Post 3-GoW

Part 2 of Gust of Wind

In the oldest tales we recite about honor and duty, there is something known as 'sword time', or the brain's ability to slow things down when in a heightened state of tension, fear or stress. Pilots reported it all the time while on psychosomatic drugs that boosted their performance, stating it allowed them to do millions of actions in a single minute because they perceive it as being far longer. I was feeling that sense now, with the ship loftily sitting in space, dead for all intensive purposes, waiting for my turn on the list. I didn't hear or feel the light slicing through the reinforced section surrounding my command center, but I saw it creep ever so slowly across the wastes of space until it contacted the edges of the bridge. It contoured to the shape of the ship and depressed the last bit of armor there, melting it atom by atom in front of my eyes. The myriad of items around my desk started to shake as the breach became more pronounced, but my hands were steady as I watched the girders and steel burn white hot under the power of a sun. When the light finally came through, it washed over the deck and left a smattering of ozone and electricity scents in my nose, while gibbering bits of magma-like molten metal exploded from the hole and cascaded to the floor. It was a beautiful sight that was terribly short lived.

From the way it had all gone, I imagined I might have felt some sort of fear, or sadness, maybe even disappointment in my own failure to protect my ship and crew, but none of that washed over me. The last 'feeling' I remember is the sense of decompression, the loss of gravity, and the extreme pain, impossibly bearable, as my sockets were shredded and the plugs into my brain were ripped out through the force of air vacating the bridge. I took longer to fly out the breach than my belongings, and was able to look back at the console with an eye for how it would have appeared off the assembly line, clean and pristine, lacking any and all human additives.