The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [18]
Exhilarated by the chaos around him, Zor-El climbed out of the flyer and gathered his pack and equipment. The air was oven-hot on his face. Each breath dried his mouth and seemed to sear his lungs. Alura had prepared him for this, though. Back in Argo City, with her vast botanical knowledge and greenhouses full of exotic species, she had picked a sealed bud—fleshy, soft and moist, the size of an outstretched hand. She had explained what to do with it, and now he silently thanked her.
Before setting out across the volcanic field, he pulled the bud from his pack. When he stroked the tight sepals at the base of its broken stem, the fleshy petals opened to form a soft and protective cup large enough to cover the lower half of his face. Zor-El placed the petals firmly over his mouth and nose, where they gently adhered; then he tentatively drew in a breath. He could barely smell the flower’s perfume, but the air he inhaled was sweet and fresh, filtered through the stem and the active membrane of the petals. He drew another breath, satisfied.
He trudged across sharp rocks that were still hot. The sound around him was a background roar. A bright splash of lava flowed like spilled blood across the blackened ground. When he reached the edge of the molten river, he stared directly into the fury for a long moment, then got to work.
Zor-El opened his pack and removed the prized new tool he had invented—a diamondfish, half alive and half machine. It was shaped like a powerful swimmer, its scales formed of purest diamond to protect the delicate internal circuitry, its body run by a network of circuit paths as well as biological nerves. The diamondfish twitched in his hand as he activated it. When it turned faceted eyes toward him, he looked the gleaming creature-device in the face. “Tell me what’s down there.”
He switched on a small force-field generator (another of his inventions), which projected a shimmering protective sheath around the mechanical animal. “Swim deep, as far as you can go.” He gently tossed the diamondfish into the air. It twitched and wriggled as it plunged into the hot, scarlet current. As if playing, the diamondfish splashed about in the molten rock, then dove downward.
From his pack, Zor-El removed a contact screen and activated it. Picking up the signal from the creature-device, he monitored the diamondfish as it swam deeper. It tasted the magma, ran the chemical constituents through integrated analyzers, and followed the intense thermal currents deeper.
As Zor-El looked around at the sterile, barren environment, he could feel the ground trembling beneath his feet. The diamondfish’s continued readings gave alarming indications of rising pressures in the planet’s core. He couldn’t be sure exactly what it meant. Zor-El suspected that some inexplicable radioactive shift was occurring far beneath the crust. Elements were converting, creating strange mineral instabilities. But how? He had to know.
With another convulsive upheaval, the river of lava churned. The magma level dropped, then bubbled up again in a fresh burst. He was astonished when the molten rock abruptly changed color, as if a vat of dye had spilled into it. Instead of the intense orange and scarlet, a gush of some new mineral compound appeared—a bright emerald green seeping into the flow like a spreading stain. Zor-El had never seen anything like it. Then the thermal currents swallowed up the green, and the lava ran red again.
The dutiful diamondfish swam deeper and deeper, hotter and hotter. On Zor-El’s contact screen the readings became even more damning. The situation in the mantle was worse than he had feared.
Then, with a flash of static, the signal vanished. The diamondfish had been programmed to keep going until the extreme temperatures terminated it. He felt briefly sorry for the brave little creature-device, but it had served well. More important, it had given him vital, but baffling information. Something unimaginably powerful but inexplicable was shifting deep beneath his feet. The larger question