hiding something... But Zero could sense already that not all was well under this glass sky.
One of the smaller vessels swooped dangerously close to the shiver, then fell away, phase drives leaving a contrail of blurred space behind it. Stranger looked intently ahead, ignoring the display. Zero, however, watched the smaller vessel move to rejoin the formation of similar vessels that it had been flying with. A brilliant flash and it was cut apart in mid-maneuver by a corvette that came in fast and low. Several destroyers moved to intercept the corvette, and another group moved in close around the shiver. The world inside the snowglobe erupted in a lightshow.
Stranger barked orders at the vessel, which increased speed and rocketed toward the sphere closest to the trapped star. All around them the world was lances of fire and phase and shiver.
“Just observing?”
“Quiet,” Stranger growled back. “We’ve had some trouble since your arrival.”
“Some trouble? All is not well in paradise?”
[paradise?] the word slammed into Zero’s mind with horrifying force. [it’s not been a paradise since the Exile sent us your precious little flower. how dare you speak of paradise when you have the blood of an entire species on your hands?]
The words echoed through Zero’s mind, a sickening sensation much like the shiver. “it’s a civil war. You don’t know what to do with me.”
“That’s right. We’re killing ourselves out there,” he indicated the skirmish taking place around their vessel “Because of you.”
The shiver continued toward the first satellite of the dying star, flanked on all sides by massive destroyers. Corvettes and fighters still swooped in and out of their path, but they were for the most part instantly cut apart by the shiver’s escorts.
The shiver slowed as it entered the atmosphere of the first planet. The surface below them was bereft of signs of life, a black icescape on the side that they approached. Their destroyer escorts stayed in orbit, and the shiver was followed by an array of smaller atmospheric vessels. Zero strained to see the lights of cities or airstrips, but was disappointed. As far as he could tell, there was nothing constructed by humans on the surface of this planet.
“It’s beneath the surface, at the planet core.”
Zero understood then, of course Heaven was at the planet core. Where had they found Mother when the planet had begun to cool and die? The planet core. These creatures were not surface-dwellers; they preferred the privacy of the interior.
“Something like that.” Stranger folded his hands across his chest.
A great gap opened in the darkness, illuminated from within, an immense silver mouth stretching into the planet interior. The shiver fell inside, and the mouth closed. With one swallow, the vessel plummeted into the distant cousin of the Vegas Gate. Pearly gates or not, Zero was on his way to Heaven.
Foreboding, suffocating sense of foreboding.
Higher and higher, caught in the swirls and eddies of the new atmosphere at the center of the planet, hovering like eagles, linked hand to tiny hand, two human forms gracefully swimming through air to the warship that was named War but preferred to be called Gary. Mother laughed, the child that she had become laughed, and Fleur cringed as she heard the depth of the decay, echoing forever through the tumult of a machine ocean. Mother was dying, and dying quickly. The destabilization of that presence that had permeated the entire galaxy of her exile in these last hundred-thousand years was evidenced in that child’s blissful laughter. Fleur shivered from the cold and from the depth of her despair.
They approached the warship from beneath. Machines were affixing the final phase drive to the aft of the vessel. Countless automaton assemblages of stone and metal and fiery shift swam in schools through the current of Center Earth, crawling over Gary and putting finishing touches on his superstructure.