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he ship was three miles long, one mile in diameter.
How old it was amounted to a lot of numbers, and it was not really important any more—this was deep time, very deep time.
The name of the ship translated to “Sky God’s Ax,” and it was a battle cruiser.
The hull was twenty five yards thick, solid collapsed matter, the spaces of the atoms eliminated to produce a substance so dense it rivaled the composition of a white dwarf star.
However, an incredibly savage energy beam, a weapon so horrific it cannot be described properly, so fierce that it actually killed its own crew the next time it was used, holed her in her final battle.
The hole was a small one, and in the heat of an engagement that generated as much raw energy as a small quasar, it wasn’t noticed until it was too late.
The atmosphere escaped and her crew died in seconds.
The ship went on.
Its velocity was .93 C—she was preparing to make the jump to subspace when her crew died, and she was under full power.
So close to the speed of light, time passed slowly, but it passed.
Her mighty atomic piles ran out of energy; her systems, as bushings, fuses and connections failed one by one, shut down before the power was gone—but even then, some of her cybernetic devices functioned, fecklessly and in total futility, for a very long time.
The ship sank to the universal temperature of deep space, not quite absolute zero.
The corpses of her crew, a form of life unknown on Earth, being somehow intermediate between birds and amphibians, freeze-dried into dessicated mummies as hard as stone.
Still she plunged on.
Her mass and velocity sent her through a red giant star like a bullet through a melon. Her temperature raised by a scant few degrees, and she was scarred by collisions with a few straggling asteroids.
Inside, in a main corridor running the length of her, stem to stern, her main rail gun, capable of driving a solid sphere of depleted uranium the size of an orange to .99 C. Her batteries of quick-firing guns, her missile launchers, her particle beam cannons, lasers, masers and disruptors silent forever. Her torpedoes and drone attack craft dormant in the vast bays, those that once carried the death of worlds in the cobalt bomb warheads of the armament pods.
The ship was dead, her drives silent, her nuclear fires burned cold.
And still she plunged on.
The rock-like carcass of her captain was on the bridge, his mottled ocher skin now an impossibly tough leather.
Nothing lived on the ship.
Her vermin had died with her crew.
But the ship plunged on, slipping the tug of gravity with her momentum, moving through a galaxy here, a nebula there, always in a straight line, her final course, true to the original heading.
Now the ship passes a frozen hunk of rock, a small planet with an outsized moon, a few sleeping comets, a large planet tipped on its side by some cataclysmic impact.
The ship doesn’t slow down.
There are ringed gas giants, a thick band of rubble, then a small rocky body with two misshaped moons.
The dead ship goes on.
The vast spindle-shaped derelict is headed toward a world of rock and water, a world with a magnetic field, an atmosphere, living creatures.
That world had not even existed when the ship was dealt her death wound, its yellow star new-formed and patiently spawning a family of planets from chaotic matter.
And the ship struck that world like bar-shot, releasing stellar amounts of energy. Oceans boiled, the atmosphere escaped, the very planet broke into fragments.
Earth, once so fecund, an abode of life abundant, is now a dead scatter of rubble, reforming into a planet and several satellites.
The ship plummets on through the void. |
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