The sky heavens were dying in silence.
Qiao Ming stood inside the cramped watching blister of Entry hall 328, his bare calloused feet braced against the freezing pale limestone flat stone slabs. The blister jutted out three paces from the giant stone dark rock hull of the Ark, suspended seventy deep-water lengths above the main drainage drain tubes, directly exposed to the biting empty pocket of the outer deep. Through the heavy, circular quartz viewport, the outer universe stretched out before him. Not as an amazing field of eternal light, but as a rotting expanse of bruised violet gas and dead cinder-cores.
He wiped the water drops from the brass eyepiece of his periscope with a dry square of flannel. The brass was cold enough to stick to bare flesh. His breath formed thick clouds of white vapor that froze into feathery frost along the bronze retaining ring.
He adjusted the height hair-width, bringing the crosshairs of the aiming cross onto the map points of the Northern Dipper Sector Seven.
Three seasons ago, that side of the sky had burned with the bright glare of twelve hundred young, azure stars. Sky suns that nourished forty mortal star-systems and fueled the spiritual academies of the Jade Court. Now, only fourteen faint, ember-red points of light remained, drifting sluggishly through the expanding void like dying fireflies over a stale pond.
