“Heartache. Panic. These are not my feelings. I don’t feel these things,” she thought desperately as she tried to regain her calm, the distinctive separation from her humans that she’d first achieved thousands of years earlier.

It was something that would not come. This wasn’t an event she could watch from the outside. She was part of it, and that was a frighteningly new experience in itself.

It took a cosmic event to truly impact on her, and her memory of the last one at that level was fuzzy to say the least. She had badly formed memories from before humans, so long before, but she almost didn’t feel like they were hers. They felt alien in some ways, like they were part of someone else and only rested in her by some quirk of cosmic fate.

She could remember flashes of a rock from the sky, a meteor impact that changed the face of the world. That changed the her that made that memory, maybe into the her that existed today. She didn’t know, she didn’t want to know. It was painful to think about and she normally tried very hard not to dwell on the flashes of those times.

Now, however, it was happening again.

Not a cosmic rock this time. This was a cosmic plague. The virus would finish what it had already begun, tearing into her body the way a hemorrhagic fever could tear the organs of its victim to shreds, leaving nothing but infected fluids behind. That was what would happen once the Drasin succeeded in digging into her. This she knew with no doubt.

Parts of her wanted to selfishly slip into the minds of those she could affect, force them to keep the protectors here. Those ships could eliminate many of the enemy, so very many . . .

But she knew that it would be futile, and unlike humans, Gaia was not prone to panic.

No, that wasn’t quite true. She had already panicked. In the second it took to understand the situation, she had panicked. She had denied. She had raged. There was no one to bargain with, and in the end she had no choice but to accept the inevitable.

It was better to see to the survival of some of those who made her what she was than it would be to see every last aspect of herself vanish.

“I wonder if there is something beyond existence?” Gaia wondered, almost idle now that she had chosen her path. “Will I follow the survivors, some small piece of me? Or is blackness all that awaits, an end to all things, even she who would be Goddess?”

Admiral Gracen looked at the numbers, the silent stares of the crew around her screaming louder than they could have if they were all cursing her at once. They’d come so far, rushed so very much, and in the end it came down to this.