Unscheduled Maintenance in the Mist

If dispatch discovered I had survived a six-hundred-foot plunge only to go wandering across the high southern plateau without logging an incident report, they would cancel my hazard pay on principle.

"Stop dragging your heels, Spark-Plug," Sela called over her shoulder. She hopped across a slick ledge of black shale with the irritating grace of a bird that weighed sixty pounds less than me. "The air is sweet over this ridge. It tastes like roasted copper."

"The air tastes like damp sulfur and imminent disciplinary action," I muttered, shaking loose slate out of my left work boot.

My boots were scuffed to raw leather, my canvas toolbelt smelled of singed hair, and every time I swallowed, my teeth rattled with stray static. Absorbing three thousand volts of emergency backwash was bad enough for a man's cardiac rhythm. Doing it while strapped to an over-caffeinated storm-shifter who thought safety carabiners were decorative jewelry was an insult to my union training.

I unhitched the brass galvanometer from my harness. The needle inside the glass lens was spinning like a drunk top.

"You're leaking charge again," I said, pointing the brass probe at her back.

Sela paused on the rim of a jagged basalt overhang, tucking her glowing blue primaries against her ribs. The storm above us had gone strangely thin. The roaring purple clouds of the lower gorge had flattened into a pale, greasy mist that smelled of boiling grease and hot steel.

"I'm not leaking," she retorted, puffing out her chest feathers. "I'm radiating. It is a sign of great vitality and spiritual superiority."

"It's an unshielded static discharge," I corrected, tapping the glass gauge with a fingernail. "Under Section Twelve of the Municipal Grid Code, walking around with thirty microfarads of ungrounded aura in a public corridor is punishable by a forty-tana fine."

She flashed sharp white teeth at me. "Come and fine me then, linesman."

"I don't have the paperwork on me," I said dryly. "And you ate my favorite pencil back on Tower 44."

I knelt in the wet scree, steadying the galvanometer against a flat boulder. Even through two layers of vulcanized rubber tape, the current hummed against my palms. It wasn't the erratic, jagged pulse of natural atmospheric lightning. This was rhythmic. It thrummed through the bedrock in a heavy, six-beat cadence: thump-hiss, thump-hiss, thump-hiss.

I clipped an inductive copper lead into the wet shale and watched the needle kick hard to the right.

"Someone buried a high-capacity trunk line straight through the ridge," I said, tracing the underground current with the probe. "No trench permits. No ceramic insulation collars. Just raw copper braid rammed into the stone."

"The thieves," Sela hissed, her crest feathers snapping erect like a crown of electrified quills. "That's their straw. They're sucking the marrow out of our sky."

She scrambled to the crest of the basalt shelf and flattened herself against the damp stone. I hauled myself up beside her, keeping my tool pouch clamped against my hip so the steel wrenches wouldn't clatter against the rocks.

Below us lay the southern trench of the plateau, hidden beneath a blanket of oily gray vapor.

It wasn't an alpine meadow. It was a factory floor carved directly into the mountain's spine.

At the center of the crater sat an iron monstrosity the size of a three-story tenement block. Four massive boiler drums chugged rhythmically on reinforced concrete pylons, belching plumes of scalding white steam into the thinning rain. Above the boilers, a cluster of inverted copper collector funnels spun on central axles, greedily vacuuming the ambient charge from the low-hanging thunderheads.

Every three seconds, a web of blue lightning crackled across the sky, only to be yanked down into the funnels with a hollow, shrieking whine. The current channeled straight into a central capacitor bank that glowed with sickly orange heat.

"A Class Four Steam-Condenser Engine," I breathed, squinting through the sulfur haze. "The Continental Power Trust told the regional council these were experimental water pumps."

"They are butchers," Sela growled. Her fingernails dug gouges into the basalt shelf, blue sparks crackling around her cuticles. "Look at the aerie above the north ridge. It's barren. The young birds won't have enough voltage to molt their fledgling down."

"Forget the molting," I said, scanning the machine's mechanical layout with a technician's practiced eye. "Look at the primary bypass valve. They're running the steam turbines at three hundred pounds per square inch over boiler tolerance to force the suction coils to spin faster. If that main steam pipe fractures, the shrapnel will level half the mountain."

"Can you break it?" she demanded, turning her golden eyes on me with predatory intensity. "Can you stick your little copper pliers into its belly and make it die?"

"I am a licensed linesman, not an aerial demolitions expert," I said, though my fingers were already twitching toward my heavy insulated wire-cutters. "And the safety manual explicitly forbids tampering with live industrial equipment without a signed lockout clearance."

"You don't have a safety manual anymore, Spark-Plug," she purred, leaning close enough that the scent of ozone and sweet rain flooded my lungs. "You have me."

Before I could remind her that workplace romance with a feral avian outlaw carried a mandatory loss of seniority, my eyes caught a glint of oiled steel moving along the rim.

A narrow-gauge iron track circled the entire perimeter of the condenser pit. Rolling along the rails on eight heavy flanged wheels was a low-slung, armor-plated patrol train. Its boiler was muffled, venting only thin wisps of dark soot, but the weapon mounted on its forward turret was impossible to mistake.

A double-barreled pneumatic shock-cannon.

The twin copper muzzles swung lazily across the rocky slopes, sniffing the air for stray atmospheric charge.

"Feathers," I whispered, reaching out to yank her wing back below the ridge line. "Get down. Right now."

"Why?" she muttered, peering over the rock with stubborn curiosity. "It's just an ugly metal beetle on wheels."

"That metal beetle fires three-inch phosphor-charged flechettes calibrated to track ambient static fields," I said, my voice dropping into an urgent, hurried click. "And you are currently glowing like a lantern festival."

Sela blinked, looking down at her own forearms. Tiny arcs of bright cobalt lightning were dancing merrily across her knuckles, drawn to the massive electrical vortex swirling inside the condenser below.

Down on the track, the patrol train's forward turret jerked to a sudden stop.

A loud mechanical hiss echoed across the ravine as pneumatic valves pressurized. The heavy iron chassis shuddered, its suspension groaning as the turret swiveled ninety degrees, locking both copper barrels straight at the basalt outcrop where we lay.

A high-pitched targeting siren cut through the mist, accompanied by the sharp, blinding glare of a magnesium tracking flare illuminating our faces.