Quoted By:
“Targeting failure. Two millisecond deviation. The hypometric weapon folds outward and bites hard vacuum, missing the main hull of the trailing destroyer by less than ten meters. It reaches out again. A dangling docking umbilical tumbles away leaking water, severed by a clinical, mirror-smooth cut. But the cut goes no further. Minimal nausea; the feeling of disorientation fades in mere seconds.
I execute an emergency hairpin turn. Eighteen gees for seventy seconds. I hear the staccato drumbeat of pressurized blood; the crush of warm gel against my windpipe. Bubbles frame the distorted edges of my vision, accompanied by strands of dull crimson. It was air – air forced out from my own blood by a sudden spike in pulmonary pressure.
Danger readouts populate the bridge, warning that the incoming destroyers are close enough to overcome our vessel’s passive stealth system. Their targeting lasers probe the space around us, intersecting with the RAIN’s position intermittently as their operators attempt to narrow their tracking tolerances down to a tight fix.
A miniscule amount of laser backscatter sheds from the RAIN’s light-absorbent hull back into interstellar space. Miniscule, but enough.
I watch as the two missiles closest to our position reorient their heading with plumes of volatile monopropellant, slewing their needle-cone bodies to face the RAIN. Their seeker heads unfold like lily-flowers, exposing a serration of optical sensors calibrated for terminal guidance. Crenulated engine ports glow white, almost blue-hot as they push their warheads towards intercept speeds.
Death. I no longer fear the process, only the consequences. Two of those missiles lancing into the RAIN would turn her into a dead, airless husk. Three impacts would reduce her superstructure into a thin patter of micrometeorites orbiting this frozen, airless moon. We could afford our own deaths, but our home could not.
And so, we shall commit to this final gambit:”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, OCTOBER 23rd, PERSONAL JOURNAL
