Fingers slammed into a keyboard aggressively, cussing filling the air.
“Bloody thing! Ohhh, come on, no no no no—“
“Professor Endel, can you please—“
Ends ignored the nagging voice, making a vague motion with her hand before it flicked back to the computer, complex processes zipping in and out of her brain and into motion on the keyboard as fast as they were thought.
“Professor!”
She slammed her hands on the keyboard in frustration - her efforts yielded nothing and the last threads of whatever she was trying to do were shredded to nothing by the interruption.
“What!” she snapped, turning around with a thunderous scowl, “You’ve gone and made me lose my train of thought!”
“President Swfift is—“
The illustrious president himself strode over, the Watcher of The Allied Systems, accompanied by the Tiger of the Stars, General of the Alliance Fleet (known less formally as Serena Fitzwilliam.)
“I was just telling him-“
“I’m the president!” Swift’s eyes flashed furiously as he turned towards the general, who’s chin rose cockily.
“Yes, I’m very happy for both of you,” Ends snapped, waving a hand, “but if we’re going to save this world, you need to stop—“
“I will fly to that thing myself and feed it an antimatter torpedo straight to the face!” Serena’s cocky voice once again dislodged a thought that was about to take shape in Ends’ mind as she gazed out of the window of the mighty flagship, the Destiny.
The sounds of bickering were meaningless noise as Ends regarded the planet worriedly. How many billions of lives down there were just one miscalculation away from being snuffed out?
“We’re running out of time!” Snapped the general, striding past the president to stare out of the window, her eyes widening as she looked. “It’s almost here!”
Ends lifted her eyes from the planet to the thing bearing down on it. It defied reason to look at- too long spent staring at it was said to drive you mad. Roiling chaos, stretching across all space, crackling with energy at its edge, vast cosmic empires made and unmade in moments in its depths. The Great Unmaker. It shredded everything in it’s path, so completely that it didn’t even leave memories. Only rumours.
“We can’t destroy it with antimatter,” Ends said decisively and calmly, turning from the window and facing the president. “All we can do is alert the planet to evacuate and retreat. We can’t save this one.”
The president looked ill. It was not the result he wanted.
“We have to do it NOW, or it’ll be us, next,” she said, testily. Everyone always blamed the messenger.
“Let’s do it then,” the president ordered, and the bridge swung into action, a hive of orders and activity.
Her role, for now, fulfilled, Ends returned to her computer, pulling up the records on file for the planet below. She frowned as she began to flick through. She could hear ships already being mobilised over the intercoms as she did, refugees from the world being ordered to berth with the Destiny, or else run- run in the opposite direction to the chaotic wave of destruction headed their way.
She blinked and rubbed her eyes. They had been at this for so long she could barely remember a time before the Unmaker. Maybe she could steal a little sleep.
Just as she was making up her mind to shut down her computer, something caught her eye. A flicker on her screen. She frowned and looked a little closer. The file looked… corrupted somehow. Weird.
Suddenly an alarm sounded. She gasped and snapped her head to the window. The Unmaker was drawing close.
“We have to leave now!” she bellowed over the cacophony, “It’s too late!”
“We can’t just leave them-“
“We have to!”
The president looked pained, all eyes on him, before he sighed and nodded, barking the order to retreat. As if puppeted by invisible strings, Ends walked to the window, horrified, as the Unmaker’s tendrils lashed the planet’s surface.
More movement on her screen from the corner of her eye. What in the world…
“The information…” she breathed, horror sliding down the back of her neck, “the information is disappearing… we won’t even know we failed!”
Her voice rose to hysteria as she turned to shout over the noise of their own evacuation, “Someone needs to write it down! The information is vanishing!!”
“How can that be?” snapped the vice president, their eyes fixed on the scientist.
“Think about it,” she hissed, even as the ship’s deck shuddered and bucked from it’s motion, “Why are you all here? All on one ship? And why are we evacuating some random world? What about our world?”
There was, despite the sirens, despite the low thundering roar of the engines, a deafening silence.
“I can’t… I can’t remember,” Serena’s voice was low with tension, “I can’t remember anything before this ship, I can’t remember-“
“We need to save the files,” Ends turned back to her screen, fingers flying into a frenzy of motion, “If we can save the information on this planet, we can save our memories of this conversation, we can save—“
Errors, missing data. Stubbornly unhelpful technology.
“Write it down, write it down, dammit!” She shouted, slamming the keys with all she had. She swore and hissed and cursed everything she could think of, slamming her fingers into the keyboard as the ship slowly fell out of warp, settling around some planet somewhere and the knowledge trickled like from her fingers.
“No no no no no—“
“Professor Endel, the president-“
Bloody interruptions, endlessly! Oh damn it, what had she just been doing?