Chapter 1: Bad Air

Harvel Gillis stared at the bottom of Lindons bunk, counting the spots of rust that were working their way through the thin sheet steel. Everything rusted down here. He suspected it had something to do with the air, and the millions of gallons of raw sewage flowing around them as they slept.

Even the hinges of his glasses were starting to rust. He gave up on the spots for now. They'd have to wait until he could get some sort of chart going.

He turned his head to stare out of one of the numerous tiny portholes that dotted the sides of the submerged pod. He didn't know why he bothered. All you could ever see was a mixture of brown and green, with maybe a dash of yellow here and there. He'd have to chalk it up to boredom, with maybe a hint of escapism.

He often imagined he was on board one of the many capital ships that lazily floated above the massive city of Boris-Valka. He'd never been aboard an airship of any kind so he wasn't quite sure what he'd be looking at. The important bit was that he wouldn't be three miles away from the stars in a ten by fifteen metal box.

As on many occasions his imagination stopped there, a crumpled diaper bumping up against the plexiglass, throwing him back into sober reality. He shot a glance at Dibbuk sleeping in her oversized steel cot. She was listening to rain sounds so loudly that he could actually make out each time the simulated thunder broke out.

He could never understand how she could sleep that much. Somehow, he could spend fourteen hours slogging through shit, and still only catch five hours or so of real sleep. Bukky on the other hand, could get 8 hours of solid rest, wake up for 20 minutes and like clockwork get in another 8, no problem.

He was nearly as green as the sewage around them with envy. Nearly being the operative word here. He couldn't imagine anything quite that green.

If sleep were a commodity, Dibbuk would have been a millionaire. Meanwhile Harvel was nearly bankrupt. He often justified said poverty by blaming it on the quality of the air. By the time it was pumped down from the surface it was nearly as greasy and thick as good soup. He liked to imagine it would be served as a bisque, or maybe a chowder.

Truth be told, he was shit at the whole sleeping thing to begin with. He had started having horrifying nightmares when he was about seven. Once he'd started getting used to them, he'd never quite gone back to normal.

They weren't the clearest nightmares. Mostly shifting lights and glimpses of unfamiliar flesh. If he got far enough into them, he would occasionally see a great monolith made up of some substance he couldn't quite place. Honestly, they had stopped terrifying him years ago. Now, it only mildly annoyed him whenever he sweat through his sheets.

He shifted his gaze over to the trio in the corner. He watched as Lindon, Merel, and Wicksomme passed around a bottle of Bullrutters Thiskey, a type of thickened whiskey primarily drunk by waste-walkers. He'd never been much of a fan himself. It reminded him of the cough syrup his dad made him take when he was a kid.

In a rather odd turn of events, he'd heard that it was popular among the wealthy elite of central, as a sort of novelty. He couldn't quite put his finger on it but something about that bothered him a little. It probably wasn't worth dwelling on.

A little too late, he realized he'd been staring for just a bit too long. He turned over and tried to make himself comfortable. They must have realized it too as he felt a slight nudge on the back of his shoulder. He turned over again to see Lindon holding out the bottle as an offer for him to take a drink himself.

"Figured you might want a swig of the old bullfuckers Harv." Don Lindon said, jovially unscrewing the top of the bottle.

Don Lindon was a stocky, older man with a short gray beard, stained yellow around his mouth from decades of chain smoking. Harvel suspected he might have been in his early sixties, but with the stress of this job he could've easily been in his early forties. He had a face like an aging alcoholic horse, with the personality of a negligent landlord.

Harvel palmed the little glass container and turned it over to read the paper label. He could just make out the word 'Bulfuchers' with little umlauts above both u's. Somebody had wanted to sound fancy.

'Oh, what the hell.' He thought as he tipped a bit of the syrup into his mouth. It tasted like cinnamon mixed with vinegar and burned like battery acid. Suppressing a wretch, he quickly transferred the concoction away from his tongue and down his throat. That was a mistake.

It moved like molasses, leaving a trail of anus withering fire all the way down his esophagus. He tried to sit up in case he felt it come back up, but before he could finish that thought, he slammed his head into Lindon's bunk. Lindon reflexively snatched the bottle before he could spill any of his precious Bulfuchers. He began chuckling maniacally as he watched Harvel sputter and cough.

"Christ, Don... Where do you... get this shit?" Harvel asked between coughs and labored breaths. Without a missed beat, Don gave him a rather forceful slap to the chest and continued chuckling.

"Oh, you know me Harvey! I've always got a guy." He said after a bit of his mirth had subsided.

'And he always does somehow.' Harvel thought, watching the man take a few large swigs of the foul Bulfuchers. Rumor was that Don had been kicked out of every bar and home brewery from the wall to Central, but he always had a bottle on him somewhere.

After he'd managed to locate the air his torso had misplaced, Harvel asked "Who even sells shit like that Don? Mahone himself?"

Don raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I wouldn't drink anything sold by that bastard. It's only Doc Parsons for me eh!" He bellowed, knocking back a few more shots worth of the bastardized whiskey.

Harvel had to assume he meant water as well. He'd never seen Don actually touch any that wasn't piss yellow and running around his boots. He was pretty sure Don would actually drink anything besides water. It was to the point where Harvel had started to wonder if he was internally hydrophobic.

Don rolled his chair the measly six feet back over to the two sitting in the corner. Merel gave Don his own customary punch in the chest. "Don't go getting our seeing eye dog sick on that shit. You okay there Harvey?" She asked, still giving Don a sour look while he rubbed his chest seemingly crestfallen.

"Yeah, no problems here Mary." Harvel replied, still letting out a few coughs.

"Good." She stated, her eyes never leaving Don.

Philmina Merel could have been referred to as the squads mother. An older woman in her late forties, she was technically the junior engineer on the team. Junior only due to seniority. No one even knew how long Don had been a wastewalker.

She had a face like a gravel road and a voice to match. Together they were quite the pair. Quite the pair in this case meaning that everyone suspected they had an 'agreement' regarding sleeping situations outside of work.

Not that it mattered really, they were both quite competent at their jobs either way. Admittedly, they were both only competent while at least one sheet to the wind. They seemed to have lost the other two, but you know how people are about keeping the last piece of a set.

Most engineers were like that though. Anybody in the position that lasted more than a few seasons understood the glorious purpose of alcohol. They tended to outlive any other members of their teams tenfold.

Engineers were the designated survivors. If things went truly south they were ordered to leg it back to base and leave the rest of the team to fend for themselves. Cruel some might say, but seeing as their skills were rare and specialized it made them the hardest to replace. Any engineer with the skills and intelligence to do the job right wasn't nearly as likely to screw up enough to end up down here.

He'd never bothered to ask Don or Mary about their fuck ups, or their previous teams. It just wasn't something you did. You didn't really ask anybody what they had done to end up in this job. Some were ex-cons, some were homeless, and some, like Dibbuk and himself, were just absolute fuck ups.

'Speaking of Dibbuk.' Harvel thought, looking over at her. Expecting her to still be dead asleep, he was surprised to see one of her greenish yellow eyes cracked open. She seemed to be actively attempting to ignore them and failing. He shot her a covert smile and thumbs up before stretching his arms. Receiving the signal she turned over and reciprocated the gesture using a claw to scratch the rough scales on the back of her head.

Wicksomme, the freshest of the faces in the room, decided to add to the conversation. "She gonna stay asleep like that all day? Don't mean to sound critical but what if we get a call?" He asked, pointing a halfhearted finger Dibbuks way. Instead of giving him a direct response, Harvel went ahead and let the penny drop.

"Well? Are you?" He asked, standing up and leaning on Lindons bunk. Dibbuk let out a long, low sigh, as she often did, vibrating the floor of the pod through her bunk. Shooting him a sleepy yet no less annoyed look, she heaved her legs off the cot.