Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 13 of 16

Rosie met the man at the generator the next morning, expecting to review the lockdown sequence one more time before she left for the vault. Instead, she found him staring at the control panel with his hands frozen over the switches. The pressure gauge was dropping. "Something collapsed in the tunnel," he said, pointing to a schematic on the blueprint. "The Ravens must have pushed too hard on the north section. They broke through into something that wasn't on their maps." He tapped the gauge again as the needle fell another notch. "The loading bay lockdown is pulling pressure from a sealed substation that's been buried since before the war. If that room is exposed now, the whole system could fail before we get the deed." Rosie grabbed the blueprint and traced the connection lines from the generator to the loading bay. The pressure feed ran through a maintenance booth near the old north entrance — a weathered wooden structure she'd walked past a hundred times without noticing. She'd assumed it was just another scrapper shelter. But according to the schematic, that booth sat directly above the substation, and if the Ravens had cracked it open, the lockdown wouldn't hold past midnight. She looked at the man. "Show me where the tunnel broke through," she said. He led her to the north side of the station, where dust still hung in the air from the collapse. The maintenance booth stood ten yards away, its grimy windows intact, but the ground beneath it had dropped six inches. Rosie knelt and pressed her hand to the dirt. She could feel the hollow space underneath. The man pulled a crowbar from his pack and wedged it under the booth's door. The wood splintered, and when the door swung open, Rosie saw metal stairs descending into darkness. At the bottom, lit by a shaft of daylight from the Ravens' collapsed tunnel, sat a pre-war substation. The housing was clean, the control panels undamaged, and the components inside were still connected to the distribution grid. She recognized a turbine assembly identical to the ones in her diagrams, a pressure regulator she'd only seen in schematics, and a cooling unit with manufacturer stamps she'd never encountered on any other functioning equipment. The Ravens had broken through the east wall of the substation, but they hadn't reached the equipment yet — rubble from the collapse had blocked their access. Rosie descended the stairs and stood in front of the turbine. This was the heart of the system, the part that controlled pressure flow to the entire grid. If she could stabilize it before the Ravens cleared the rubble, the lockdown would hold. But if she made a mistake, she'd crack the housing and lose the whole station. She pulled her notebook from her pocket and opened it to the diagrams she'd stolen months ago. The sequence was there — stabilizer third, housing bracket first. She'd learned it the hard way, and now she had one chance to prove she'd learned it right.