Quoted By:
“It took many minutes for the hunter-drone to die.
Although its final, defiant strike against the flagship had given the Mazarin fleet pause, it ultimately failed to shatter their collective advance. As the irradiated hulk of their command vessel drifted back, the rest of the flotilla burned forward with single-minded determination – drawn to a flickering barrier-field that had finally showed strain under the force of their bombardment. Every shattered slug and deflected fusion-flare added rippling stress-distortions to the shield: an obvious sign of impending failure.
I recall the moment when the Mizarians first drew blood: a trio of kinetic slugs ripping past the barrier to smash against one of hunter-drone’s orbiting blade-rings. The Mizarians saw it too. Over the next two minutes, their fleet consumed over forty kilotons of high-yield ordinance: accelerator barrels and launch cylinders glowing cherry-red as they rallied for a final, desperate push.
No material could resist such an assault for an appreciable amount of time. The drone’s armor went first – slagged by successive fusion detonations before being rent apart by a hail of kinetic rounds. The internals followed – blown out into chains of glittering fragments as the Mizarian vessels advanced close enough to focus fire on prior impact points.
I forced myself to watch until a final brace of heavy slugs – fired from the remaining cruisers - ripped straight into the ship’s unprotected centerline, coring through the main hull in a shower of plasticized metal. The rings collapsed into simple debris. The light inside the hull dimmed to black, and the radio transmission became formless noise.
Flares lit above the hull: destroyers and cruisers flaring retrograde thrust to dock with the hunter-drone’s corpse.
I remember turning away to return the to bridge, filled with a strange melancholy. A remarkably anticlimactic end for an intelligence which had seen and promised so much.
“Wait, companion,” said MERRYGATE, signaling with the ever-soft touch of holographic acoustics.
A glimmer of activity. The touch of familiar radio noise against the RAIN’s sensors, barely a whisper above the endless singing of MIZAR-V’s magnetic fields.
“The atrium of my heart is now perched at the precipice. The soft dissolution which shall follow in my wake will be a tragedy but not a futile one, for I have dictated that ALL NIGHTS.
ALL NIGHTS.
ALL NIGHTS.
ALL NIGHTS.…”
“…must end,” whispered MERRYGATE, finishing her counterpart's dying prayer.
