Core

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

---

Source

Core

For the first time I'd be on a planetary exploration mission. In front of the exit tunnel of the ship's hangar, I observed the orange horizon of that planet, it was a gas giant, its structure was formed by layers and layers of gases at different pressures and temperatures, probably without a rocky nucleus, only hydrogen and some helium denser and denser, until it practically became solid.

A merciless, merciless world that would destroy, shredding into something like a piece of paper made ball, any ship that ventured to penetrate its eternal atmosphere. Only with the help of deflectors is it possible to penetrate inside them; capable of repelling any form of matter approaching more than two millimetres and of generating enough negative pressure to prevent the ship from collapsing, thus avoiding misfortune, otherwise any type of material would be crushed.

The sign of the IA of the main ship indicated that this was the place where we had to descend, just above a storm where intense lightning plagued the sky, jumping from the upper to the lower clouds, as if from infinity of adhesive threads, in two pieces of wood glued together and separated.

Based on my EVA capsule, a kind of anthropomorphic robot, with a gigantic head instead of a torso, inside of which I was sitting, covered by a large bubble of transparent polymer that gives me a range of vision of one hundred and eighty degrees. I steadily advanced to the edge of the exit ramp, which led to the mouth of the hangar tunnel, and dropped, slipping like a slide into the atmosphere.

Outside the spacecraft, the AI ignited the antigraviton field and the electromagnetic thrusters, which would help me move through the dense layers of clouds. Along with me, seven other explorers and ten sample-collecting drones made up the group. We began to descend and the clouds became thicker and stranger and stranger, until they seemed to be flying in the middle of a thick, dark type of syrup or potingue.

The normal vision was useless here, laser sensors allowed us to locate where the other members of the mission were and avoid colliding with each other, which, although it wouldn't have been dangerous, if it had been annoying enough.

Almost ten hours after starting, we arrived at our destination, in one of the deepest layers of the planet which covered its possible solid nucleus, it is the layer of metallic hydrogen, a form of this gas, compressed so intensely that it behaves like an electricity conductor, beyond this point we could not continue advancing, our electromagnetic propellants would not have allowed it.

The drones equipped with specifically designed containers began to take samples of the gases around this region, and of the metal hydrogen layer itself. Meanwhile, the explorers placed ourselves forming an octagon, separated about twenty meters one from the other, in order to initiate the tracking of the nucleus of the planet, emitting waves directed to the center of the same waiting to receive the rebound of the same in the central solid region, after almost two hours we began to perceive the readings.

The planet had a solid nucleus, formed by pure carbon, compressed by the high pressures and temperatures until crystallizing, it was a diamond of several hundreds of thousands of tons. Once the dream of a jeweler, this material, more common today than many would like, was essential for the construction of filaments used in the construction industry of superstructures such as bridges and vacuum tunnels for hypertrains.

However, on this planet, it was just a curiosity, its extraction would be unjustified, there being places where the operation would be simpler and less risky. However, it was interesting to find a planetary nucleus of carbon, something common in methane planets, where this element predominates; in a gas giant, where the common thing are the rocky nuclei of silicates.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, June 2019

Other stories from the Time and Space series

• El Destino de Fenrir / The Fate of Fenrir
• Mundo Océano / Ocean World
• Realidad (1/2) / Reality (1/2)
• Realidad (2/2) / Reality (2/2)
• Púlsar / Pulsar
• Esferas / Spheres
• El Laboratorio de la Isla / The Island Laboratory
• Rescate de Chatarra / Scrap Rescue
• Mares Eternos / Eternal Seas
• El Reactor (1/2) / The Reactor (1/2)
• El Reactor (2/2) / The Reactor (2/2)
• Terror Nocturno / Night Terror
• Criaturas de Agua / Water Creatures
• Mi Día Entre Gusanos / My Day Into Worms
• La Masa Gris / The Grey Mass
• Colisión / Collision
• Los Bosques de Perséfone / The Forests of Persephone
• Osiris / Osiris
• Metamorphosis
• Hastio
• Paradox
• Decay
• Under the influence of the Pleiades
• Anniversary
• Memories
• Core

I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar

Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time

---

---