From the bridge of the lead transport, the planet below stopped being a planet.
Nobody spoke for the first several seconds. There wasn't a sound that fit what they were watching, and the silence that filled the bridge felt less like restraint and more like nobody's voice had caught up yet to what their eyes were reporting.
It started as a single point of light, impossibly bright even through the reinforced viewport's auto-dimming filter, somewhere deep beneath the planet's crust where a reactor the size of a man's chest had just stopped obeying every law it was built to respect. The light didn't spread so much as it arrived everywhere at once, the planet's own curvature lighting up from the inside like something had reached in and switched on a second sun buried in its core.
Then the surface began to lift.
