A Foul Sump

Black stormwater hammered the brass dome of Tidjani's diving helmet with the concussive roar of an express train barreling through wet gravel. He braced his weighted lead boots against the steel catwalk forty feet below the drowned street grid, fighting the hydraulic drag that pulled at his thighs. Every gutter in Nouar-el-Bahr was dumping grease, street filth, and rainwater into Sump 4's concrete throat, and his shift ended only when the trash rack stopped choking the intake.

"Check your mix, Old Brass-Lung," Zahara Bembara's voice crackled through the wired bone-conduction comms inside his hood. The surface tender sounded small and metallic against the booming underwater resonance of the vault. "You're pulling twenty-eight liters a minute. Chief Mansouri is pacing the winch truck. He says if the intake head doesn't drop two meters before the cloudburst peaks, the lower wards take four feet of sewer brine by midnight."

"Tell Khelil to pull on a drysuit and dive it himself," Tidjani rasped into the chin microphone. He adjusted the secondary manifold on his chest rig with thick, neoprene-gloved fingers. "The boulevard runoffs are flushing half the slaughterhouse district into my faceplate. What do the high-avenue bastards eat up there, whole steer carcass with the hooves on? The trash rack feels like someone shoved a bale of wet rugs between the bars."

"Telemetry says you've got twenty-six bars on the hydraulic line," Zahara replied, clipping her words with the cool detachment of a technician watching dial needles swing toward the red. "Cutter pressure is live. Clear the intake runner, get your hazard voucher stamped, and I'll winch your heavy carcass up before the tide turns the basin into an eddy pool."

"Working on it. Keep the hot water coming down the umbilical. My left heel is going numb."

Tidjani killed the halogen headlamp mounted on his breastplate. In the churn of the storm surge, four thousand lumens did nothing but illuminate a swirling soup of grey silt, floating diesel sheen, and yellow industrial soap foam. Out here in the dark, light was a liability that blinded a diver with backscatter. He had navigated the city's drowned belly for twenty years using his callused fingertips and the pitch of water roaring through iron seams.

He leaned forward against the current, letting the tethered weight of the umbilical hold his balance. His boots found the bottom rim of the primary trash rack. The rack was an eighty-foot grid of forged carbon-steel ribs designed to stop palm trunks, oil drums, and storm-wrecked cars before they reached the massive impeller blades of Turbine 4. Right now, the water behind the grate was starved. The suction differential produced a deep, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through the soles of his boots and rattled his teeth inside his jaw.

Tidjani ran his gloved right hand down the fifth vertical rib.

Normally, a storm blockage was hard and sharp. A diver expected jagged planks, sheet tin, tangled wire, and mats of fibrous weeds wedged tight by fifty tons of hydrostatic head. When his knuckles made contact, however, the surface yielded.

It did not crack or splinter. It gave with the dense, oily resistance of cold lard.

Tidjani paused, his fingers sinking two inches into the mass. The obstruction was lodged between the three-inch gaps of the steel bars, but it did not drift with the violent eddies. It clung. As he pressed his palm flat against the center of the mound, a distinct, sluggish tremor pulsed back through his thick glove.

The vibration was not the mechanical hum of the diesel pumps above. It had a cadence. Two beats, a pause, then another heavy heave.

"Zahara," Tidjani said. He kept his breathing low and slow, drawing shallow drafts from the regulator to keep his carbon dioxide levels flat. "Did maintenance dump grease bales into the north canal this morning?"

"Negative," she answered. Static whistled across the frequency. "North canal was dredged Tuesday. Nothing in the manifest except storm runoff and tannery overflow. What are you touching?"

"Feels like five hundred pounds of spoiled mutton packed into a wet mattress," Tidjani muttered. "And it's warm."

"Warm? The delta runoff is fifty-two degrees, Tidjani. Don't play games with the comm log. City dispatch logs every word."

"I don't give a damn about dispatch," he said.

He swung the heavy pneumatic cutter off his shoulder sling. The tool was an eight-foot steel lance fitted with opposed hydraulic scissor jaws, powered by high-pressure oil delivered through an auxiliary hose coupled to his main tether. Tidjani slotted the lower beak of the shears into the gap beside the mass, levering the heavy tool with his hip to align the blades.

He squeezed the manual actuator on the grip.

The hydraulic motor on the winch truck topside groaned down the umbilical line. The hardened steel jaws met, biting through the rubbery bulk with a wet, shearing shudder that sent shockwaves up Tidjani's forearms.

A violent, convulsive spasm tore through the intake rack.

The mass did not drift away in pieces. It whipped.

A thick, ropy appendage—slick as a peeled eel and thicker than a dock hawser—lashed out from between the iron bars. It coiled twice around Tidjani's left forearm, slamming his wrist hard against the steel frame of the rack. The impact knocked his breath into his throat and jarred his grip on the cutter's guide bar.

The suction was instantaneous and terrifying. Five circular, disc-shaped pads along the inner curl of the limb clamped against the vulcanized rubber of his sleeve. The grip tightened with mechanical ferocity, dragging his arm toward the narrow gap between the intake ribs. If the flesh pulled his shoulder into the grate, the hydrostatic pressure would pin him there until his umbilical kinked and his lungs collapsed.

"Tidjani!" Zahara's voice spiked with sudden sharp distortion. "Umbilical load jumped three hundred kilos! Did you get caught on the grating?"

He did not waste breath answering. In thirty feet of zero-visibility deluge, panic was a quick drowning.

He planted his right lead boot against the third steel bar, locking his knee to form a rigid fulcrum. With his trapped left arm pinned, he twisted his torso, shifting the eight-foot cutter using only his right hand and the leverage of his thigh. He could not see the blade. He did not need to. He knew the geometry of the tool down to the sixteenth of an inch.

He slid the blunt guide-shoe of the lower shear along the outside of his forearm, feeling for the exact seam where the rubbery coil squeezed his suit. The clamping pads were tearing at his outer sleeve lining, seeking skin.

He found the apex of the muscular ring. He braced the tool against his hip, jammed his thumb into the emergency bypass lever, and dumped maximum hydraulic pressure into the ram.

The cutter slammed shut with the crack of a pistol shot.

The limb severed cleanly. The sudden release of tension hurled Tidjani backward into the surging basin. His umbilical snapped taut against the winch cable, arresting his drift ten feet off the catwalk in a swirl of muddy foam.

He hovered in the dark, gasping through the mouthpiece as the regulator wheezed. His left forearm throbbed where the coils had crushed the rubber, but the suit seal held. The pressure gauge on his chest rig remained steady at four atmospheres.

"Tidjani! Report!" Zahara's voice was frantic now. "Mansouri is hitting the emergency winch override. Say something or I'm dragging you up!"

"Hold the winch, damn it," Tidjani wheezed, shaking the numbness from his left fingers. "I'm on the platform. Tell Khelil to keep his hands off the switch."

"What the hell was that spike?"

"I'm looking at it now."

Tidjani reached down to his tool belt, pulled a coarse mesh specimen sack from the brass d-ring, and reached into the water where his left hand still gripped the severed section.

The thing was three feet long, heavy and dense as cured rubber, with five pale, ridged suction orifices lining the belly. Even detached from the main body, the muscular tissue rippled in faint, sluggish contractions against his glove.

He hauled the severed piece close to his helmet faceplate and clicked on his low-beam inspection torch.

A thick, tar-colored sludge was pumping from the severed stump into the murky water. It did not disperse like hydraulic fluid or diesel grease. It drifted in stringy, dark ribbons that coiled against the acrylic dome of his visor. Through the tiny equalization valve of his intake filter, a sharp, sickly stench bled into his breathing air—the thick, unmistakable stench of rotten bone marrow and warm, congealed blood.

"Zahara," Tidjani said, his voice flat and cold over the wire.

"I hear you. Did you clear the bars?"

"This isn't driftwood," Tidjani said, shoving the twitching meat into the specimen sack and knotting the drawcord tight. "And it isn't a dead cow from the slaughterhouse."

He looked back toward the dark maw of the intake rack, where the rest of the mass was pulsing in the deep.

"Call Mansouri down to the winch platform," he said. "We've got something living inside the turbine throat."