The main freight hoist of Geothermal Shaft Nine groaned as its four massive hard dark metal-steel cables unspooled from the ceiling winches. He dropped into an upright black deep pit that seemed to have no bottom.
The platform was an open sixty-foot square of heavy-duty steel grating, suspended over the central cooling chimney pipe. The hoist plummeted past the negative-two-thousand-meter mark. Then, the surrounding heat outside the safety cage began to climb with terrifying speed: forty degrees... Fifty-five degrees... Seventy degrees.
The air rushing up through the steel floorboards was thick, dry, and white-hot. It smelled of scorched stone, fiery sulfur, and the metal tang of molten iron. Far below, through the gaps in the rusty grating, faint veins of dull orange light pulsed in the pitch darkness. The underground magma vents that pre-Cataclysm engineers had tapped to power the eastern continent.
Arthur stood at the edge of the dropping platform, his charcoal field coat discarded. He wore a fire-resistant tactical bodysuit woven from dark rock fiber, an oxygen breathing mask strapped securely over his mouth and nose. Over his chest hung his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine, its magnetic rails cooled by a closed-loop freezing liquid sleeve that Toby had jerry-rigged before departure.
