Friday, February 25, 2011

SID 23202.14

EMERGENCY EVACUATION VEHICLE EEV.1.AA1
LORD HIGH GOUVERNEUR BASMUS WETTERSTRUM,
VISCOUNT OF KRAKEN, GOL-GONATAR, AND THE GREAT EXPANSE
PERSONAL LOG

Plasma billowed out the breach and we were astonished by the sight of it; liquid light, blue-white and shimmering, drifting in great clouds from the rupture to engulf and obliterate.

The light poured from the ragged opening to envelop and consume everything in its path-- planets, moons, starcruisers-- until it seemed that every horizon was a part of its eerie phosphorescence. We watched the light and were entranced, even as we saw the other evacuation vehicles buckle and shatter amid the growing light, even as we felt the crackle and shudder of our ship's deflector shield failing as the light washed over us; we watched the light and could not look away.

Then a buzz and a pop and we were somewhere else, far away. Blackness, just blackness and void, and then the ship swung around and we saw again the cloud of coruscating blue, distant now, the cloud beginning to collapse into itself, light becoming bright and hard at the center of the cloud, the rest of the cloud drawn to the core in a narrowing disc of increasing brilliance. A new star, born at the moment of our greatest failure, at the site of our most profound loss.