The departure from the Central Glacial Caldera began at the base of the Great Pipe. A huge upright transit shaft eighty meters in width, bored through twelve thousand meters of ancient land-wide craton.
In the descent three weeks ago, this deep gap had been a pitch-black deep pit of howling sub-zero blizzards, dangerous ice bridges, and hiding deep-sea hunting beasts. Now, with Vault One purified and the world-size spirit vein humming with sky warmth, the shaft was an orderly, glowing highway of stone.
The surrounding heat climbed steadily as they climbed from the volcano bowl floor. They rose from minus one hundred and sixty-two degrees toward the standard Antarctic surface baseline of minus thirty-eight degrees.
Arthur Vance rode securely on Grimm’s broad shoulders. His boots were locked into custom magnetic stirrups attached to the hound’s tactical harness.
The eight-meter Glacial World-Eater was a marvel of living building and locomotive grace. Grimm bounded upward along the spiraling stone ramps carved into the channel walls, his massive black glass paws striking the rock with rhythmic, muffled thuds. Each forty-foot bound carried Arthur smoothly across yawning fissures and collapsed galleries without a single jolt of upright recoil, the hound’s void-gravity domain absorbing ninety percent of the moving heavy rush.
