The heavy, scarred boarding ramps of the forty-seven battered civilian transports rested against the polished pale Sylfen wood of Primary Docking Bay Alpha, and for a long, agonizing minute, the thousands of refugees huddled inside the dark cargo holds simply stared out at the vibrant, starlight-illuminated hangar in total, paralyzed disbelief.
They had spent weeks packed into failing ships, fleeing the collapsing infrastructure of the Obsidian Expanse while ruthless warlords burned their colonies to ash, and their entire reality had been reduced to the desperate, freezing dark of the void. They fully expected to be dragged off the ships by heavily armed slavers, branded with energy collars, and marched directly into the toxic plasma mines of the Core Sectors, because that was the only language the universe had ever spoken to them.
