Star Soldier

The door into the elevator room stood ajar. Blood and gore lay splashed on the controls, but the bodies had been cleared.

“PHC beat us here,” said Omi.

“So it would appear,” Marten said.

“You doubt?” Omi asked.

“No….” Marten said.

“What then?”

Marten looked up, swallowed. “We have to go down after them.”

“What?” Turbo asked. “Down? How about up?”

“Highborn say no,” Omi said.

“Yeah? And how do you know that?” Turbo asked.

“By thinking.”

Marten thought Turbo would jeer. Instead, the lanky man shuffled off to sulk. Marten studied the controls. They seemed basic enough. He pressed a red button. Ping! The nearest elevator opened, and before them stood the plush box that could take them farther down into the planet than anything else possibly could. None of them, however, made a move.

“I once heard an old, old saying,” Marten finally said.

Turbo refused to be drawn. Omi grunted, but seemed lost in thought. Stick, who stropped his vibroblade on his pant leg, looked up. “Yeah?”

“Those who would lose their life will gain it. Those who would gain their life will lose it.”

“That don’t make sense,” the knifeboy said.

“Here it does.”

Stick thought about, shrugged. “Maybe.”

“No maybe about it,” Omi said. “He’s right. So let’s go.”

17.

They plunged toward the center of the Earth, picking up speed until the elevator whined and vibrated so it shook their teeth. Speech was impossible. Turbo thumped against the nearest wall, cradling the grenade launcher between his bony knees as he stuck his fingers in his ears. He closed his eyes and it almost seemed as if he fell asleep. Stick sat beside him and stared fixedly at his vibroblade, switching it on and off with his thumb. Of course, it was impossible to hear its hum. Marten wasn’t sure the knifeboy could even feel its vibration. Omi stood and watched the depth gauge and heat-meter. His features showed an increasing dread and desperation.

Marten clamped his teeth together on the nervous urge to laugh. He’d seen far too many people in the last while high on violence. He didn’t want to become as uncontrolled as they had been.

Down, down, down they plunged, toward the molten core of the planet. Heavy oppression squeezed these lifelong underground dwellers. A sense, an aura, a feeling of extreme pressure bore upon each of them. No python ever tightened its coils like this. Breathing became difficult. Strange sounds, groans, hisses and screeches abraded their hearing, their very awareness.

On the outside of the shaft, the temperature of the Earth increased thirty degrees Celsius for every kilometer they dropped. At one hundred kilometers it would became white hot. Then the rate of temperature increase would slow. No metal or ceramic substance man had ever used in construction could have survived the blasting heat of the deeper reaches of the Earth. Yet incredible heat was the lesser of the two problems. The greater technical difficulty lay in pressure, awful, mind-numbing pressure. Just as a swimmer in a pool experienced pressure as he dove as little as six feet down, so the Earth increased in pressure the farther down one went. At three hundred and twenty kilometers, it reached one hundred thousand atmospheres, twelve hundred times the pressure of the deepest point in the ocean.

Omi threw an agonizing glance at Marten. Marten grunted and moved beside the gunman, watching the deep gauge and heat-meter. Deep-Core personnel were intensely trained for five years before they dared go down. Psychological tests weeded out over three-quarters of the personnel. Many often cracked after a little more than a week in the deep station. Not that any human could withstand one hundred thousand atmospheres. That was impossible.

Omi tapped the depth gauge.

Marten nodded.

They left the Earth’s crust and entered the mantle.

A solid layer of rock circled the outer Earth, its crust. On the ocean floor, the crust could be as little as sixteen kilometers thick. On the continents, the crust reached a thickness of forty kilometers. Basalt composed the ocean floor, a combination of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, magnesium and iron. The continental mass was mostly granite. Granite was of lower density than basalt. Thus, the continental granite plates floated on the basalt. The entire crust floated on the mantle.

Twenty-nine hundred kilometers thick, the mantle was composed of molten olivine rock: iron and magnesium combined with silicon and oxygen. Overall, the mantle was solid, but under these terrific pressures, it behaved like a plastic. Under the slow, steady pressure the material flowed like extra-thick molasses, but sudden changes in pressure would cause it to snap and fragment like glass.

Beneath the mantle pulsed the outer core. The Earth’s inner core was solid. Both halves were constituted mainly of iron in an alloy form with a small amount of sulfur or oxygen. Because of the heat and pressure, the outer core was molten iron, hot to a degree almost unimaginable.

Heat and pressure of such extremes prevented the use of any known material in shaft construction.. Magnetic force alone formed the walls of the long narrow mine sunk deep into the Earth. Incredibly powerful magnetic shields shoved against the unrelenting pressure of crust, mantle and outer core. The terrible heat from the Earth itself powered these shields, and everything livable had to stay within them. Generators of brutal efficiency and power cooled the temperature inside the shaft. A breech anywhere along the line would destroy the entire deep- core mine. This core heat provided Greater Sydney and much of Australian Sector with its energy needs.

Therefore, the main safety feature was already built into the deep-core. The only way lava could possibly geyser up the mine and onto the surface was to send a tiny plug of it, like a man spitting—a little spurt of molten metal would destroy the magnetic tube behind it as it went. But such was the Earth’s ability to spit that Sydney and everything around it for fifty kilometers would be annihilated. The design and safety features of the mine ensured that process could only be triggered at the deepest section of human habitation, the bottom core station, which hung just above the Earth’s outer core.

The bottom core station was the elevator’s destination.

For a time, Omi and Marten watched the gauges. Suddenly Marten trembled. The psychological weight around him became more than he could bear. He staggered to a cot conveniently provided and slumped upon it. He shut his eyes and his breathing grew even. Exhaustion claimed him. He dreamed of being crushed to death, of Major Orlov sitting on his chest and smothering his mouth with a rag. He clawed against her brawny forearms to no avail. Then, sluggishly, with infinite slowness, he grew aware that he dreamed and fought to wake up. His eyelids unglued and his vision swam in blurry confusion. He groaned, but couldn’t hear himself. Nausea burned the back of his throat with threatened vomit. He concentrated, swung his legs off the cot and rubbed his eyes. A horrible headache pounded. He squinted. The blurs wouldn’t go away. A bolt of fear stabbed him. He bent his head between his knees and told himself to relax, to breathe deeply. He did, and he found that if he pressed his hands on either side of his head that he could focus.

Turbo lay sprawled on the floor, drool spilling from his open mouth. He stared glazed-eyed at the wall. Stick squeezed his eyes closed with ferocious intensity and breathed in and out as if he were a bellows. Omi kept jerking the slide to his assault carbine open and shut, open and shut. Fifty cartridges lay at his feet, but he seemed oblivious to them.

Marten willed himself to his feet, but found that he couldn’t move. Weird gusts of air puffed his cheeks. He frowned. Then he realized that he brayed moronic laughter minus the sound, or the elevator was too noisy to let him hear his own laughter. He slapped a hand over his mouth. Then, after he’d settled himself, he put his hands to