Humanity Endures

Part 3 - Light's End | Chapter 2

Velan, alert as ever thanks to a potent cocktail of adrenaline and MECS, hastily scanned the area surrounding his ship with said vessel's sensors, and was justifiably alarmed when he confirmed Terxah's findings: the Nemesis, as well as a few other unfortunate ships, was entirely surrounded by impassable debris, wrecks, and crippled vessels incapable of serious movement. As the deadly detritus around him, as if animated by the cruel hand of fate, began to close in on his luckless ship, Velan, seeing only one way out of his predicament, warned all vessels around the Nemesis of his new, ruthless course of action, before ordering Yelazar, the Nemesis's Chief Gunnery Officer, to carry it out.

The following moment, the Nemesis's remaining nuclear turrets turned on the sparsest region of impassible debris, and, attempting to be precise, they used the force of repeated nuclear detonations to push aside — or annihilate — the destroyed vessels in Velan's way. Great spheres of atomic flame seemed to illuminate the blackness of space itself, outshining even the fires of failing human warships nearby as they obliterated or relocated the wrecks that had trapped the Nemesis, and others like it, disregarding the fact that any number of them might have harbored survivors, for the sake of the greater good. With each semi-intact wreck that came apart under his nuclear barrage, Velan's mind strained, and his soul tore just a bit more; making decisions, and sacrificing lives, were things any commander in a desperate situation had to do, but not even this knowledge made such acts palatable. Before Light's End, the loss of even a single ship, with all of its thousands of crew members, would be a tragedy in the Empire; Velan was now watching as millions suffered and perished in a calamity whose source he didn't even understand, but still had to survive regardless of his ignorance. MECS stemming the tide of tears which yearned to break free from his eyes, and his veins pulsing with fear as the debris around his ship advanced inexorably, Velan ordered the intensity of his bombardment to increase. The mild nuclear inferno Velan had created easily incinerated the clouds of metal debris — among which was no small number of flash-frozen corpses — that stood between the Nemesis, those ships around it, and survival; this debris would have impeded or damaged any vessels passing through them, but now that they were ash, they were harmless. Any larger wrecks were either destroyed or pushed aside by the atomic assault. Not wasting an instant, or even waiting for an order, Terxah then flew the Nemesis through the violence-born breach in the anarchic carnage, and after a few tense moments of soaring past debris and immolated warships, the Nemesis, its hull scorched and tinted black by the flames of its dying comrades earlier, was now greeted by millions of kilometers of mostly-empty space, occupied only by the battered survivors of the catastrophe behind them. A few hundred human vessels escaped their demise through the breach Velan had created, though the carnage behind them was intense enough that this trickle of survivors soon slowed, and then stopped; any laggards were callously crushed by debris. Hundreds of thousands of additional human craft were making their way out of the debris-field through other gaps in the catastrophe, and though the human fleet had been ravaged like it never could have imagined as it merely arrived at its destination, the majority of its ships were still functional and ready for whatever the black hole threw at it next. At least, they thought they were.

As the appearance of safety returned to those within the Nemesis, sighs of relief could be heard across the bridge and most other parts of the damaged vessel, though no one was joyful, for while they and many others had survived, millions of people were being wiped out in the madness just a few thousand kilometers away. Worse still, it was unknowable as to whether any rescue attempts could be made: the gargantuan figure of Light's End, a blackened orb true to its name, loomed threateningly before them, demanding attention and promising death. The black hole's eyeless, enigmatic glare strained the already weakened wills of those who witnessed it, while its depths promised to be the harbinger of a galactic crisis the likes of which humans could not even imagine. Those shivering few who confronted the most unnatural part of nature felt all their grief be replaced by fear; the human warships were but shimmering specks of dust, illuminated by the sparks of their dying comrades behind them, as they cowered before a mountain of malice. Indeed, it was difficult to do anything else when confronted with something so ominously powerful, so seemingly malevolent, and so utterly mysterious. Though Light's End had been estimated to have only a few thousand solar masses, its sheer scale seemed to be almost equal to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way; why the human fleet had not been consumed by it yet, no one could guess, nor were they brave enough to try. That monstrous black hole had devoured the cosmos since long before humanity had entered into existence, and something told the humans that it would do so for a long time after humanity had been erased from the face of the universe.