Chapter 8: Pump Station 6

Dibbuk lumbered out into the infirmary wing of the pump station. She hunched as she passed through the door, still lightly bumping the crest of her head. She could never quite get used to having to crouch wherever she went. If the Tar-Khal were in any way prone to back problems she would have looked like her father by now.

The fatburg team locker rooms were across the station, on the bottom level of the basement. Her safe haven if you will. No team member ever looked at her sideways down there. They were all just poor sods once they put on their gear.

She could feel the eyes of the office staff on her skin like blisters beginning to form. It wasn't that she assumed they were bad stares really, Harvel had done the same when they had been first introduced. As it was though, the difference between "curious" and "cunt" was located behind their corneas, and as such, was significantly less apparent.

With every corner she rounded, a new set of eyes would lock onto her like some sort of missile defense system. As on edge as she was, she nearly put a hole in the roof when her arm vibrated. She took a second to steady herself before glancing at the little display projected from her phone implant. It read "Chromeo" in blocky orange lettering.

"Ugh, probably trying to sell me another software package." Dibbuk murmured, remembering the last time she'd been roped into a new operating system.

Dibbuk waved away the call, letting it send him to voicemail. She didn't have the energy to deal with another annoyance at the moment. Not to mention she had to get down to the lockers for the big meeting with Lier.

She figured that team 5 wouldn't be doing anything too involved, what with being a member down at the moment, but you never quite knew with the captain.

Captain Lier hadn't been happy about the railway incident one bit. This was to be expected seeing as he never entered a state any more jovial than moderate apathy.

The first thing he'd done during their debrief was walk into an adjacent room and scream in frustration. The second thing was walking back in with a completely straight face. Dibbuk figured you got like that when every piece of news you received was bad news.

They'd all gotten a piece of it too. Team 6 had been waiting outside of the door when they came out. Their decision to ignore the rust on the tracks on the way down was a key point within the screaming she'd overheard from outside. They had also taken much longer to reach the point of impact with the fatburg than was excusable.

If they had arrived on par with the time it had taken team 5 to reach the same area Harvel wouldn't have had to walk back on his own. She'd been pretty angry about that little detail herself. When she'd first caught sight of them outside of Lier's office she had almost clotheslined the lot of them. The whole reason they were down in that damn pod in the first place was situations exactly like this.

While she had elected to keep her claws to herself, she'd given in a bit and had served Selby a slight shoulder check before he'd walked in the door. Though she'd said "Excuse me." she'd meant "Go fuck yourself."

Selby hadn't said anything back, but when they'd locked eyes after she could almost feel the self-loathing rolling off of him. Selby had never fucked up this bad and he knew it. He had almost looked sickly if she was being entirely honest.

Dibbuk might have felt bad for him if she hadn't been as furious as she was. She hadn't overheard their reasoning, but the fact that they had taken nearly an hour and a half to get there was odd enough. Selby didn't have anything against Harvel as far as she knew and was probably wholly unaware of Harvels distaste for him in the first place.

So why? Team 6 was full of competent members, and there's no way they wouldn't have received the distress signal. At any rate, there was no way Selby of all people wouldn't have jumped at the chance to rescue a fellow waste-walker. The promise of savior status would have put him into a glory and valor coma. As far as she understood anyway.

As Dibbuk entered the locker room a boot slammed into the lockers to her left. This wasn't much of a surprise to her. The boot-shaped dent had been repainted at least three times since she'd started here, and it was starting to flake again.

"How, exactly, and I want the right answer this time, did we not notice the burg sooner? And for that matter how did we miss the rust on the god damned track?" Captain Lier said, standing in front of a group of engineers.

One of the more senior looking engineers slowly raised his hand. Lier just stared at him for a second before asking, "Well, Burdock?"

"Uh, because we were fucking off?" The engineer now known as Burdock answered, a little sheepishly.

"Finally! A valid answer. That's two less demerits for Burdock." Lier said, a vicious grin spreading upon his face as he gave him a little golf clap.

"But, we don't have demer-" A much younger engineer started to say, before Burdock slammed his hand over the mans mouth. Burdock, wide eyed, gave him a desperate head shake, illustrating the severity of his potential mistake. The recruit the thrown boot had belonged to hopped one footed over to the doorway, and Dibbuk handed the nervous kid his boot back.

"You might want to keep it off for now. He might need it again." Dibbuk said, watching the man try to slip on the boot without his sock touching the eternally damp floor. Another boot slammed into the locker, causing another recruit to start the arduous journey to the back of the room. Dibbuk caught it before it hit the ground.

"Oh, you might be alright actually. He usually only needs two." She said, tossing the freshly thrown boot back to the other recruit.

Dibbuk scanned the room, spotting the rest of team 5 sitting in a huddle to the right of Lier. Dibbuk didn't need to catch their attention, it was a talent of hers to be noticed wherever she went. As she made her way over to them, Lier, having finished admonishing the engineers, trained his laser focus her way.

"Valez! How's Gillis faring?!" He shouted, trying to sound as kind as he ever had, quickly putting down the finger he had reflexively pointed her way.

"Not dead yet, sir." Dibbuk answered, having to keep herself from straightening up and ramming her head into the ceiling.

"Good, that's good. Uh, order him to keep it that way." He said, lowering his voice a little. He didn't want this small show of affection to ruin his reputation.

"Of course, sir." Dibbuk responded, giving Lier a little nod, indicating she'd understood his subtext.

This was a bit new to Dibbuk. She had always suspected that the captain held a special place for Harvel somewhere in his heart. A special, dark, vinegar and ant filled place, but a special place none the less. The fact that it might not be that bad of a place was the real news.

Dibbuk carefully picked her way through the rest of the crowd, using as many it iterations of "Excuse me." And "I'm sorry." As she could come up with.

"Ah, Dibbuk, what a sight for sore eyes. Come, have a seat." Mary spouted, as Dibbuk made her way towards their bench. She looked tired, more so than usual, Dibbuk noted. She knew Mary had children, exactly how many Dibbuk hadn't bothered to keep track of, but she knew what a well overworked woman looked like.

Mary was one of the most outspoken, yet caring, individuals Dibbuk had ever met. When the solvent incident had gone down, she'd lent Dibbuk and Harvel nearly half a months salary to help them out. Harvel had insisted on paying it back in triplicate. Dibbuk had been a little confused when he'd explained it to her, but according to him it was something their dad had taught him.

"You get more bees with honey than with vinegar." He'd said. Dibbuk was unable to confirm this seeing as she didn't know what a bee was, but with time she had come to understand.

Mary treated her like a daughter not a lizard. The last two years had been just about the most educational she'd ever had. Mary had a wisdom to her that was fueled by years of fire, along with a few decades of ice behind it.

She was cynical, crude, and could be off putting at times but there was nothing like one of her pep talks to bring Dibbuk out of whatever slump she was in. She couldn't see much of that fire now. It was diminished by the sad smile seemingly nailed in place on her face.

Dibbuk gave her a reassuring look. She could wager a guess that Mary felt at least somewhat responsible for what had happened to Harvel. She wasn't, Dibbuk knew, but there wasn't much of a chance of her convincing Mary otherwise. What would she say? "It was a ghost"? That would never do her any good.

Dibbuk could see more of the faces lined up on the benches around the room from her new vantage point. She could pick out most of team 6, scattered amongst the crowd. They all had these haunted looks on their faces, like they'd spent a night fighting off someone else's personal demons, and couldn't quite forget what they'd seen.

Selby seemed to have gotten the worst of it. He was sitting alone on a bench near the far wall, just staring into the middle distance. Occasionally his eyes would dart towards the door to the railway launch and quickly dart back. Dibbuk could tell he was dreading going back into the pipes.

While Dibbuk didn't know Selby all that well, she did know the look of a person being pushed towards the edge of a cliff they were currently scrambling to get away from. She didn't want to talk to him, not really, but she had to figure some of this shit out one way or another. Social anxiety or otherwise.

She gave Mary a quick pat on the shoulder and started making her way back towards Selby's bench of infinite fear and sadness. As she approached, Selby sat up, his back rigid as a street pole. For a moment the fear he was broadcasting changed frequency to confusion and then settled on guilt, the figurative volume knob spinning towards maximum.

Since Dibbuk had first seen him after the incident, enough time had passed that her ire had subsided. Expecting another shove, Selby braced himself as she went past him. His sigh of relief was short lived, as she put her legs over the bench from behind and lowered herself down next to him. Dibbuk slightly enjoyed the power she currently had over her shining example of a colleague but she wasn't going to let herself revel in it.

"Dibbuk, I'm-" Selby began, but Dibbuk cut him off with a wave.

"Scared?" She whispered, making full eye contact. Selby could barely maintain the gaze before he glanced again at the launch station door.

"Sorry. I was going to say sorry." Selby responded, the words seemingly stuck to the roof of his mouth.

"Well don't. I don't know what took you all so long, but I have a hunch it wasn't something you were in control of. I don't know if you saw something down there, but I sure as hell did. There's something down there. Harvel felt it." Dibbuk whispered, a bit closer to Sulbys ear than she was comfortable with.

Selby shuddered a bit. Dibbuk couldn't tell if it was fear or relief but she saw an immediate change in his demeanor. It might have been relief as for the first time Selby made the effort to make eye contact himself.

"It showed me something down there. It showed us all something. We were halfway down the tracks and we just stopped. It was like we couldn't bring ourselves to move. It was like if we moved even another foot, we'd never make it any further." Selby said, gulping down what Dibbuk could only assume were his own fears.

'I truly am pathetic.' Said a voice somewhere in the back of her mind, sending a shiver down her spine. It was a deep, low voice, yet not her own. It wasn't Selby's voice either. It was something else entirely. It sounded like the voice she'd heard down in the sewers. Her throat went dry and her blood ran slightly colder than normal.

"Don't tell anyone, please. I don't want people thinking I'm out of my mind." Selby asked, placing a hand on Dibbuks forearm. Shaking off her dread, Dibbuk sighed. She was just as worried as he was in that regard.

"That's fine. I just needed to know if we were in this boat together. Harvel will be relieved too, I know it." She replied, carefully plucking his hand off her arm. She wasn't much of a fan of physical contact.

"Good, if it's you and Harvel involved I know I have people I can trust." Selby said, noting her aversion to his earlier action.

'Odd, Harvel always made it seem like Selby disliked him.' Dibbuk thought, rubbing the spot where Selbys hand had previously been.

"Are you and my brother friends? I guess I just never got that impression." She asked, genuinely curious.

"Oh! Uh, yeah. Kind of. Back when we were in training he saved my life a couple times. I never really got the chance to thank him, Lier was always too busy yelling at him. We don't talk much now but, I honestly look up to him quite a bit. Objectively speaking, he's one of the reasons I'm on team 6 now." Selby replied, a guilty smile flashing across his face.

Dibbuk didn't know how to respond. Harvel had never told her about saving Selby's life. She knew that they had been in training together, but he'd never really talked about it much.

The scouts, the tankbearers, and the engineers all trained separately for the most part at the beginning of their employment. Recruits were only assigned a training team once they had passed specialization training. Most didn't make the cut but that was the point honestly.

Her own tank-bearer training had mostly consisted of fitness and accuracy training. If you couldn't haul or accurately spray solvent and pesticide you'd be left with a bunch of wheezing idiots with garden hoses in their hands. Dibbuk had never had a problem with either.

The fitness training was about as challenging for a tar-khal as making breakfast, and the accuracy training was like power washing her dads house. It had been fun honestly. Harvel hadn't been so lucky as she recalled.

The scout training was about the same with the added bonus of a course on cartography, and small spaces. Lier had personally overseen all tests or finals. Harvel hadn't been much of an athlete before they signed up, but he could almost always walk around with an uncanny sense of direction. The catch was that Harvel had a very "minor" fear of cramped spaces that she'd heard had nearly killed him.

He was claustrophobic to the point where, upon entering a children's fun-house when they were fourteen, they'd needed to pull him out, shaking and wheezing. She speculated that he'd gotten out of it with somewhat lasting scars to his ego. The big brother bravado schtick had only grown in haughtiness for a few weeks afterwards.

He'd never quite gotten over that it seemed. He tended to shower with the door open, to Dibbuks overall dismay. It left water all over the bathroom floor, and traction was quite the commodity for clawed peoples, especially on tile.