by Cixin Liu
>> At the time, a World Government had come to replace our senate. Its politicians took on the responsibility of overseeing and safeguarding the core space. They attempted to harshly crack down on the frenetic explorers, but this had very little affect. Most of the explorer's bubble ships had already dug into the deep layers of our planet.
>> The World Government soon realized that the best way to stop bubble ships would be with bubble ships. Following this logic, the government began building an armada of gigantic ships designed to intercept, attack, and destroy the explorers’ vessels deep within the rock. The government's ships would then retrieve the space that had been stolen. This plan naturally met with the resistance of the explorers and so the long drawn-out War of the Strata broke out, fought in the vast battlefield of layers of rock.
“That sounds like a very interesting way to fight a war!” Fan called up at the sphere, intrigued.
>> And very brutal, even though at first the pace of the fighting was languid, at best. The excavation technology of the time only allowed our bubble ships to move at a pace of less than two mph through the rock.
>> Large ships were the most highly valued asset on both sides in the War of the Strata. There was a simple reason for this: The larger the bubble ship, the longer it could go without refueling; also, the ships' offensive capabilities scaled with their size.
>> Regardless of how big they were, the ships of the Strata War were all built to have the smallest bow width possible. Again, this had a very simple reason: The slenderer the bow, the smaller the area of rock that the ship would need to dig through and the faster the ship would be able to move. As a result, almost all of the ships of the war looked very similar when seen from the front. On the other hand, their bodies and lengths varied widely. In its extreme, it meant that our largest ships ended up looking like very long tunnels.
>> The battlefields of the Strata War were of course three-dimensional and so the combat was fought somewhat like your forces engaging in aerial warfare, even if things were a good deal more complicated for us. When a ship encountered the enemy, its first course of action was to hastily broaden its bow width. The ships did so to present the largest possible front of weaponry to bear; in this new configuration, the ships transformed into a shape reminiscent of a nail.
>> When necessary, the bow of a bubble ship could also split out into multiple sections, like a claw ready to strike. This configuration would allow the ship to attack from multiple directions at once. The raw complexity of the War of the Strata also revealed itself in another tactic: Every warship could separate at will, transforming into multiple smaller ships. Ships could also band together, quickly combining to form a single, giant ship. Whenever opposing battle groups met, the question whether to form up or split up was an object of profound tactical analysis.
>> Interestingly enough, the War of the Strata did little to hinder the drive for further exploration. In fact, the war spurred a technological revolution that would play a critical part in our future endeavors. Not only did it bring about the development of extremely efficient excavators, but it also lead to the invention of seismoscopes. This technology could be used to communicate through the layers of rock and could also be employed as a form of radar. Powerful seismic waves were also used as weapons. The most sophisticated seismic communication devices could even transmit pictures.
>> The largest bubble battleship we ever built was called the World-of-the-Line. It was commissioned by the World Government. In its standard configuration, the World-of-the-Line was more than 90 miles long. It was just as its name suggested; a small, very stretched world all of its own. For its crew, serving on the World was much like it would be for you to stand in the English-French Channel Tunnel; every few minutes a high-speed train rushed by, delivering tunneled debris to the aft of the ship. The World-of-the-Line could of course break up into an armada all by itself, but for the most part it operated as a singular vessel of war. Naturally, it did not always remain in its ‘tunnel’ configuration. In motion, its stretched hull could be bent impressively, forming a closed loop or even crossing its own path to create intricate shapes of destruction. The World-of-the-Line was equipped with our most advanced excavators, allowing it to travel twice as fast as ordinary bubble ships, reaching a cruising speed of up to four mph. In combat, it could even maneuver at speeds exceeding six mph! Furthermore, an extremely powerful seismoscope was installed in its hull, allowing it to pinpoint bubble ships at ranges eclipsing 300 miles. Its seismic wave weapon had an effective range of 3,300 feet and anything and anyone within a bubble ship it targeted would be shattered to pieces or crushed. Every once in a while the World-of-the-Line returned to the Bubble World, carrying with it its booty of space recovered from the explorers.
>> It was the devastating blows struck by the World-of-the-Line that finally pushed the explorer movement to the brink. It seemed as if the age of exploration was about to come to a sudden end.
>> During the entirety of the War of the Strata, the explorers always found themselves outmatched. Perhaps most importantly, they were prevented from building or forming a ship longer than five miles. Any ship larger than that would be quickly detected by the seismoscopes installed on the World-of-the-Line and the walls of the Bubble World. Once they were spotted, destruction would be swiftly at hand. And so, if exploration was to continue in earnest, it became imperative to destroy the World-of-the-Line.
>> After extensive planning and preparation, the Explorer Alliance encircled and attacked toward the World-of-the-Line with over a hundred warships. Not one of the explorers’ ships was longer than three miles on its own. The battle ensued a thousand miles outside the Bubble World and so became known as the Battle of the Thousand Miles.
>> The Alliance first assembled 20 ships, combining them to form a 20-mile-long ship 1000 miles outside the Bubble World, daring the World-of-the-Line to attack. The World took the bait, rushing in for the kill in its tunnel configuration. Just as it was speeding toward its prey, the Alliance sprung its ambush. More than a hundred ships dug forward, simultaneously attacking the flanks of the World-of-the-Line from all directions. The mighty 90-mile ship was split into 50 sections. Each of these sections, however, could carry on the fight as a powerful warship in its own right. Soon, more than 200 ships from both sides were engaged in fierce battle, tunneling through the rock in a brutal and chaotic melee. Warships were constantly combining and separating, eventually appearing to blur into an amorphous cloud of vessels and violence. In the final phase of the battle, the 150-mile battlefield had become honeycombed beyond recognition by loosened rock and empty space left by destroyed ships. The Battle of the Thousand Miles had created an intricate three-dimensional maze 2,250 miles beneath our planet's surface.
>> The jarring rumble of vicious close quarters combat reverberated all throughout this bizarre battlefield for what seemed eternities. So far from the core of the planet, gravity already produced very noticeable effects – effects that the explorers were far more familiar with than the government forces were. In this great maze battle, it was these weak forces that slowly decided the battle in favor of the Explorer Alliance. In the end, their victory was decisive.
CHAPTER
8
Under the Ocean
>> After the battle, the Explorer Alliance gathered all the space left over by the battle into a single sphere 60 miles in diameter. In this new space the Alliance declared its independence from the Bubble World. Despite this declaration, the Explorer Alliance continued to coordinate its efforts with the explorer movement in the Bubble World from afar. A constant stream of explorer ships left the core to join the Alliance, bringing considerable amounts of space with them. In this way the territory of the Explorer Alliance was continuously expanded, in effect allowing them to turn their territory into a fully stocked and equipped forward-operating base. The World Government, exhausted by the long years of war, found itself unable to stop any of this. In the end, they were left with no other option than
to acknowledge the legitimacy of the explorer movement.
>> As the explorers pierced higher altitudes, they came to dig through ever more porous rock. This was not the only benefit these heights offered; the strengthening gravity also made dealing with the excavated debris that much easier and this newly discovered environment led to success after success. In the eighth year after the end of the war, the Helix became the first ship to cross the remaining 2,250 miles, completing the 5,000-mile journey from the planet's center, 3,250 miles from the edge of the Bubble World.
“Wow! That's all the way to the surface! It must have been so exciting for you to see the great plains and real mountains!” Fan exclaimed, fully caught up in the visitors' story.
>> There was nothing to be excited about; the Helix reached the seabed.
Fan looked up at the alien sphere in shocked silence.
>> When it happened, the images from the seismic communicator began to shake and in a flash, ended altogether. Communication had been lost. A bubble ship tunneling through the rock beneath it could only catch one strange sound on its seismoscopes; a noise that in air would have produced a peeling sound. It was the sound of tons upon tons of water bursting into the vacuum of the Helix. Neither the machine life forms nor the technology of the Bubble World had ever been designed to come into contact with water. The powerful electric current produced by short-circuiting life and equipment almost instantly vaporized everything the water embraced. In the rushing waves, the crew and technology of the Helix exploded like a bomb.
>> Following this event, the Alliance sent more than a dozen bubble ships to fan out in many directions, but all met a similar fate when they reached that apparently impenetrable height. Not one crew was able to vindicate their sacrifice by sending back information that would have led us to understand that mysterious peeling sound. Twice a strange crystalline waveform could be seen on the monitors, but we were completely incapable of comprehending its nature. Bubble ships following these missions attempted to scan what lay above with their seismoscopes found that their instruments showed only mangled data; the returning seismic waves indicated that what lay above was neither space nor rock.
>> These discoveries shook the Open Universe Theory to its core and academic circles began discussing the possibility of a new model. This new model stipulated that the universe was bound to a 5,000-mile radius. They came to the conclusion that the lost explorer ships had come into contact with the edge of the universe and had been sucked into oblivion.
>> The explorer movement was faced with its greatest test yet. Before the Helix incident, the space taken by lost explorer ships had always remained, if only in theory, recoverable. Now, however, our people were faced with the edge of the universe. The space it eagerly devoured appeared to be lost forever. Considering this, even the most steadfast explorers were shaken. Remember that in our world, deep within layers of rock, space – once lost – could never be renewed. With this in mind, the Alliance decided to send a final group of five bubble ships. As they reached an altitude of 3,000 miles, these ships proceeded with extreme caution. If they were to suffer the same fate as the previous missions, it would mean the end of the explorer movement.
>> Two bubble ships were lost. A third ship, the Stone Cerebrum, however, made ground-breaking progress. At an altitude of 3,000 miles, the Stone Cerebrum was slowly digging upward, every foot of rock tunneled with the utmost caution. When the ship reached the seabed, the ocean's waters did not gush through the entire ship and so did not instantly collapse the vessel, as had happened in all previous attempts. Instead, the seawater spurted through a small crack, forced into a powerful but minute stream by the immense pressure above. The Stone Cerebrum had been designed with a beam width of 825 feet. By the standards of the explorer ships, this was considered large, yet it turned out to be an unbelievable stroke of luck. Because of the ship's size, the rising seawater took nearly an hour before it was able to fill the entire space of the ship. Before coming into contact with the bursting water, the ship's seismoscope had recorded the morphology of the ocean above and much data and images had been successfully transmitted back to the Alliance. It was on that day that the People of the Core saw a liquid for the first time.
>> It is quite imaginable that there had been liquids in the Bubble World in ancient times, but it would have been nothing but searing magma. Once the violent geology of our planet's formation had finally come to rest, this magma must have completely solidified. In our planet's core, nothing remained but solid matter and empty space.
>> Even so, our scientists had long since predicted the theoretical possibility of liquids, but no one really believed that this legendary substance should actually exist in the universe. Now however, in those transmitted images, they clearly saw it with their own eyes. and what they saw left all in shock: Shocked at the white, bursting jet, shocked at the slow rise of the water's surface, and shocked at seeing that demonic substance warp itself into any form, clinging to every surface in complete defiance of all laws of nature. They saw it ooze into even the tiniest cracks and they witnessed how it seemed to change the very nature of rock, darkening it with but a touch, even as it seemed to make it shimmer like metal. However, what fascinated them most was that while most things disappeared into this strange substance, some shattered remains of the crew and machinery actually came to float on its surface! There was nothing that seemed to distinguish those things that floated from those that sank. The People of the Core gave this strange liquid substance a name; they called it ‘amorphous rock’.
>> From that point on, the explorers could again celebrate a long string of successes. First, engineers of the Explorer Alliance designed a so-called drain-pipe. In essence it was a 650-foot-long, hollow, drilling pole. After it had been drilled through the final layers of rock, the drill bit of this pole could be opened like a flap valve, drawing the ocean's waters down the pipe. Another valve was attached to the bottom of the drain-pipe.
>> A bubble ship rose to an altitude of 3,000 miles . Then it began drilling the drip-pipe through the final layers into the seabed. Nothing could have been easier; drilling was, after all, a technology with which the People of the Core were abundantly familiar. There was another piece to the puzzle, however, and that required technology of which we had never even conceived: sealing.
>>As the Bubble World had been completely devoid of liquids or gases, sealing technology had never been necessary, or even imaginable, to the People of the Core. As a result, the valve at the bottom of the drainpipe was far from watertight. Before it was even opened, it had already let water leak out and into the ship. This accident, however, proved to be very fortunate indeed; had the valve ever been opened fully, the power of the onrushing water would have been much greater than the spray through the rock crack encountered by the Stone Cerebrum. It would have burst forth in a concentrated beam of water, powerful enough to cut through everything in its path like a laser. Now instead, the water seeped through the porous valve at a much more controllable drip. You can imagine just how fascinating it was for the crew of the bubble ship to see that thin stream of water bursting forth before their very eyes. To them this liquid was completely unknown territory, much as electricity had been to early humanity.
>> After carefully filling a metal container with the strange liquid, the bubble ship again retreated to the lower layers, leaving the drainpipe buried in the rocks. As the ship descended, the explorers took the greatest precautions they could imagine, keeping their strange sample as still and safe as possible in its container. Carefully observing it, they soon made their first new discovery: The amorphous rock was actually transparent! When they had first seen the seawater shoot through the cracked rock, it had of course been heavily laden with sediment and mud. The People of the Core had accepted this as the amorphous rock's natural state. Following this discovery, the ship continued to descend, and as it did, the temperature aboard began to rise.
>> It was with horrified shock and a deep fear that the explo
rers suddenly came face to face with the most horrible realization yet: The amorphous rock was alive! Stirring, its surface had begun to roil with anger, its terrifying form now covered with countless bursting bubbles. But this monster's surging life force seemed to consume its very being, its body dissolving into a ghostly white shadow. Once all the amorphous rock in the container had transformed into this new phantasmal state, the explorers began to feel a strange sensation grip their bodies. Within moments the sparks of shorting circuits erupted from within, ending their lives in agonizing fireworks.
>> Seismic waves transmitted this terrible spectacle live to the Explorer Alliance, right up until the monitors, too, fell silent. A quickly dispatched relief ship suffered the same fate. As soon as it made contact with the doomed vessels, its crew also erupted into horrible sparks, dying in pain. It seemed as if the amorphous rock had become a specter of death, looming over all of space. The scientists, however, noticed that the second series of short-circuits was nowhere as violent as the first spectacular displays of death. This led them to a conclusion: As the area of space increased, the density of that amorphous specter of death decreased.
>> It took many lives and countless horrible deaths, but in the end, the People of the Core finally discovered another state of being they had never encountered before: Gas.
CHAPTER
9
To the Stars
>> These momentous discoveries finally moved even the World Government and they reunited with their old enemies, the Explorer Alliance. The Bubble World now also committed its resources to the cause, heralding a period of intense exploration marked by rapid progress. The final breakthrough was within reach.