Oblivion watched the bright thread of a distant starwarpskip as if it were an insult.
His throne-room was not a throne room at all but the corroded heart of a ship grown from metal and dark-space mineral, ribs like the husks of tectonic moons. Around him moved General Xancar, a silhouette in a uniform of practical cruelty; sharp-voiced, efficient, the kind of officer who took no joy except in missions completed and lives saved from the inefficiency of mercy.
"Target located," Xancar said. His voice slid along Oblivion's senses like an algorithm. "Planet designated: Terra. The Star of Aggamotog—confirmed. It radiates the signature your readings required."
Oblivion's mask was black matter, smooth and hungry, with two holes for eyes that were not eyes at all but white fires in a dark sky. The armor across his shoulders was dull and ashen, forged from the heart of a dead neutron star. It kept him together; without it, his essence would tear at the seams and spill into vacuum like a sun bled through a sieve.
"Send the message," Oblivion said. He did not raise his voice; the ship obeyed him as oceans obey the moon.
A gargantuan battleship—first wave—bloomed from the mothership's belly and flamed toward Earth like a gale-formed predator. Its mission: make example, take the bar of gravity and light that held a certain small blue planet together and put Oblivion's emblem upon its chest. If the Celestials resisted, they would be restructured; if they did not, then he would take what mattered anyway.
Xancar left with the ship in a fury of engines and directive code. Somewhere in the serried bowels of the mothership, rows of cells held prisoners and secrets. One of them had been a boy.
Timothy Tyler Tuckerson—Tim—was not a soldier in any formal sense. Young, lean, 17, with a tendency to find locks where locks were not supposed to be found, Tim had spent weeks learning the pattern of the guards' circuits. He had spent months learning how to breathe while his heart shouted. When the moment came, a corridor sealed by a careless door and a timing error, he was ready. He slipped through the backstairs of the prison like a line of code finding an off-by-one error.
He didn't get far.
A Xirok patrol found him sprinting to the docking shaft and answered with a single plasma bolt meant to pin, to warn. It hit him square across the chest anyway. Tim's body obeyed Newton and exploded outward into nothing more than a ragged fall and a screaming silence. The airlock spat him like a rejected package into blackness. He tumbled, the atmosphere of the mothership and then the thin fringe of interspace closing over him, and the last thing he saw was the blue arc of a planet below.