Fallen

"Don't stop."
-Motto RNS Ardent Fury

It was hopeless. The fleet was shattered. The last elements had split up after Wolf 359 scattering in every direction in a vain attempt to avoid the sweeping wave of slaughter. In three days the entire sector has been smashed. Noone even knew what happened to the 9th and 24th fleets beyond there. Some things simply dissapeared. On the 4th day the remnants of the Home Fleet gathered at Lagrange Point 3. The reinforcements promised had never come. Would never come. Never existed.

Terminator brakes, spilling light across the assemblage. Twenty-one ships. Far from anyone's last best hope, they simply were there. Some willing, others not. Doom has a strange way of affecting people. Some meet it like a normal everyday event, the same way they greet their morning coffee, with a strange mix of indifference and calm. Others take it on their shoulders accepting their fait and doing their damnedest to avert it. Others retreat into themselves whether from cowardice or fear or just simple contemplation.

Either way, death would reach for them all.

In ready rooms and on bridges and in corridors men and women waited for the invetitable. The automated silence that surrounded them broken only by the mechanical and electrical noises of the ships. For a moment the ships seem more alive then their crews. Living beings filled with automated drones oblivious to their surroundings. No fear from them. No gloom coursed through their circuits unaware of those inside and their feelings.

Death came. They fought.

It might have been easier for those in the front. They simply just ceased to be. Those behind had to keep going if just to cease a little later rather then right now. Light, plasma, nothing. Over and over. Ten times. Elven times. Twelve. No lifepods here, no escaping. They don't accept their deaths in many cases but they don't flee them. They fight. It's pointless. Either way, death has them. Still they fight. They fight in a way that causes many to look at them with a respect and honor otherwise never accorded to people. It's desperation and hope all in one. Hope for a future already lost and desperation to cling to it for one last moment.

There's only two ships left. They're damaged. Bleeding. Heroic acts are committed. History will never record the efforts or the achievements. Perhaps that makes them more heroic. It doesn't make them any less remembered. They still fall. Unknown, unremembered, unimportant.

Just one left. Alone. Isolated but yet still not by itself. The legacy of hundreds, thousands before it stand behind it in one last moment. Now. For that moment the sole survivor is invincible. Then it's gone. The ship is gone. Everything is gone.

There is no wisdom here. War presents none of that. War has only one constant: change.

//Not quite sure why I wrote this. Doubt it's even all that good. Somehow I was thinking of the Russian soldier of 1941 and how to capture them and their actions...even if for some of them it turned out far better.