Severed Chains

The iron ladder leading to Deck Five vibrated with the violent rhythm of a runaway drive shaft. Guard Provost Einarr climbed with one hand locked around the greasy rungs and the other gripping his stun-baton, the brass cylinder of the Directorate manifest knocking against his ribs with every stride. Above him, beyond the grating of the upper maintenance deck, the screech of dry cogs drowned out the dying wail of the central steam siren.

"Move your boots, Watchman," Kolskegg grunted from three rungs below. The Master Butcher hauled his sixty-pound pneumatic saw over one shoulder, his apron caked in black coagulum. "The tension cable is groaning. When that chain jumps the main cog, it'll whip through this shaft and cut us into tallow ribbons."

Einarr kicked through the upper hatchway, hauling himself onto the narrow suspension gantry. Heat rolled over him in suffocating waves from the vast, bubbling tallow vats fifty feet below. The air smelled of rendered marrow, scorched brass, and raw sulfur.

"Over here!" a sharp voice barked through the chemical fog.

Berglind stood wedged between the massive reduction gear housing and the master drive spindle. Her face was streaked with black soot, her apprentice's six-pound iron spanner gripped in both hands. Wrapped around the gear train was a throbbing tangle of gristle, reconstituted bovine muscle, and interlocking spinal segments, holding the emergency release lever in full forward drive.

"You took your time," she yelled over the roar of the machinery. "The auxiliary clutch is frozen solid. The meat has wrapped around the intake teeth, feeding itself into the cog to keep the chain under tension."

Hrapp hauled his lean frame over the coaming, his filtered sulfur-mask hissing rhythmically. He glanced at the sprawling mass of quivering flesh bound to the main drive. "Directive Eleven strictly prohibits introducing foreign biological matter into primary gearing. That's a forty-token deduction against the entire shift."

"Save the ledger, Hrapp," Einarr said, stepping to the edge of the gantry.

Across the suspension platform, the meat on the overhead rail was gathering. Clustered along the heavy iron track, dozens of carcass torsos were melding together, sprouting multiple ribbed joints and wet, blind eye clusters that focused on the maintenance platform. They crept forward along the ceiling rail, dragging their joined mass toward the master gears.

"They're guarding the drive," Torvald stammered, clutching a bone cleaver behind Kolskegg. "They know we're trying to stop the chain."

"They don't know shit," Kolskegg growled, stepping past the apprentice. He cracked the valve on his saw's pneumatic tank. The toothed iron disc spun into a screaming blur of steel. "They just want the machinery running so it feeds them more carcasses."

"Kolskegg, wait," Berglind commanded, gesturing with her spanner toward the primary spindle. "The gear housing is cast iron, but the freeze from Deck Four made the outer sleeve brittle. If you hit the master link cold, your blade will shatter. We need to fracture the casing first."

"I have two canisters of grade-four solvent left," Hrapp said, pulling squat zinc pots from his leather harness. "Highly caustic, rapid thermal expansion. Usually reserved for dissolving vat sludge."

"Throw them at the housing joint," Einarr ordered. "The moment the chemical cracks the frost, I'll drop the high-voltage arc into the seam. Kolskegg, Berglind—hit the drive link together the second the casing splits."

The chimeric swarm lunged from the overhead rails. Three massive fused limbs tipped with jagged split hooves dropped onto the iron grating, buckling the suspension struts under hundreds of pounds of dead weight.

"Stand your ground!" Einarr shouted.

Hrapp uncapped the first zinc pot and hurled it squarely into the gear casing where the biomass entwined the main drive. The caustic fluid hissed violently upon contact with the frozen iron, releasing thick plumes of yellow acid vapor that dissolved the clinging muscle fibers in boiling streaks. The outer housing groaned under sudden chemical shock, hairline fissures spidering across the frosted metal.

A fused mass of horns and bovine jaws snapped inches from Hrapp's face. Einarr stepped in, thrusting his stun-baton directly into the creature's exposed sinew core. He thumbed the capacitor release to maximum discharge.

A deafening electrical crack detonated across the platform. Blue lightning arced through the chimeric mass, charring muscle and violently repelling the swarm back onto the ceiling rails.

The electrical surge traveled straight through the conductive acid bath covering the gear housing. With a sharp, concussive bang, the brittle cast-iron casing fractured down its center seam, exposing the massive, three-inch master drive link rattling against the drive teeth.

"Now!" Einarr yelled.

Kolskegg lunged forward, burying the spinning teeth of his pneumatic saw into the exposed master pin. Sparks erupted in blinding sheets as tempered steel ground against forged iron. The vibration rattled through the floorplates, shaking the very bolts of the gantry.

"Berglind! Leverage the spindle!" Kolskegg roared over the shriek of metal.

Berglind wedged the heavy six-pound spanner into the reduction teeth behind the link, throwing her entire weight onto the handle. She braced her iron-shod boots against the housing flange, torquing the gear with mechanical precision to put maximum shear stress on the severed pin.

The saw cut through the outer collar. Kolskegg threw his broad shoulders into the grip, bearing down with all his strength.

With a sound like a naval cannon firing, the master link snapped.

The immense tension in the miles of overhead chain recoiled instantly. The heavy iron links whipped backward through the gantry shaft, obliterating the overhead tracks, smashing through roof beams, and shearing the invading biomass into shredded ribbons of flesh.

Across all six decks of the Skallagrim Abattoir, the deafening mechanical roar died.

The spinning pulleys slowed and shuddered to an abrupt stop. The endless conveyor hooks hung motionless in the air. On Deck Three, Deck Four, and the staging bays below, the automated lines locked into dead silence.

Then the secondary dynamo in the ceiling housing blew out.

A brief shower of copper sparks rained down from the ceiling before plunging the entire cavernous chamber into total, pitch-black darkness.

No alarms rang. No steam hissed through ruptured vents. The only light was the faint, dying ember of Kolskegg's saw motor and the smoldering residue of the sulfur charge.

Kolskegg let out a long, ragged exhale into the dark. "The line is dead. We stopped the hooks."

"The shift is over," Hrapp muttered, wiping acid from his visor. "No machinery, no processing."

Einarr stood on the blackened platform, lowering his baton as the capacitors hummed down to zero. He reached inside his coat, his fingers pressing against the cold brass cylinder of the manifest and the corroded DX-09-PRE valve stem.

In the dead stillness of the factory, a soft, deliberate scraping traveled down through the ceiling truss sixty feet above. It was not the recoil of severed iron or the release of steam valves, but the rhythmic sliding of reconstituted muscle pulling itself along bare girders.

The machinery was dead, but the herd had never belonged to the rails. In the dark above the vats, four plant managers listened together to the factory breathing under its own power.