The porthole showed dark rock.
Then it showed nothing, because the rock was gone, and Lilith was already inside whatever had replaced it.
The drill's established rhythm — the grinding cadence that had spent six hours becoming the background of everyone's consciousness, the sound the brain had filed under normal and stopped processing — simply stopped. Replaced, immediately and without transition, by a sound that had no good name: metal under hydraulic pressure, the hull flexing against a force it wasn't designed to flex against, a high sustained shriek that went through teeth and found somewhere behind the sternum to live.
The vibration changed entirely. Not the rhythmic forward grind of the drill anymore — a full-body shudder, lateral rather than forward, Lilith no longer eating through something but being held by something, the nose angling slightly downward as something cold and total and pressurized became the dominant force against the hull.
