He limped into the Linus Highway and started up the steep slope.
A few more faint lights flickered to life, illuminating the orb's descent. The lights’ reflections followed the curved surface, starting out at the bottom, gradually arcing around the side and then sliding to the top as the orb fell down and down and down.
Reflections of massive, rough-hewn pillars, each larger than the Eiffel tower, thicker than a skyscraper, each a monument of engineering and long-dead technological prowess, glided over the polished platinum. For several minutes the pillars’ images alone covered the orb's sides, until a new reflection arced across the metallic surface, gradually growing larger and more defined.
Clearly lit, a fish-eye reflection of the cave floor swelled on the orb's bottom.
"Put me down,” Lybrand said. “I can walk."
"You can't walk,” O'Doyle said through tortured breaths as he stumbled up the tunnel. “You're hurt."
"Put me down, dammit!"
O'Doyle leaned against the stone wall and gently lowered her to the ground. Sweat covered his ashen face. He struggled to remain standing.
"I'm hurt, but I can make it,” Lybrand said. “The KoolSuit helped. I can walk, can you?"
"I'll damn well find the strength to walk out of here,” O'Doyle said. “Let's go, the rocktopi are coming."
They struggled on, holding each other up, knowing full well that the silverbugs were behind them, that the rocktopi couldn't be far off. They dashed up the steep tunnel, beaten and battered, pushed far beyond the point of exhaustive collapse.
Connell's vision blurred and he fell heavily to his side. It was blood loss, not heat, that finally dragged him down. He knew he lay dying. He peered up the Linus Highway. How much farther to go? He couldn't do it. He just couldn't.
The distant screeches of the rocktopi suddenly grew louder, cacophonous in the narrow tunnel. They were coming. Connell rolled to his back and shook his head, trying to clear his vision. He blinked a few times, then sat up. He couldn't pass out now. He had to go on, kill as many of them as he could, give O'Doyle and Lybrand a chance.
Connell unhooked the gun's black nylon strap and tied it around his leg, just below the knee. He pulled it tight with a vicious snap and swallowed the scream that tried to erupt from his lungs. He snarled, looped the strap again, and pulled even tighter. He had to stop the bleeding, or at least slow it enough to stay conscious for a little while longer.
Too weak to stand, Connell clutched the gun in one hand, pushing it in front of him as he crawled on hands and knees up the Linus Highway.
Twenty miles below Connell's feet, the orb finished its descent, landing lightly on the shaft floor. The heat raged at just over 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. An internal computer quickly processed data on air pressure, heat, and distance traveled. Finding those readings suitable, the computer triggered the detonator.
Chapter Fifty-two
The orb shuddered once, then disappeared in a nova of light brighter than the sun. Impossibly powerful shockwaves lashed out at supersonic speeds, disintegrating the countless support pillars in a billowing burst of evaporated stone. A great rumbling and shaking began as millions of tons of rock, now without support from below, began to settle into the newly created void.
Devastating heat from the blast raced up the deep shaft, melting rock along the way. Within seconds the blast erupted into the Dense Mass cavern, spurting upward like a geyser in an expanding cloud of destruction. The orb's cathedral room, which sat in the center of the immortal metal hull, sagged like cheap wax and collapsed in on itself, in seconds going from a magnificent technological monument to a white-hot sea of molten metal. Silverbugs erupted like popcorn, then quickly dissolved into the boiling pool of metal. Like a ring rippling from a pebble in a pond, the explosive heat reached out from the ship's center, melting the timeless vessel in a quickly expanding wave.
The shockwaves also traveled straight downward, winning the battle between the irresistible force and immovable object. Rock simply ceased to exist as star-like temperatures evaporated everything within reach, creating a huge bubble of superheated gas.
The orb didn't punch a hole through the Earth's mantle. It didn't have to. The cold, calculated, precise science that had carved out the pillars had placed the shaft's bottom a geological hair's width from the swirling mantle. For millennia, the Earth's internal pressure pushed against the shaft floor, obeying the laws of physics and seeking the easiest way out. But the shaft floor's precise design held just enough strength to keep that incalculable force at bay, just enough to keep things as they were meant to be.
The orb, however, melted another half mile worth of crust, a calculation as fixed and precise as a surgeon's stroke. At the bottom of that newly created bubble of plasma, the Earth's pressure — so long held in check by the thinnest of margins — finally broke free.
Magma rocketed upward with tidal-wave force, pushed ever higher by the liquid core's grinding, pulsating pressures. It quickly filled the new pocket and continued up the shaft, pushing the 10,000-degree gas bubble before it, racing toward the ravaged ship and the Dense Mass cavern.
O'Doyle and Lybrand crawled on their bellies, urged on by the unmistakable smell of fresh, outside air. The ground shuddered beneath them, pouring fuel on their desperate effort to escape the mountain.
The low rock ceiling scrapped at O'Doyle's back. He grunted as he worked his thick trunk through the narrow opening, the rock tearing away his KoolSuit with long rips and shreds. The suit no longer mattered this close to the surface.
The ground beneath Connell shook and lurched like a bucking bronco, knocking him about so violently that he couldn't even stay on his hands and knees. He fell to his chest. The grinding sound of mammoth boulders breaking free of the mountain's motionless grasp filled his ears. Cracks raced up the tunnel walls like bolts of splitting lightning. Thick, swirling storm clouds of dust seeped into the air.
Connell looked up to see a fist-sized piece of rock fall from the tunnel ceiling, dust trailing behind it like a comet's tail. The rock bounced off the wildly shaking floor and settled against the tunnel wall — then the entire ceiling gave way in an avalanche of bellowing, angry rock.
Connell barely had time to raise his arms over his head before the boulders crushed down on him.
Magma exploded out of the shaft floor, a great gushing pillar of molten rock jetting against the tunnel ceiling more than two thousand feet above. There it licked against an artificial sun, which sputtered once and then fell dark. A great rain of magma splashed off the ceiling, across the cavern, and fell into the hellish pool of bubbling, liquefied hull.
Confused silverbugs scattered everywhere, rushing pell-mell in all directions. Some rushed headlong into the boiling pools and melted in a fraction of a second. Some scattered up the walls, only to be peeled off by the torrential cascade of scorching lava. Some fell motionless where they stood, baked to death in heat rivaling that at the Earth's center.
Rocktopi dropped dead by the hundreds, instantly cooked in the expanding heat and sulfurous fumes that filled the massive cavern. Swirling magma covered the floor, forming a hell-spawned lake that rose slowly up the cavern walls. Boiling rock poured like water, flowing into the countless tunnels connected to the cavern, splashing orange-hot and destroying everything in its path.