The Dreadnought continued forward, heedless of its failing shields and crying engines. Again and again it struck, but a flood of enemies threw themselves against it. With a flicker of visibility, the forceshield failed and thousands of creatures crashed into the hull.

More pulse-laser batteries opened fire, desperately trying to clear the hull. The numbers were too many, and they began to dig. It wouldn’t be long before they had chewed their way through the five meter hull.

The logistics showed only one ship remaining in the fleet behind them; deep down, Admiral Nimitz knew which ship it was. Now was the time for the final goodbye, the last hurrah before the howling dark.

“Execute command Omega,” the Admiral said softly, his order barely heard by the ensign to his left. Harry Spruance ran to his console, and began bellowing into an intercom. Warning sirens began to blare throughout the ship, after a moment they were silenced. A countdown appeared on the logistic screens, and the Admiral finally smiled. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…

   Most ships in the Imperial Navy are powered by unique plasma producing engines. Plasma is inherently unstable, but physicists were able to subject it to our will over a century prior. With his last command, Admiral Chester Nimitz was forcing those engines to go super-critical, restoring that plasma to its unstable state.

Harry Spruance walked up beside his commanding officer. As the clock slowly wound down, the Admiral took out a worn picture from his pocket. It was an old-style picture, probably digital. On it was a young boy enjoying what appeared to be his first toy model of a battleship. The Admiral turned to him.

“Hurrah,” he said weakly, as the clock struck zero.

The resulting explosion could be seen in a separate arm of the galaxy. A burning white light appeared in the space where previously the Renaissance was located. It immediately incinerated the surrounding Swarm, and burned a hole in the atmosphere of the previously human-settled planet kilometers away.

The last human ship in the system watched this dazzling display until the light faded. After surveying the damage, the Dark Ages prepared to jump.

“On my mark,” said High Admiral Nimitz, recently widowed, “mark.” The ship jumped faster than light to the nearest Fleet rendezvous, located in the Phoenix system.

Amongst the shattered machines, movement was visible. Unseen by the naked eye, nanites slowly collected pieces of elements from the debris.

The Dreadnought’s sacrifice had only bought humanity a brief respite. Even now, the broken creatures of the Swarm were being patched together again, undoing everything the fleet had done.

After a while, some of the Swarm descended on the broken planet they had conquered.