Commando by Aer-ki Jyr

Author:Aer-ki Jyr [Jyr, Aer-ki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

6

August 26, 2464

Solar System

Uranus

Rio rode the dropship down from the starport, seeing the greenish/blue atmosphere of the planet grow in size until it swallowed up the vid screen view, and still their destination wasn’t visible. Braking against their own orbital momentum coming off the starport, the dropship eventually slowed to a near hover, matching the drifting motion of the Snake Pit that was riding the upper atmosphere below them, partially obscured in the gas giant’s haze.

The colony wasn’t on the surface of the planet, because the planet had no surface. It was layer after layer of gasses, mostly hydrogen and helium, that transitioned down into a blender-like mantle of gas and ices. This gave it no true surface to land or build on, with the center core of the planet being made of rocky material…material that Clan Metal Gear was convinced contained significant corovon deposits.

Trace amounts of Herotol, a gas whose atomic structure included a single corovon along with 8 protons and 4 neutrons, had been discovered in the atmosphere of Uranus, and the Clan had been adamant about probing for deposits within the core. Davis had eventually granted them permission to try, and Clan Metal Gear had built the Snake Pit to facilitate those ongoing efforts.

The city/colony floated on anti-grav engines…a lot of engines, with backups for the backups, to keep it afloat and away from the dangerous interior. With pressures and temperatures rising the deeper one went into the planet, the more exotic the stages of matter became, with bits of liquid hydrogen mixed in with the rock, all of which was in a molten state. The thick ‘atmosphere’ contained the heat, preventing there from being a solid center, resulting in mud-like layers of material, sorted out by their densities and magnetic properties.

The corovon, if in its pure form, would have sunk to the center of the planet…in theory. There was no way to scan that deep, so the Metal Gears’ efforts were more exploratory than mining, and so far they hadn’t been able to penetrate anywhere near deep enough to get at the center of the planet, but they had been recovering other compounds that contained corovon, in small amounts, which made the facility worthwhile in the interim as they continued to upgrade their technology and devise ever more interesting techniques to get at the core.

Though Rio couldn’t see them, coming down from atop as the dropship was, there were thin tethers dropping off the bottom of the circular city that connected down to mining probes that were collecting material at varying depths. Hydrogen and helium collection were being harvested en mass, then exported out to the rest of the Clan, along with methane and other gasses in the upper atmosphere.

Over the years many of those tendrils had snapped, due to the winds, but the Clan had kept at it, devising more flexible and robust connections, allowing them to sway about without breaking. None of them were manned, but the underside of the city was covered in

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