Humanity Endures

Part 3 - Light's End | Chapter 2

Before Velan had even finished his final sentence, cheering and applause had sprung up throughout the entire ship, the crew's fear having been transmuted into courage through one of the most formidable weapons available to a good leader: powerful words. Velan was able to speak honestly to his crew; despite the misgivings of his cynical mind, his naive heart was confident in the chances of a good outcome — his encouraging tone, infused with sincerity, was even more impactful than it would normally be. Nevertheless, as excitation and energy flooded him, Velan could not help but feel as if the universe would find a way to pay him back for his ignorant bravery.

Half a minute later, the order to breach into the Light's End system was given, and Velan ordered Terxah to obey it an instant after that. Within seconds the ship began shaking, convulsing, and straining, as it struggled to complete an inordinately difficult breach back into normal space — a difficult breach made even more strenuous by the fact that an immense amount of power was being diverted to the Nemesis's gravity nullifiers in anticipation of the deadly black hole on the other side. As the Nemesis continued to battle with the arcane forces of the Remnant, Velan's mind was forced to weather a seemingly endless tide of panicked textcomms from other ships in the fleet; the breach into normal space was proving troublesome, and dangerous, for all of them too. Many warships suffered minor damage to much of the expeditionary force as their armor warped or fractured under the weight of the Remnant's assault; these struggles were as unprecedented as they were utterly terrifying.

As Terilan, the prime admiral, had ordered all vessels to enter into normal space at the same time, rather than adopting the standard strategy of entering into a system in waves, none in the fleet had any information on what lay within the increasingly hostile system that awaited them. Evidently, Terilan wanted to bring overwhelming force against whatever lay within Light's End as quickly as possible, preventing his force from potentially being destroyed in groups by whatever possibly occupied the system, but having not even scouted the system first seemed to endanger the entire expeditionary force; Velan usually trusted the judgement of his superiors, but now, even he had his doubts. Worse still, this strategy meant that the smaller ships which had finished opening a breach first would have to wait until every last vessel in the expeditionary force had done so as well — an appalling reality when, in these strange circumstances, opening and maintaining a Remnant breach had the potential to cause damage to one's own ship. Velan realized that the fleet he was a part of stood to suffer devastating casualties from doing something as simple as entering the system they were investigating, but nevertheless, he had orders to follow.

Because of these orders, once the Nemesis had forced open a rupture back into normal space, Velan had no choice but to wait for another minute, allowing the larger vessels to complete their own breaches, all while the unimaginable forces of the Remnant threatened to tear his helpless ship apart; once the order to finally enter into his ship's breach was given, a relieved Velan immediately ordered Terxah to comply with the command. Within seconds the Nemesis, travelling at one-quarter of FSA, or Fastest Safe Acceleration — the maximum acceleration that a vessel could undertake before its crew was adversely affected — slipped through the breach back into normal space. Once the Nemesis had passed through the breach, however, it was not confronted with the comforting blackness of space, but rather, Velan was quickly surrounded by a brutal inferno — an inferno fuelled by Terilan's fleet, as the Empire's ships burned and detonated around it.

Falling through the ether and lightly striking Velan's ship across the bow was a flaming, burning cruiser, with a frigate lodged in its rear: the two warships had been forcefully and unexpectedly merged, and this was not an uncommon sight. All around Velan, there was fire, shattered metal, and the space-borne corpses of the unlucky; the expeditionary fleet was being torn apart. A flurry of desperate textcomms flew between what remained of the confused fleet's vessels as they attempted to decipher what was happening; Velan, more concerned with staying alive than finding out why his life was threatened, ordered Terxah to find a path through the carnage before him. This was a carnage that only seemed to grow as more ships made their way into normal space, appearing in unexpected and entirely dangerous places amidst the bloodbath, and sometimes even appearing inside other human ships. Velan, kept in his chair only by the multitude of deployable restraints that had wrapped themselves around him, could do nothing but watch as hundreds of thousands of human ships were annihilated in a metal blizzard — the result of ships appearing either inside or too close to each other, whose resulting disarray made warships slam into their allies by the thousands. Where there should have been the glorious entrance of the human navy, there was a rampant inferno, a dark cloud of shattered steel, and a few million desperate ships trapped within a nightmare forged from the wrecks of their allies. As wrecked or damaged ships flew in all directions, navigation through the catastrophe became more and more difficult with each passing second, even for a pilot as skilled as Terxah; while clouds of debris rattled the hull of the Nemesis, many turrets or weaker systems were damaged or disabled entirely despite the attempts at evasion and the vessel's thick armor. Velan saw events unfold, and he commanded his ship through its evasion, but the terrible majesty of what was occurring overwhelmed; he found it difficult to do anything but watch, and cower in fear, despite the MECS coursing through his veins. After nearly a minute of desperate flight at FSA through the rapidly-unfolding catastrophe, weaving through disintegrating formations of warships and shooting through clouds of debris, Terxah, her face saturated with beads of sweat, told Velan via textcomm, "The ship is trapped, and there is no possible path around the ships surrounding us. The debris nearby will crush the ship in less than a minute. Requesting instructions."