The Xuanwu gravity barge cut through the Sea of White Flame at forty miles per hour. Around the floating stone craft, the overload star-fire surged and roiled in towering blazing bright waves. It splashed against Titus’s forward black-ice spires only to be flash-crystal-hardened into falling showers of sparkling stone rime.
Arthur stood braced against the central control pylon, his magnifying glass working continuously to map the churning heat eddies beneath the surface. At minus nineteen thousand five hundred meters, the underground sea was not uniform. It was intersected by deep heat rifts where plumes of twenty-thousand-degree core star-fire welled up from the lower mantle.
“Titus, veer fifteen degrees to port,” Arthur commanded, adjusting his footing as the platform rolled over a huge surge of white flame. “There’s an upwelling channel two miles ahead. If we catch that plume dead-on, the water-flow shear will flip the barge.”
Titus grunted, his front left claw digging into the gravity control matrix. The floating stone platform responded instantly, carving a smooth, banked turn that carried them cleanly around the boiling white vortex.
The hydrodynamics of liquid aetheric star-fire defied every standard equation of fluid mechanics. The fluid possessed a specific gravity nearly six times that of water. But its thickness fluctuated wildly in response to local magnetic gradients. When a wave crested, it didn’t break into spray. It snapped into blazing bright sheets of white glass that hovered in the air for several seconds before dissolving back into the molten soup.
