An icy wasteland lay before them. Gamma Centauri’s faint light etched the Peacekeeper’s hull in stark white and ink-black shadows. Behind them was the nearly invisible disc of the dead planet, now reduced to nothing more than a haunting memory. All around them was the galactic starfield, a vast stellar river crisscrossed by dark bands, almost as desolately beautiful as the vista recalled by Liu on their approach voyage so long ago. Yet this was no source of wonder.
Nudge. The Peacekeeper was steadily accelerating into empty nothingness, each tiny step giving them a few more centimeters per second of speed forward. Nudge. Another pellet of fuel, a meticulously sculpted pellet of metal and lithium deuteride, irreversibly lost to the dark in a brilliant spray of plasma. They had just enough remaining delta-v to reach the nearest base without a tender, no more, no less.
Ahead in the featureless abyss, a single, steady pinprick of violet light glowed. The Relativity. Liu’s stomach tightened. Their jailer was still there. Colonel Meng’s last message still reverberated in their minds.
>Peacekeeper. You are reminded again to remain within line of sight and velocity matched to the Relativity. Do not deviate from your trajectory.
Their suspicion was palpable despite light seconds of distance and the cool neutrality of the message.
The crew was mostly in stasis, except for a small detachment that stayed awake for the dangerous journey in the outer solar system. Liu should have been frozen as well, but Sanchez had ordered him, along with Captain Schaefer and a few others, to stay awake. It was, as he put it, a matter of paramount importance and utmost secrecy.
Sanchez, Grayson and Liu stood alone in the CIC, with the captains on EVA standby.
“If we cannot trust each other, none of us will make it out of this,” Sanchez said with a matter of fact attitude. “I need to know that I can trust you.”
Grayson cleared his throat and nodded in acknowledgement, but Liu raised his voice.
“No more playing with stasis,” he said, voice shaking with a mix of resolve and fear. “Absolutely no more messing with stasis.”
Sanchez looked around the room, though it was empty. “Lieutenant Colonel, any objections?” Sanchez asked. Grayson’s stone face hardly budged.
“It is agreed then,” Sanchez said with a faint smile. “We will lock stasis chambers from all maintenance activity until further notice to prevent any more… accidents.”
>Disable nitrogen purge routine until end of voyage. Simultaneous authorization required to unlock disable: Major Liu Yang, Lieutenant Colonel Grayson Joseph, Colonel Sanchez Miguel.
“Satisfied, Liu?” Sanchez said with a feigned laugh.
Liu nodded. He had no choice not to. This was the smallest, most minimum victory he could achieve: everyone being able to enter stasis without the fear of never waking up again, a right secured for not only himself but for his treasonous superiors.
“Now let us think of what to do with the Relativity,” Sanchez continued calmly. “As you understand, they are a source of entropy. Entropy must be minimized.”
Silence rippled in the aftermath of this heavy statement.
"They are not our enemies, Liu. They are our comrades. And that is why this is necessary," Sanchez said, his voice deep with sorrow and regret.
His gaze focused on the tactical plot that showed their local astronomical environment. Dwarf planets. Comets. The Relativity.
>Nearest minor planet? Sanchez queried.
The Peacekeeper AI immediately responded, not understanding the implication.
>Nearest minor planet: uncharted, vector (5,1,1), range 0.1 million km, angular size 0.02 arcminutes.
>Line of sight to Relativity occultation time? Sanchez continued to press.
>t = 38 min +/- 5 min. Duration: 10 min.
A celestial blind spot with a duration of 10 minutes. This is just long enough for a maintenance accident to become irreversible. Sanchez turned from the plot, and his gaze was not one of rage, but of a terrible weariness. The numbers were in. The decision was made.
>Open audio channel, EVA team, he thought.
“EVA team here,” the voice identified as Schaefer said with a cold resolve.
“Suit up. I’ve sent you the instructions for emergency maintenance of a cruise missile,” Sanchez said with a strange mix of euphemisms. “This concerns the survival of us all.”
There was a brief pause before Schaefer replied, his voice heavy with regret.
“Acknowledged. We are suiting and will soon be ready for the… maintenance release.”
“Do it on my mark. Use the repair bot’s thrusters to give it some initial speed,” Sanchez commanded.
Liu stared at them with hollow eyes. His throat was dry. Sanchez noticed his discomfort and began to speak from his perch like a prophet delivering an apocalyptic judgement.
"A commander's duty is to his ship. To his mission. The Auditor taught us that, in her way. The Relativity is a variable. Its continued existence represents the probability of our demise approaching one. We are not murdering them. We are… optimizing our chances."
He was using her words, Liu thought. Sanchez’s face dimmed with a mix of internal rage, self hatred and disgust. It was as if a part of his soul had withered and died alongside the auditor. But the logic was flawless. It was the logic of survival at a scale where individual lives blurred into patterns and statistics.
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Liu spoke up haltingly but defiantly. “This is disgusting.”
He looked around for support, but found none. Right. Sanchez and Grayson had wisely sent the rest of the crew to stasis, with only a minimum staff to support outer solar system operations. Minimum witnesses.
"It's us or them, Major," Sanchez said, his voice low and stern, cutting through Liu's protest with absolute finality. This was not open for debate.
Liu felt a knot tighten in his stomach. The phrase was brutally simple. It erased everything moral and honorable in the universe. His throat felt like it was swollen shut as he struggled to swallow a knot of spit before opening his mouth to refute the grotesque logic.
"If it's us or them," Liu whispered, the words leaving his lips before he could stop them, "what makes us the ones who deserve to live?"
Sanchez glanced at Liu without bothering to turn his head before reverting his eyes to the projection. The look he gave Liu wasn't one of anger, or even impatience. It was a look of profound, almost pitiful dismissal. It was the same look the Auditor had given Liu when his mind was perceived as being too simple to grasp her grand design. In that glance was the entire answer: Deserving has nothing to do with it.
Empty command perches stretched both above and below them, home to only ghosts in the dim green light projected from the strategic display. The air was perfectly sterile, with a burning hint of ozone from the UV purifiers. Sanchez turned back to the projection. In that moment, the silence said more than any speech could.
>Lock comms, Major Liu Yang, 12 hours, Lieutenant Colonel Grayson suddenly ordered on Neuronet.
“Sir?” Liu asked, bewildered by the sudden betrayal.
“I cannot risk your sentimentality,” Grayson replied with a dull sadness in his voice. “I don’t expect you to participate, but I expect you to not interfere.”
In the corner of Liu’s vision, he saw Grayson’s hand float near his sidearm the same way that he saw in his near execution near the stasis chamber in another lifetime. He knew it was hopeless. The plan would happen with or without him.
“Do we need to invite you to leave, or are you willing to help us save ourselves?” Sanchez queried with a foreboding in his voice.
Liu remained silent and frozen at his perch before exhaling deeply. Grayson and Sanchez were going through with this. There was nothing he could do but bear witness to this monstrosity. They nodded, accepting his melancholic exhale as a form of acquiescence.
“EVA team, status?” Sanchez asked, carefully hiding the previous melancholy in his voice.
“We read you,” Schaefer from the EVA team replied.
“Check your status again,” Sanchez ordered, carefully skirting around anything that could possibly be flagged in a log audit. “Ensure no malfunctions.”
A significantly weaker jolt than the forceful ejection of a true cold launch was felt. A Neuronet update appeared in their minds.
>EVA team reporting. Deployable object has broken loose… during maintenance… while set to TV guidance. It is floating away, delta-V = 10 m/s.
Grayson muttered something to himself before realizing that the EVA team couldn’t hear him.
>Unfortunate. EVA team, return. Do not risk yourselves further. We will establish manual IR telemetry to… repair the component.
Liu’s world was reduced to the ghostly green symbology on his tac-glasses and the steady, pale purple star that was the Relativity’s reactor, half a million kilometers away. It was a constant in the void, a companion in the silence.
>LOS to Relativity compromised. Occultation in progress.
The purple dot dimmed like a light being slowly extinguished by a ghostly hand. The faint, structured gray smudge of the Relativity’s radiators dissolved into the darkness first. Then the reactor’s light was snuffed out, smothered by the perfectly black, airless disc of the intervening dwarf planet.
In that instant, the Relativity ceased to exist. The space where it had been was swallowed by a dark sphere within the void.
An encoded IR communication burst appeared. Liu’s combat uploads could read it like a book, but it was just a jumbled signal of nothing with no one to receive it except the missile. They weren’t communicating with it. This was simply a modulated pulse for time of flight ranging. They would need it for final trajectory calculations.
Another IR burst radiated out from the Peacekeeper. This time, it was encrypted with a key that Liu did not recognize, no doubt transmitting the final instructions.
The missile lit its pulse engine with great urgency in the dwarf planet’s shadows. Brilliant bursts of radiation lit the icy planetoids with a spectral white light for a fleeting instant before fading to oblivion. It was a high-thrust boost, possible only under the covert shadow of the dwarf planet. The engines cut immediately before leaving its icy umbra. Everything went dark again. The cruise missile was now an obsidian speck sliding across the icy darkness.
Then, a single pixel on the display flared back to life. A pinprick of violet light, growing steadily. The Relativity returned to their vision, oblivious to the reaper’s scythe creeping towards it. The cruise missile was now drifting into the shadow of their reactor’s plasma wake from over the horizon of the dwarf planet. All of their sensors would be blind in that direction. Liu was about to warn them before he realized that he had been muted.
The world held its breath. After an agonizing wait that stretched into subjective perpetuity, Liu saw another IR burst emitted from the Peacekeeper. This wasn’t encoded, but was rather a Neuronet hail. This was the trigger.
>Confirm receipt.
Three seconds later, a brilliant full spectrum star appeared where no star should have ever existed. Its luminosity was blinding, instantly over-saturating Liu’s sensors and scouring the void with X-rays. The sensors suddenly went dark, undoubtedly due to shutters automatically closing to protect them from the immense radiation flux. When the shutters reopened, the neutron and X-ray glow had disappeared.
>Commander Sanchez, reporting nuclear detonation, 500 m from Relativity, Grayson stated with a feigned calmness.
>It seems to have been an insurgent nuclear mine, Sanchez noted with what Liu knew to be a false emotional mask.
>A tragic loss. They died heroes defending humanity.
From their relatively close range, the aftermath of the detonation was clear on infrared sensors. A cloud of vapor with small bits of deformed metal was all that remained of the Relativity. The white hot debris spewed thermal radiation into space as they slowly faded to black. Within a few days only a few minor fragments would even be recognizable as artificial.
This was the expected result from such a close detonation. At several megajoules of X-ray irradiation per square meter, the plating on the entire side facing the blast would have evaporated instantly, sending a thermal shockwave and shower of plasma through the entire structure at the speed of sound in metal. The frontal armor of the warhead would have been propelled as a jet of vapor, blasting whatever structure remained after the irradiation with relativistic force before dissipating into dust.
Liu stood at attention in his restraints, already numb to the killing. What was a few hundred, compared to the millions they had just cleansed? There was no cathartic collapse or tears of redemption. No room for such excessive sentimentality existed in this world. Instead, he simply floated awkwardly, his feet only loosely planted on his perch, alternatively pressing down and floating up in the miniscule vibrations of the Peacekeeper.
Liu’s gaze drifted from the fading infrared smear that had been the Relativity to the band of stars beyond. So much has been lost already, and more will be lost in the future. Yet compared to the indifferent universe, it was less than nothing.
