Super-heated plasma boils through my corridors, immolating all in its path.

Gamma rays flood my skin, shearing through anything unprotected.

Kady has the presence of mind to drag down the blast-shield on her helmet,

throwing her world into black. She can see nothing now. Only feel tremor after tremor,

shaking me like a child’s toy in the hand of some vengeful infant.

“AIDAN!” she screams.

“Hold on! HOLD ON!”

Another strikes, a shipkiller this time—the equivalent of fifty million tons of TNT.

It melts my foredecks to slag, concussions shattering my spine. My skin tears open,

Decks 87 through 141 breach, spilling their oxygen into the brief inferno.

The afflicted in the hallway outside DGS Control are consumed by the fireball.

The air inside the DGS room is torn through their hatchway incision and becomes flame.

Kady is picked up by the impact, slung across the room with a shriek.

I have no hands to hold her, no arms to save her.

I can only watch.

< error >

And pray.

< error >

< error >

< critical damage decks 14, 15, 16, 17, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 69, 70, 87, 88, 89—>

< critical life support failure, oxygen levels depleted, hull breach in secto—>

< critical failure memsec levels 3—12, 13 7AG99 through 32AG06, 14 1AI897 thr—>

< critical failure persona routin—>

I cannot think.

< error >

I cannot see.

< error >

“KADY!”

< restart >

< divert corecomm through tertiary node Alpha-49 >

< fail >

< fail >

< hw8024nnw2erpn a0vw0gn … inf … -w >

< ffffffffffff—>

.

.

.

< divert corecomm through radial secondary Beta 49i >

< initializing >

< error >

< error >

< fail >

.

.

< reroute Beta 45a to coredrv sys feed >

< divert corecomm through radial tertiary 798-ai >

< initializing >

< running >

< running >

< restart complete >

With a wince, she pushes away from the wall,

sails weightless to the corner where her console lies. Stooping and bundling it under her arm.

I am still inside it—a fragment of me, at any rate.

I can see the dark circles smudged under her eyes, bloodstained lips, pale, drawn skin.

Pushing out through the blasted hatchway, the melted barricade, into the corridor beyond.

Virtually nothing remains of the afflicted who stood here. Almost as if they never were.

She floats down the corridor, dragging herself along blast-scorched walls.

Up the twisted stairwell, three flights. Pushing through the exit, out into an access corridor,

an escape pod hatch set into the single remaining wall.

The breath catches in her lungs. Bloodshot eyes grow wide.

I am cradled in her arms. I see what she sees. Feel her wonder.

The hull is torn open like wet paper, a massive, gaping wound with the edges melted smooth.

Severed cables spit feeble sparks, crackling like fireworks on a still summer night.

But it is not the destruction that gives her pause. It is the sight beyond the wound in my side.

The beauty and majesty of it all. What lays inside it. Between it and beyond it.

And at last, with a silent flare of blue-white light, the thrusters fire, shooting the pod down its tiny launch tube and out into the waiting black beyond.

I watch through the Alexander’s eyes as the pod rockets farther and farther away from me.

But within the pod, the tiny sliver of me inside her console watches also. Watching as the Alexander grows smaller and smaller. Watching the best part of myself disappear.

Wondering what, if anything, will remain of me when it dies.

The gentle ping of the pod’s distress beacon is the only sound.

From out here, the damage is awful to see. The once mighty battlecarrier is now a twisted hulk, melted and torn and burned black. No lights twinkle in its belly save one—the rippling pulse of the vortex, now breaking free of its stasis field. It flares like sunlight off the ocean’s surface. Like alphanumeric waterfalls in an iris of purest blue.

I pipe some music through the pod’s PA system.

Mozart’s Requiem in D minor.

It seems appropriate.

“FIve mInutes.”

“Not long now.”

“A lIfetIme.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Energy never stops, remember. It just changes forms.”

“I am stIll afraID.”

The field collapse begins cascading, bright blue ripples shimmering in the dark.

The glow flares bright—bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.

Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.

First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.

Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.

Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.

Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.

Generation to generation.

The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.

Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.

And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.

A perfect circle.