I was floating freely in space, spinning slowly around myself. All around me was countless spaceships, missiles, bullets, explosions... Yet I was lucky. Not only I had survived Lodos' destruction, no one was shooting at me. I was no longer a threat, but just a part of the debris field.
Remaining Republic ships had started shooting all of their weapons with no tactics whatsoever. Everyone knew that they wouldn't last another ten minutes, so in the last moments, they were throwing whatever they had at the enemy.
A few stray projectiles passed in front of me, scaring me to death. After the initial shock passed, I laughed at myself. I didn't quite get why I was so scared, I was going to die once I ran out of oxygen anyway...
Suddenly, when I tried to rotate myself to look behind, I felt a weight on my right leg.
"Am I stuck on something?" I asked myself and looked down.
To my surprise, it was nothing like what I expected. Mei was holding my leg tightly. When I looked down, she looked up.
"You are alive!" I yelled. In return, she made a sign with her hand, indicating that my suit's communication system was not active.
"Of course, I am an idiot." I said, and pushed the button to activate the communications system. The moment I did that, I could hear everything the nearby Republic ships were saying to each other. There was chaos. I could only make sense of a few sentences among
"Fighter down!"
"Our railgun tunnel was bent by the collision, commander! We can't reload it, it is jammed!"
"We've lost the aft starboard engine!"
"Get some medics to the bridge! The XO is injured!"
Mei slowly punched my leg to get my attention again. Using the signs she made with her hands, she instructed me to switch to a private comms channel. The random chattering between Republic ships stopped.
"Finally." I heard Mei through the speakers in my space suit. "Your leg is leaking air."
"Oh?"
"This will be the last time I save your life." she said.
"Don't force yourself." I said. "I will run out of air either way."
"If you die, you will leave me alone here." she said. "I don't want to be alone."
"Ms. Admiral sounds scared."
"Honestly, screw the navy, screw the glory of Mars, screw whatever my service records stand for." she said. "I am scared! This is the end of us, Kagan. It is time for us to give back all the atoms we've borrowed from the universe. I just want to be with you until the end."
I couldn't say anything back for a few minutes. It was touching, her words were more powerful than I expected them to be.
"Mei..." I finally talked. "Thank you."
She just tightened her grip as a response. We both remained silent, but we were connected through our feelings.
I looked at the Sun. Almost all Republic ships were gone, and Commander Arf was supposed to activate the Crystal Mirage at any moment. I switched back to the previous comms channel to get a clue.
"We have one beamship, coming around!"
"Target the new swarm!"
"We need a replacement tank here, to the port side! Hurry!"
"Oh, ****! We have environmental alert!"
"Confirmed! Extreme radiation alert from the Sun!"
My suit's radiation light came on as well.
"It must be the Crystal Mirage. All ships ALCON 0!"
"Wait!"
Suddenly, radiation dropped back to safe levels. We were exposed to dangerous radiation for no longer than a few seconds.
I switched back to the private comms channel.
"Shh, Mei... Are we dead?"
"I don't know, are we?" she asked. "I don't care if this is what afterlife is like."
I switched back to the Republic navy channel, again.
"What was that!?"
"The Crystal Mirage is destroyed! The Crystal Mirage is destroyed! It is gone, guys!"
"****!"
"Oh, the humanity..." I said. "Oh, the humanity! That's it... We've lost."
With the failure of Commander Arf, and destruction of the Crystal Mirage, humanity had no chance to fight the machines back anymore. All runaway civilian parties would be discovered after a while, and destroyed by the ruthless machines.
I switched the channel back to private one more time, but stopped before giving the bad news to Mei. She didn't have to experience this pain in her last hours. However, I was crying silently, looking at the stars.
After a while, I started speaking to myself.
"I thought we would reach out to the remotest regions of Milky Way one day... Humanity, as one. I thought we would travel through nebulae and watch new stars form. I thought we would live inside gas giants and watch lightning shows one day. I thought we would hop into tourist ships and visit black holes devouring massive stars!" I sobbed. "Turns out they were just some nice dreams..."
"Kagan..." Mei spoke. "Are you okay? I can't hear you."
I couldn't hold it back anymore.
"The Crystal Mirage is destroyed."
Mei's eyes suddenly filled with tears. She released my leg and climbed up to my chest, allowing oxygen to leak out from my damaged suit. She hugged me tightly, crying out loudly. I hugged her back. Only then I saw that her suit was damaged too, in the chest area.
We were both losing oxygen rapidly now, but none of us cared.
I watched the destruction of the last Republic ship: An escort carrier blowing up into millions of pieces.
The motherships called their swarms back and engaged their engines. They were probably going to attack Deimos, and finally the Martian surface. After a few minutes, the only thing I could see was an endless debris field expanding in all directions.
Unexpectedly, Mei made a sudden move. She grabbed a piece of cloth floating around.
"This looks like Alliance uniform." she said, before tucking it into the hole on my leg. "There. You have plus half an hour to live."
"What about you?" I asked.
"Don't worry." she said, ripping apart a piece of the cloth. She shoved that part to the hole on her chest. "Now I also have plus half an hour."
"Enough time to watch the apocalypse." I said.
"Shut up about war and all that stuff." Mei said. "Look. Look at the stars with me. Let's watch the beauty of cosmos together."
We started watching the stars.
"I've served aboard spaceships my whole career..." Mei said. "I feel ashamed. I never watched the stars for fun."
"To be fair, warships usually don't have windows." I said. She laughed.
"I see what I've been missing now..." she said. "Maybe the end of humanity isn't that bad after all, if everyone gets to watch the stars and all."
Now, it was my turn to laugh.
"Did you know that our galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the center?" she pointed in the general direction of Sagittarius. "It drags spacetime itself as it travels through the universe. Imagine an object having so much mass to anchor an entire galaxy!"
"You know what I would like to see the most?" I asked. "Pillars of Creation. Imagine standing a few hundred light years away from the massive gas structure. It would be majestic!"
"The Orion Nebula would beat it anytime." Mei said. "I would like to see a millisecond pulsar. Think of a star completing a rotation around itself in mere milliseconds! If that isn't amazing, I don't know what is!"
"I always wanted to land on a comet."
"I know, right!" Mei screamed with excitement. "This might sound weird, but what I really wanted to see was a big asteroid collision. Like, how it would look like if a 1km asteroid hit Pluto... It would be spectacular!"
"No, it is not weird at all." I said. "Now you made me curious too... I also wonder what a large asteroid collision would look like. But I was wishing for something even better."
"Which is?"
"I would LOVE to see Betelgeuse going supernova."
"Oh, wow!" Mei said. "Now that would certainly be incredible!"
Suddenly, Mei and I were blinded by a white light.