The morning sun of Sphere One rose not with a sudden glare, but with a gentle golden bloom.
Outside the grand spatial reception concourses of all twelve Golden Karma Dyson-Spheres, the evacuation fleets were docking in endless, orderly lines.
One hundred thousand Sunshine-Gold cruisers opened their passenger ramps.
A sea of one trillion mortal refugees stepped onto the wide, heated boarding platforms, their eyes wide with quiet apprehension.
They had spent generations living under the thumb of the Seven Usury Vaults.
To them, government promises of housing always meant damp canvas tents, contaminated water barrels, and armed guards demanding eighty percent of their daily wages as municipal rent.
Among the crowd in Concourse Seven walked Mother Liu, a widowed seamstress from Planet Nine-Four-Two.
She wore a faded linen dress patched with twenty different colors of thread. She clutched the hands of her eight-year-old twin daughters, while her ten-year-old son carried their entire earthly possessions in a single cardboard box tied with rough twine.
