Free Prophet Margin by Simon Spurrier

discourage even the most insane of thrillseekers from a stage invasion.
    Ha, yes. They're turning away.
    Actually... they're turning away rather fast. Fleeing, you might say. And what's that glowing thing they've left behind? Ah well. I can't be held responsible for the peculiarities of my fans. The show must go on, as they say.
    Take a deep breath. Feeeeeeel the music, that's it.
    A-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-f-
    Boom.

SEVEN
     
    The sky shook.
    Roolán had always assumed that descriptive sentences of that nature ("the earth moved,"; "the ground shivered,"; "the stars quaked,") were the hyperbolic work of overenthusiastic authors. Not so now.
    The sky really did shake. He felt it all through his body, like a highly impersonal massage from someone with cricket stumps instead of fingers.
    Confined to the farmhouse by his parents, he'd smuggled himself onto the corrugated roof where he could stare upwards and watch the show undetected. Peering across the irregular surface of Shtzuth presented a bizarre spectacle: every spare inch of ground occupied by a ticket holder, sprawled on their backs (or dorsal carapaces, etc) with their eyes fixed on the sky.
    Roolán's parents were charging a stupendous amount for "ground rental". He could see them in the distance, ambling about on hov-scooters selling refreshments at six times their value. Roolán had never seen them so happy.
    Thus far, the show had been breathtaking, with spectral images of Widdiso hazing like supernovae across the atmosphere, haloed by a spaghetti trail of lasers. Every soaring crescendo, every orchestral dirge, every reflective breath that the maestro took was reproduced in gargantuan scale.
    Clouds ceased to be the usual drab tetramethane smudges that blotted the sky and became instead nuggets of gold or sapphire, snagging at whatever luminescent artillery was sweeping past. Arcs of light lifted and fell, prismic shapes arose and broke apart, puddles of colour ran together like molten lead, here bubbling to form a brief image of Widdiso's face, there crackling in time with the orchestra's weird harmonies.
    But now there was something new. Some cataclysmic lighting effect that blossomed from a single point; a chrysanthemum of light and shadow that hurt Roolán's eyes, even through the heavy cloud. Down amongst the reclining audience cheers and drunken bouts of applause rippled in vague eddies before dying down. Even those spectators who'd been sucking on kpokkian neg-cactus blotters couldn't fail to notice how the expanding fireball continued to stretch towards the horizon, now so bright that even the clouds offered no refuge for stinging eyes.
    One by one, the other effects snapped away. Wobbly cloud holograms crackled then faded, auroras consumed by the roiling fire.
    Then the air started to shake.
    The crowd exchanged glances, muttered about how realistic modern special effects were becoming, decided that things were perhaps a little too realistic and started screaming.
    Then the atmosphere was dappled by tumbling motes of light, the clouds ignited, the screams reached a cacophonic pitch.
    And lumps of debris travelling at an eyejarring velocity shot from the sky and set about flattening the crowd.
    Roolán watched a party of Pothirii hippies go the way of Krakatoa nearby, a lump of flaming wreckage striking their chilled-out patch with nuclear force. The dungworld shitcrust shattered open, frothing magmacrap boiled into the air, the ground heaved like a living thing and Roolán opened his mouth to scream.
    It saved his life.
     
    In the aftermath of the disaster, geoforensic teams estimated that ninety-four per cent of the people who had been on the dungworld when the Plasmatomic weapon detonated in low-orbit had died; mostly by being drowned in the scalding liquid shite that swept across the planet. Subjected to a sustained bombardment from above, the solidified crust of Shtzuth was broken apart, unleashing a tide of fluid excrement that swept up entire