. If you have an issue with that, take it up with Beth. I need to get back to my pipes and make my next round of adjustments."

He mumbled something under his breath as I walked away, but my nanites didn't magically grant me better hearing, and I couldn't make it out over the low hum of the pipes vibrating as water circulated inside of them. It was probably for the best—I didn't particularly care what he thought of me as long as he did his job and stayed out of the way.

Back at my pipes, I checked each of the thermometers in turn and closed each valve slightly to make sure that my pipes were taking their share of the burden when it came to pushing up the temperature inside the generation chamber. The temperature had already started to go up slightly in several of the pipes even before I'd made any changes, but Beth had warned all of us about that back before we'd even been allowed to step into the pipe room.

Everything was one big interconnected system. When everyone else had reduced the speed of the water flow through their pipes, the waste heat hadn't just started building up in their pipes, some of it had started bleeding over into my pipes too.

I took manual readings off of the two pipes with broken thermometers, and then headed back out to grab another drink of water.

"Don't bother coming over here and trying to look over my shoulder again. I've got things under control."

Del hadn't even waited for me to fully exit the pipe room before mouthing off, but I reminded myself that my mission relied on not drawing attention to myself, and headed over to the water line rather than walking over and slamming my elbow into her face like I half wanted to. I swallowed a few sips of water and then headed back towards the door, detouring slightly so that I could at least get a feel for the temperature inside of the generation chamber.

It had spiked a lot further than I'd been expecting it to, but it was still inside the tolerances that Brennan and Tyrell had set out when they'd designed the system. If things continued to get hotter we would be in trouble in short order, but as long as everyone was watching their section we'd be okay—even just increasing the flow of water through a few of the pipes would be enough to bring the pressure down and stabilize the operating temperature.

I went back inside the pipe room, and nearly tripped over a spot where the metal plating wasn't as flush as it would have been back home. The Society built with perfect seams and everything was fastened down. Brennan had finished off the pipe room with a false floor that consisted of nothing more than plates of metal laid on a framework of steel girders. As long as all of the plates were in position it functioned like a giant interlocking set of puzzle pieces, but I was pretty sure that once you started lifting up sections of flooring you had to worry about other sections shifting—it made me glad that we weren't responsible for maintenance.

My thermometers were showing readings that were approaching the danger zone. The tiny, primitive part of my brain that was a holdover from the time before humans had figured out how to use tools was jumping up and down demanding that I open the valves back up, but I ignored that urge and opened up the valves in sequence, moving the wheels less than a third of the way back to where they'd been.

It was exactly what Beth had told us to do, but when I went back to my first cluster of pipes the temperatures looked like they were still climbing. That wasn't necessarily proof that anything was wrong—Beth had told us several times that there was a gigantic lag built into the system. It took time for the water to complete its circuit back to us so that it could be measured, and then even more time for the instruments to register any changes in temperature, but I couldn't get past the feeling that something wasn't right.

I ran over to the control room.

Del glared at me. "I told you not to—"

My eyes found the thermometer reading the temperature inside of the turbine and I cut her off with a look.

"You're not doing your job! That's all of the way up to the top of the acceptable operating range. You should have been inside the pipe chamber yelling for us to open things back up."

"There's a lag built into the system. You guys just opened things up, it's going to take time for it all to cool down."

I pushed past her and grabbed the ticker tape. The one from the command center was blank, but the one from the foundry was repeating the same code over and over again. Three shorts, six longs, three more shorts.

I rounded on Del and she stepped back as though realizing that it wasn't safe for her to be within arm's reach of me right then.

"Don't freak out—it's just the foundry acknowledging the fact that Brennan asked for more power."

"You've got the longs and shorts reversed. Even without that you should have known that something was up—there's no reason for the foundry to acknowledge an order from headquarters to us, let alone do so a dozen times. That code is signaling that they've had a failure down there—a feedback loop in one or more of the burners!"

I was already moving back towards the pipe room, but I paused for just long enough to yell back over my shoulder. "Get a pair of gloves and then get inside the pipe room and open up every valve you can see!"

Even if I hadn't just seen the ticker tape I still would have known that something was wrong. The pipes were all groaning and the temperature inside the pipe room had climbed at least twenty degrees in the last few minutes. It was like walking into a blast furnace—we didn't have much time. It might already be too late.

I wanted to stop and open up all of the valves in my area, but that would have to wait until Beth and the others had been warned—hopefully Del would manage to open up at least some of my pipes.

By the time I made it to Beth, she was already opening up her pipes an inch at a time. Her instincts were good, but she was operating without all of the information she needed.

"Open them up all the way—they've got a feedback loop on the burners in the foundry!"

"How did she miss—no, there isn't time. Tell Jerome. I'll tell Billy!"

I'd already started running towards Billy's section. Now I veered to the right, recklessly leaping over pipes that I normally would have detoured around. My foot caught on another lip where two of the plates in the floor weren't quite the same thickness, and I started falling, headed right for a pipe that was so hot that it was shaking like it was going to come apart.

I wasn't going to get second-degree burns, not from something that hot, I was headed towards third-degree burns. I was off balance and moving far too quickly for such a dangerous environment, but I managed to get my right hand up and slam it into the pipe, knocking myself away. It wasn't enough to stop me from falling, but I managed to hit a clear piece of ground and stopped my roll by slamming a boot into another pipe before I could burn the entire left side of my body.

Even the floor was hot enough to burn the bare skin of my back and shoulders, but I didn't stop to assess damages—if we didn't get the temperatures under control we were going to all end up dead.

I pulled myself back up to my feet and stumbled around another big cluster of pipes to find Jerome struggling with a frozen valve. The temperature gauges on his pipes were all reading temperatures beyond anything the pipes were supposed to withstand.

"Leave that one—we've got to get as many open as fast as we can—hopefully the other pipes can suck some of the heat out of that one if we work fast enough."

I grabbed the nearest valve and heaved against it, increasing the flow of water by a good quarter turn, and then threw myself towards the next pipe. My gloves weren't keeping the heat away from my palms now—it hurt to grab hold of the metal—but I forced the next valve open and moved on to another.

The thought of what was going on back in my section was making me desperate, but Jerome's gauges were even hotter than mine had been. All I could do was hope that getting his pipes cooled down would draw some of the heat out of my pipes before everything exploded.

Valve after valve turned until it hit the stops, and then it was down to the last couple, which I left for Jerome to take care of as I raced back to my section. I arrived to see temperatures every bit as high as what Jerome and I had been dealing with just seconds before.