Beneath its atmospheric shroud, Meza was a porcupine world. Its equatorial zone was studded with great stone spars, or super-mesas, that soared up to 50 miles into the stratosphere. For perspective, if you climbed from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest, you would have only gone halfway. And Meza was no lightweight on the order of Mars, whose diminished gravity produced outsized features like Olympus Mons. Meza was five times as hefty as Earth and half again its girth. Nor was Meza a dead planet, the scars of its violent creation preserved for all time. At around 300 million years old, the spars were a relatively new feature.

Massive and without any obvious purpose, the super-mesas did not have the makings of artificial structures. Yet nothing in the geologists' repertoire could explain them. Unlike mountains, they were not the product of mantle upwellings or continental clashes played out in pangean time. Narrow and flat-topped, they had an average circumference of around thirty miles, about the size of greater Tokyo, with sheer sides that, rather than widening toward the bases, tapered instead. The scale was stupefying. A single spar weighed in at a hundred billion tons. The forces needed to raise that much mass into the stratosphere would have warped the planet's crust. Creating a whole chain of them would have ripped it apart. So how had they come to be?

Weathering could not be responsible. Extraordinarily dense and durable, super-spars were resistant to chemical reactions and physical abrasion. But if you raised the power of the weathering action by a ridiculous amount—torrential floods and cyclonic sandstorms, say—then the spars would dwindle away to slivers long before reaching their full height. There were other anomalies. In comparison to the self-similar mesas of the American southwest, the height of the Mezan spars varied wildly; a five-mile high spar might be found next to a fifty-mile high one. There was no stratification of rock layers either. The spars were monolithic, uniform slabs.

What was left? Some type of gradual accretion process? Crystallization was quickly ruled out since it required carefully controlled conditions over geologic spans of time. Furthermore, the strongest crystals—and only the strongest would suffice for such mega-monoliths—required levels of pressure and heat that could only be achieved deep within a planet's heart. How about the reverse? A surface recession. Maybe the spars were present all along as sub-surface features that were slowly exposed as the planet cooled and contracted, causing the floor to fall out from beneath them. It was plausible in theory but failed to address the central question of how the features had come to be in the first place.

There was only one theory that fit all the facts: the shattered core.