The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (9 page)

Those of us in the second stage weren't in quite as much danger as the people in the foundry, but we had just as much or more responsibility. If we didn't correctly regulate the flow of water into the coolant headed down into the foundry, then everyone down there would die. If we dumped too much cold water down the pipes, then the secondary power generator stopped working and power that the rest of the compound was depending on disappeared.

That would have been plenty bad enough all by itself, but the added complexity driven by the hot water coming up from the stage one power generating facility meant that we were often juggling multiple variables with nothing more sophisticated than a few old-fashioned mercury thermometers and an ancient telegraph.

The crew I was working with was a mixed bag. Our team lead was a serious, silver-haired woman named Beth who'd been running the night shift inside of phase two for more than three months. Her right-hand man was a guy named Billy.

Billy rarely said more than two words at a time, but the two of them had a near-perfect ability to anticipate what the other needed at any given moment in order to keep the various pipes from getting too hot.

Those two were the good part of my new team. The two who'd joined up with me were decidedly less competent. Jerome was roughly the size of a house—an amazing feat for someone who'd grown up in the food-poor interior of the city. I suspected that he'd served as an enforcer for one or more of the other warlords before moving into Brennan's territory. He was only marginally smarter than a rock, which made me question the wisdom of putting him in such a critical location, but there was no denying the fact that his strength came in handy when it was time to open or close some of the more corroded valves.

My best guess was that Tyrell had assumed that Beth and Billy would be able to keep Jerome out of trouble. Nothing had gone catastrophically wrong so far, but I'd only been on the job for two days, and there was still plenty of time for Jerome to screw something up.

His girlfriend, Del, was an even bigger question as far as I was concerned. She didn't have Jerome's strength, which meant that she usually ended up monitoring the telegraph and master thermometer. That would have been okay if she'd been intelligent, or at least realized that she needed to check in with Beth on a regular basis, but she was dead set on appearing competent regardless of the reality of the situation.

I'd spotted a likely hiding spot for the transmitter I'd brought with me at the end of my first shift, and dropped it off on the way into work the next morning—a fortunate thing since everyone had started making pointed comments about my need for a shower. The transmitter wasn't waterproof—even assuming it wouldn't have drawn attention to shower in communal facilities with my clothes on—and I wasn't willing to leave it back in my locker.

I arrived to work the third morning freshly showered and only slightly embarrassed at being forced to shower around a dozen other women. I was beginning to understand why most of Brennan's workers were so happy to be working for him. Being clean again—even after less than forty-eight hours in the city—felt like the ultimate luxury.

The people who'd been working there for a while made it clear that the showers weren't always hot, but they often were, and being able to shower more often than just when there was a rainstorm was considered an amazing perk to working in the compound.

Beth looked up as I walked in. "Good, you're early—that means I'll be able to brief you."

"Something new going on?"

"Yeah, the foundry is shifting over to steel again, which is a first for you. Up until now they've been just turning out new rolls of copper wire."

"So we'll have more waste heat being dumped into the wall."

"Smart girl. Yes, more waste heat, which means more pipes turned on in order to keep the pressure from getting too high. This is the first time we've dealt with a steel pour in more than two months, which has me worried. Before this, Brennan and Tyrell always came down here to make sure that everything ran smoothly when the foundry kicked over to the more dangerous jobs. Between the two of them and Brennan's guards, we always had plenty of hands—smart ones—to make sure that nothing got out of control."

"So we're on our own this time? Any idea why?"

Beth shook her head, silver locks whipping back and forth. "They've moved on to some other project. It's the way of things around here. Brennan is always thinking several steps ahead, always working on the next step to getting us so that we'll be able to stand up to the ants. The foundry and stage one have both been working just fine for more than four months—since even before I got here. Adding the second generator up here only happened about three months ago."

"So the bosses figure that all of the bugs have been worked out of the system and with our arrival you've got the extra hands you need to keep up with all of the flow regulation that needs to happen."

"Yeah, that's the idea, but the truth is that it's never been done before with so few people. There are only five of us, and two more thermometers have gone out since then—with no replacements in sight—which means that we'll have to go in and take manual measurements."

I pursed my lips, debating. "You're worried about Del?"

"About all of you, but her most of all. Jerome needs to be inside turning valves—Billy and me too—which just leaves the two of you. If I had my druthers, I'd have you out watching the telegraph, but Del is worse than useless inside the pipe chamber. She doesn't have your strength, and she's as likely to shoot her mouth off as she is to obey an order."

"Can you get her replaced?"

That got me a shrug. "Maybe. I already asked, but the day manager says that decent people are hard to come by. He wants me to give things a go with her first. We should be okay. We'll keep an eye on things—keep the temperature on the low side of the operating range so that we have an extra safety margin to work with—and then you, me and Billy will all stop by the telegraph every chance we get to check that she's passing on the messages. You'll be working the area closest to the doors though, so it will mostly fall to you to keep an eye on her."

The thought of being in the pipe room if a pipe burst was enough to make my skin crawl. The bottom end of the generator's operating temperature was more than a hundred and fifty degrees. The pipes were supposed to be rated for three hundred and fifty degrees, which meant that a pipe that got too hot and burst from the resulting pressure was going to be unleashing scalding water on anyone in the vicinity.

If I'd been the team leader I would have given the day manager a piece of my mind, but Beth knew a lot more about the way the system worked than I did.

"Okay, if you're sure it's safe. I'll do my best to keep an eye on her."

"You're a smart girl, Skye. You and I both know that there isn't anything safe about any part of this process. Brennan is the smartest man in the city—maybe the smartest man on the whole continent—but he's figuring this out as he goes. We have accidents all of the time. For every thing he anticipates there's at least two more that he doesn't see coming—mostly interactions between complex systems. Sometimes grunts like you and me see the issues developing and can head them off, sometimes we can't. There's a reason that Tyrell drops off a body or two every morning and comes back in with an equal number of new recruits. None of this is safe."

"I thought it was mostly people who weren't paying attention who were getting killed."

"Tyrell say that?"

"I'm not sure—maybe."

"There's some of that happening, but that's not the only reason that people are dying."

"If this is all so dangerous how come you're still here?"

Beth grinned. "Same reason you are. Here's no more dangerous than out there. At least here we don't have to worry about being murdered or raped. Besides, maybe the two of them are right and we can finally put the hurt on those ants. Bombing runs killed both of my children when they weren't any older than you are right now. I'd give a lot to be a part of something that evens the score between us and them."

I tried to fake an enthusiastic smile, but it was harder than I'd expected. Being told it was going to be hard to keep my emotional distance from a bunch of grubbers wasn't quite the same as actually living among them and sharing life-threatening risks. Maybe I was more like Megan than I'd realized. On some level, I hadn't really thought of the grubbers as people. I'd expected them to all be like Piter and Bash, but so far a lot more of them had ended up like Beth and the three people—Sally, Jack and Donner—who'd covered for me back in the bucket brigade.

I knew that Brennan had to be stopped—the lives of all of the people inside this city weren't any more important than the citizens, franchised or otherwise, back behind the barrier—but I was starting to realize just how much death and destruction ultimately needed to be laid at Brennan's feet. There were more reasons than I'd originally realized to make sure that I was successful with this mission.

Billy arrived a couple of minutes after Beth and I finished our conversation, but Del and Jerome were a full twenty minutes late, which meant that two of the workers from the night shift had to stay late. I could see Beth getting hotter and hotter under the collar with every minute that passed after the official start time, and I was pretty sure that she was going to have another conversation with the day manager once our shift was finished. Luckily the foundry wasn't scheduled to start heating up the steel until more than an hour after our shift started.

My new bed had included a set of utilitarian clothes made out of fabric that came in a loose, scratchy weave. There were several layers to the garments, which I hadn't understood at the time, but as I stepped away from the telegraph and prepared to go into the pipe room, I blessed the individual who'd decided on multiple layers as a way of staying warm rather than opting for a single set of thicker garments.

I'd already shed my outer layer of clothing when I'd arrived at work, but now I pulled off the long-sleeved shirt I'd been wearing and set it to the side as well. A few seconds later I was dressed in nothing more than a set of crude shorts and a halter top. I started shivering almost immediately, but I knew I was going to be grateful for the extra exposed skin once I was working around all of those hot pipes.

I strapped on a set of heavy pads for my knees and hips, and then pulled on thick gloves that ran all of the way up to my elbows. Once I was 'in uniform,' I opened the door to the pipe room and winced at the heat.

Everything about my current assignment was one long series of sub-optimal compromises. Back home this kind of job would have been handled by computers—even assuming that we'd used any technology so antiquated. If human intervention had been required, then the workers would have been dressed in special suits that would have both protected them from contact with the hot pipes and maintained a cooler temperature so that they could work in comfort.

In Brennan's territory, we were faced with the choice of bundling up enough to make burns unlikely—and passing out from heat exhaustion less than an hour into our shift—or shedding enough clothes to keep us from overheating and risking nasty burns from accidental contact with the pipes. Everyone in the pipe room would rotate out for water at least every half hour and take salt tablets to replace the electrolytes we were losing, but working in the pipe room was still a punishing assignment.

The generator was located just below us, which meant that Brennan had been able to install a primitive cooling system by running pipes circulating cold water through the walls and ceiling, but even when the foundry was just pouring copper, it still got hot inside of the pipe room. I could only imagine how hot it was going to get during a steel pour. Either Brennan had more confidence in the resilience of the unaugmented human body than I did, or he'd misplaced a decimal when doing the calculations about how much water he'd need to circulate through the pipes cooling the pipe room. That or maybe he'd just run short on building materials when constructing the second stage of the geothermal project and this was another of the compromises that were such a part of life here.

Within seconds I was coated in sweat and wishing that I could lose the gloves, but I knew better than to remove them—not when I could feel the heat coming off of my set of pipes even through the thick leather.

For nearly an hour I was able to lose myself in the work—mindless though it was. It was obvious that the piping system had all been built with scavenged materials. Brennan and his people had put the geothermal installation together back before they'd had the ability to melt down metal and then pour it out in new shapes.

That meant that they'd been working with a non-standard set of diameters and lengths. Throw in the fact that they'd had to accept bends in less than optimal locations, and it was amazing that they'd managed to run the pipes at all. Even more astonishingly, the tangled mass of pipes had still ended up with a high degree of order to their placement and grouping.

When I'd first stepped into the pipe room two days before all I'd seen was a jumbled mess with no apparent order, but now when I looked at the pipes I saw the work of a frighteningly capable mind. The pipes all came together into clusters that had thermometers mounted more or less at eye-level on smaller, bypass pipes, and for the most part they'd all been installed so that it was possible to see every pipe by walking no more than three-fourths of the way around the cluster—a good thing since not all of the pipes made it up above head-level for someone Jerome's size before bending and running horizontally toward the closest wall.

For one of the first times in my life I was glad that I was a tad under average height. Even knowing that all of the pipes in my area were tall enough that I couldn't walk into them by accident didn't stop me from worrying that I was going to slam into one at some point and collect a burn scar similar to the one prominently displayed across Billy's forehead.

It turned out to be a good thing that the foundry waited until an hour after our shift started to begin working with the higher temperatures—it meant that I'd had a chance to get into a routine. I started on the end closest to the door out into the control room and checked on all of the pipes in my first cluster, opening up valves where the thermometers were showing temperatures that were getting up into the two-hundred-degree range, and slowing the flow through any pipes where the temperature was dropping below one-fifty.