The descent below minus eighteen thousand meters crossed a deep-rock frontier where standard terrestrial physics surrendered to ancient heat laws. Here, at the threshold of Stratum Four, the rock was no longer dark black glass or red-glowing dark rock. It was a boundless, blinding expanse of semi-clear white granulite, lit from within by the churning radiance of the Sea of White Flame.
The heat was staggering. At twelve hundred and forty degrees, the air was no longer gaseous air. It had tightly packed under thousands of sea-weights of lithostatic weight into an overload star-fire soup that clung to surfaces like liquid fire. Every breath Arthur drew through his baked-clay-filtered breathing mask tasted of blazing bright quartz and spark ozone, tingling along his lung passages with the sharp prickle of raw aether.
Arthur paused on a wide shelf of crystal-clear stone that jutted out over the white sea. He unclipped the tracking data receiver from his tactical chest rig, checking the heat sensors embedded in his pressure suit. The outer man-made fibers of his heavy coat had begun to scorch, their matte gray coating baking into a rainbow-bright sheen of glass-fused glass.
“Pip, increase shunt absorption to maximum,” Arthur commanded, his voice raspy against the filter membrane. “Draw off the excess heat load from my chest cavity.”
