The death of a starship was a thing far more dignified than the passing of a man. This was so to a degree commensurate with the greater scale of its life. Men fought men and famine and disease and time. They grew infirm of mind and body and too prideful to admit that until the abject terror of their closing moments if they even saw their doom coming. For such a petty creature as man came petty deaths by a thousand different hands - at times, even their own.

But not so for the noble starship. It didn't know an existence other than to take up arms and armor and fight other titans of steel and semiconductor. Then they rent each other asunder with clashes of lightning until one or both expired with a shuddering violence that could poison an orbit with their bones and viscera for generations. At times they fought entire planets - and even won, more often than not.

This was not one of those times. Too many systems had failed and too few bypasses had been made in time to salvage the resources that would be needed to deal back to the foe what had been dealt to them. The fires had stopped only because there was no air left to burn and the men kept working only because they had nothing better to do for lack of escape craft. They would have been dead weight until they were needed - and as soon as one side cut them from their designs then no ships could afford that dead weight any more, starship design being as competitive as it was.

The depressing reality was that the vessel that had bested them may have managed to do so simply by virtue of having been built six months later. It was a troubling fact that freshness of paint job was a better correlate to combat odds than crew experience was, and this was not their first patrol by any means. As the main beam began to snap a dull rumbling through the floor signaled impending catastrophic failure. That underlying structure reminded the captain of something: for as dignified as the Ardent's glorious death was, it was a death that mimicked life in being orchestrated by scientists and engineers.