They left me behind?
Crackling static poured through the ship’s speakers. In the
back of my mind, I knew it would never be broken by the sound of familiar
voices—but there’s always that chance, isn’t there? With a heavy hand, I
flicked a switch at the console and ended that empty noise, that futile music.
They left me behind.
Silence is the lack of static, the lack of hope that I would
ever see the convoy again or hear the warmth of another human voice. Silence is
the color black, the color of the empty starless space that stretched out
around me in all directions without end.
I fell out of hyperspace only two light-years from where we
made the jump. We were being pursued—by what, I don’t know. The relativistic
calculations were hastily made, the coordinates were off their mark by entire
degrees, but the captain gave the order to jump anyway. Half of our fleet must
have been scattered in that frantic escape, left behind, left discarded like
dead weight thrown overboard a sinking ship. That’s why there would never be an
answer on the radio. They would let me drown in this silent darkness.
COLLISION IMMINENT!
An alarm sounded and a warning
light began to blink on the console, cutting through the coffin-gloom of my
cockpit. Instinctively, I reached for the controls and fired the reverse
thrusters. The flickering white light from the engines illuminated the hazard
in front of me: an enormous asteroid cloaked in complete darkness plummeted straight toward my ship. Quickly, I cycled the starboard maneuvering
jets and performed a sharp pirouette in space before throttling forward at
maximum acceleration. Another alarm, another red warning light, another massive
asteroid loomed in front of me. There was no time to lose, I reached for the
firing controls and unloaded a volley of white-hot plasma fusion bolts from the
forward blaster cannon.
The shots cut through the
darkness, burning with the brilliance of newborn stars; they streaked towards
the wall of solid rock that was closing in quickly. On impact, a silent explosion
shattered the asteroid, scattered enormous chunks of molten rock in all
directions, and filled the void with sudden radiance. I guided my ship through the burning chaos and watched in awe as so
many glowing embers danced in the darkness around me. They brought light and
life to the dark heart of this extinguished galaxy.
If I am going to die…
If I am
going to die, it will be here on a cosmic funeral pyre, burning like laughter
against this cold abyss. I will not drown in darkness!