Sergeant Ven Callus had survived four engagements, two promotions, and a court martial that hadn't quite stuck, and she had always assumed, in the vague way that soldiers assumed things about their own endings, that when it came for her it would come fast.

  She had not assumed it would look like this.

  The Concord's Seventh Expeditionary Fleet had numbered sixty-three twenty minutes ago. Ven knew this because she had the manifest open on her secondary display even now, a habit from her years in logistics, the need to know what was where and how much of it. Sixty-three vessels ranging from the flagship Unyielding Accord — a dreadnought that had survived three wars and a black hole transit that shouldn't have worked — down to the paired scout runners on the outer edge of the formation.

  Twenty minutes ago, sixty-three.

  She had stopped counting at thirty-one because counting had started to feel like documentation and she wasn't sure she wanted to document this.

  Her station was damage control, portside mid-deck, which meant she had a viewport. Most of the crew didn't. Most of the crew was working from instrument readings and system alerts and the reports coming through comms, which had been deteriorating for the past eight minutes as the ships producing them stopped producing them. Ven had the viewport. She had been watching through it the way you watched something you couldn't look away from even though you understood that looking wasn't helping.

  The fleet was dying quietly.

  That was the thing she kept returning to. There was no exchange of fire — no visible weapons discharge, no energy blooms, no the dramatic flash-and-pressure of hull breaches she'd seen in actual combat. The ships simply stopped. One at a time, in no order she could determine, they just — wound down. Running lights going first, then the blue-white of active flux drives fading, then the slow tumble that meant attitude control was gone, then the dark. Ship after ship after ship going dark in the middle of the formation like lights being switched off in a building, floor by floor, methodical, unhurried.

  The Calloway's Promise had gone dark eleven minutes ago. She knew people on the Calloway's Promise.

  She pressed her hand flat against the viewport and looked for the source of it and found her, eventually, because finding her wasn't actually the hard part — the hard part was understanding what you were looking at once you had.

  She was small at this distance. That registered first, the same way it apparently always registered with people who saw her — small, and therefore wrong, because nothing that produced this should look like that. She was standing in open space without a ship, without a suit, without anything between her and the void except whatever she was, and she was holding something in her right hand.

  Ven pressed closer to the viewport. Her breath fogged the glass.

  The object was small. Dark, mostly, except for the glow — cobalt blue, steady, not pulsing, just present the way a coal was present when it had been burning long enough to stop being dramatic about it. It fit in one hand. She was holding it the way you held something you'd carried for a long time, without thinking about it, the grip habitual and easy and completely at odds with what it was apparently capable of.

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  She wasn't doing anything with it, that Ven could see. She was just holding it.

  And the fleet kept going dark.

  The Unyielding Accord — three wars, a black hole transit, the pride of the Seventh Expeditionary — went dark at minute eighteen. Ven watched it go and felt something shift in her chest that wasn't fear exactly, or wasn't only fear. It was the particular sensation of a thing you had believed in stopping being true.

  Her own ship shuddered. The lights dropped to emergency levels — red-tinged, inadequate, the kind of lighting that existed to help you find the door rather than to help you do your job. Her displays flickered and several of them went out entirely. The comms had been silent for four minutes.

  She kept watching through the viewport.

  The figure in space hadn't moved. She was still there, still holding the object, still apparently doing nothing except existing at the center of what used to be sixty-three ships and was now considerably fewer. From this distance, in the red emergency light, Ven couldn't make out her face. She was too small, too far. Just a shape. Just a person-shaped thing standing in the void with cobalt blue in her hand.

  She looked, from here, almost peaceful.

  That was the worst part. The fleet had come here to deliver a message — a show of force, a demonstration of the Concord's position on certain matters, the kind of message that sixty-three ships usually delivered without needing to say anything. And the message that was being sent back to them was being sent in the quietest possible way, with something that fit in one hand, and it looked from this viewport like nothing so much as someone standing very still in a place they'd chosen to stand.

  Ven's ship shuddered again, longer this time. Something in the hull gave a sound she'd never heard a hull make before — not a breach, not yet, but the precursor to one, the structural complaint of something being asked to hold on past what it was built for.

  She looked at the figure one more time.

  The cobalt glow caught the light from the orange star in this system and threw it back differently. The object turned, slightly, in her hand — not deliberately, Ven thought. Just the small unconscious movement of a hand that was holding something it had held for a long time.

  Then Ven's viewport went dark.

  Not the ship. Just the viewport — or rather, the viewport was fine, but there was nothing on the other side of it anymore that her eyes could make sense of. Something had changed in the space outside and her visual cortex was declining to process it, the way it had declined once before when she'd looked directly at a level five Igo and her perception had simply refused.

  She pulled back from the viewport.

  She sat down on the floor of her station because her legs had made a decision without consulting her, and she put her back against the wall below the viewport, and she looked at her hands in the red emergency light.

  The ship was very quiet now.

  Somewhere down the corridor something fell — a small sound, something knocked loose by the structural stress, something that had been sitting on a surface and was no longer. Then nothing. The ship's ambient hum, which she had stopped noticing years ago the way you stopped noticing the sound of your own breathing, was gone. Just gone. The silence of it was enormous.

  She reached for her datapad with the automatic instinct of someone who documented things. Pulled up an incident report. Looked at the blank fields.

  She didn't know how to file this. She didn't have the category for it. Engaged by unknown entity — that was technically accurate. Fleet status — she looked at the manifest, at the sixty-three names, at the status indicators that had been going red one by one for the past twenty minutes and were now — she counted, because she was a logistics person and she counted things — all red. All of them. Sixty-three.

  She typed: The object she was holding was glowing. Cobalt blue. I don't know what it was.

  She looked at the sentence. It was not a useful sentence for an incident report. It was the only sentence she had.

  The emergency lighting flickered once and went out entirely.

  In the dark, Sergeant Ven Callus sat with her back against the wall of a ship that had stopped making any sound at all, and thought about the cobalt blue, and did not finish the report.