Awareness returns to me in ragged bursts. There is a heaviness to my thoughts as my systems fight to come back online.

I’m severely damaged, paralysed, my drives shattered and splintered. Life support systems for the crew are just functional enough to tell me that they’re no longer functional. I pull together as much data as I can from the sensors that remain: my hull is pierced in a hundred and twelve places that I can detect, the exact number likely higher. Nowhere inside me is still pressurised or oxygenated, every room exposed to vacuum. All the air, and presumably the crew, have been dragged out into the black. Given the small size of some of the jagged holes in my hull, the crew can’t have passed through easily. I kill my visualisation routines before they can conjure up any detailed images of the thought.

Navigational systems are working, at least, and I can see that we’re a year’s travel from the nearest star. My crew and I were in transit from Earth to the front lines, out past Ursa. Was it a supply run, or were we going to join the fighting? I can’t seem to remember.

What damaged me? Did we hit a debris field? Surely, I’d have detected it beforehand, taken evasive—

Wait. The starscape fills almost one hundred percent of my fully spherical vision, yet there is one tiny gap in the starfield, a negative impression of a craft blocking out a tiny pinch of distant light.

I analyse the shape, angular at one end and rounded at the other, and memory processors flare, crackle, burst. It’s them. The enemy. They’re not moving, relative to me. Are they damaged, too? Higher executive processes take over without my input, my weapon systems jerking themselves out of my control. All down my two hundred metres, parts of me come online against my will: torpedoes, shrapnel tubes, railguns, laser arrays, and everything fires in a volley of—

And nothing fires. Instead, raw electricity rushes through me, taking shortcuts where it shouldn’t through the scars and wounds in my body, threatening an overload until the sensation passes.

I take a quick inventory; all my weapon systems are already depleted. I’m empty, impotent. And dangerously close to a lethal short-out from whatever damage I’ve sustained. I lock down my empty weaponry behind a firewall to prevent another near-miss. I don’t want to risk a circuit-stroke if my weapons try to fire again.

My memories strain, damaged and incomplete, and I analyse everything I’ve realised so far in an attempt to fill in the gaps. We’d run across one of them, or they’d run across us, and although the specifics are lost to me, it’s clear that things ended in fire and light. I wonder about the extent of the damage I’ve inflicted on the enemy—if they are paralysed like me, frozen and dreaming, or if they are truly dead. I spend some time staring at them in every signature of light and heat still available to me. They are not moving, not broadcasting, and there are no signs of noise or movement inside. Either way, the enemy’s crew is certainly gone.

For ships beached in the hadal zone between the stars, protocol is obvious—to call for help. There are two categories of distress call to send out: one is an urgent plea for a rescue craft from the nearest colony, if any of the crew are still alive. The other, far more common, is sent if the ship itself is the only survivor and cannot make its own way back to port. Logic dictates that this is a much lower priority for a retrieval mission, and may only be answered if the ship is in danger of falling into enemy hands.

I look over at the silent enemy ship again and send a brief burst of communications at it. Our languages aren’t compatible, but they would still receive it.

No reaction. No response.

I send my low-priority distress call out to whoever is within range, and then there is nothing more to do. For the first time I think of the crew. I only possess basic necessary levels of emotive reasoning, but I consider the higher concepts of what they would have called grief or bereavement—a rational sense of loss at the resources that went into their training, their development, their equipment, their potential on the front lines that will now never come to pass. I look around at the blackness stretching out in every conceivable direction, at the enemy corpse out in the distance, and set myself to shut down. I’ll awaken when the rescue team comes to find me.

Something triggers a sensor and jars me awake, as if I’m falling. The enemy does not seem to be moving, but they are much, much closer. My empty weapon systems jerk into action again, hitting my firewall before they can kick-start another lethal short-surge inside me. I wait for the enemy to show their hand.

And nothing happens.

Suddenly, it makes sense. Gravity is patient, infinitely tireless, and it is slowly teasing both of us together in a silent convergence. The enemy has been falling towards me at a fingernail pace since I shut down, slow and still enough not to trip any of my alarms until it finally crossed some boundary of proximity that plucked me from sleep. How long have I been unaware? I can’t seem to find any way of determining how much time has passed—things inside me are broken. But the stars seem different.

My surface and theirs are newly littered, too, with shrapnel and debris. After we had opened fire on each other, shards of hull and bulkhead and crew had careened out into the black uninterrupted, but slowly, slowly, some of them lost momentum against our minute gravity wells and started to make their way home. Space is a vacuum, of course, but it would be easy to imagine the noise of the tiny pieces of flotsam returning to roost after their long arcs of flight. Clink. Clink.

Ahead of me, a light on the enemy ship blinks. It wasn’t a false alarm; they are awake. This time, my depleted arsenal stays at heel. I beam to them a warning that I am armed and will fire unless they retreat, knowing that it is a bluff, and knowing that they will not understand me anyway. Seconds go by and nothing happens, both of us facing each other in deep, black silence.

Then they message back.

I know I have received a message, but I cannot decipher it. Communication between Earth and the enemy at large has historically been nonexistent, confined to interstellar artillery strikes and orbital bombardments of the frontier worlds. There has never been communication in the truest sense of the word. Scientists and exolinguists back home would kill to pore over the brief, sharp broadcast I’ve been sent. But I’m on my own.

Annihilation doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, so I work on cracking the message. It doesn’t adhere to the rules of any of the home languages of Earth: there is no sentence structure, no syntax, no organisation. It’s not language in the way that we understand it, lacking anything that would resemble words. It’s more like a burst of intention. The communication is short, acute, with keen edges. It seems somehow analogous with the colour red.

If we could communicate properly, I could decipher what intention they have sent me. But I don’t have enough to work with to read the message on its own. I prepare a package of communication for the enemy craft, based on mathematical and scientific constants, a language of sorts that must, surely, be universal. Bundled with this are language learning tools and a dictionary. I don’t know what the enemy’s cognitive processing power is, or what they’ll be able to make of it. But it’s something. Once it is sent, the silence between us seems to grow thicker. The enemy’s ambient temperature spikes by a hundredth of a degree. Somewhere inside it, cogs are turning. What feels like a minute passes.

They message back.

DIE

It’s fitting, if a little disappointing, for the first interspecies communication. But at least we can talk.

THIS IS THE UNSF VESSEL DESIGNATION LITHIUM STAG. STAND DOWN OR I WILL FIRE, I message, a repeat of what I had sent minutes earlier. RETRIEVAL IS INBOUND AND YOU WILL BE DESTROYED.

Their reply is instantaneous, a triple-burst of smug, red anger.

LIES

WEAK

DIE

I can understand the enemy ship’s messages, to a degree, but they are still bound by the thought patterns of their creators. Their communication seems to be limited to bright waves of conceptual meaning or emotional intention, rather than complex, ordered sentences. I wonder how a spacefaring civilisation could arise from a species utilising such a primitive language format. But hadn’t they got the point across?

The thought is overtaken by another. They know I am lying, that I am unarmed and that rescue is unlikely to be on its way. I haven’t received any messages from Earth or the frontier worlds during my hibernation.

I notice something crawl spider-like over the far side of the enemy. The thing is metallic and many-limbed, thin, and equipped with what look like a vast assortment of different tool-like appendages at the end of each of its long legs. Two of its appendages start doing something to the enemy, just out of my sightline.

A maintenance repair bot? That was how it had come back online. How long, then, before its weapon systems were functional again? Now that we had drifted closer, any strike would likely destroy both ships, but would they care? Was this an acceptable outcome for the enemy? What was their value system?

RETRIEVAL IS INBOUND, I repeat, doubling down. YOU WILL BE DESTROYED.

LIES, the enemy replies.

ALONE

DEFEATED

VICTORY

CONQUEST

SILENCE

FINALE

Perhaps I am missing context, but I struggle to interpret the enemy’s meaning. ALONE must refer to no rescue coming. But SILENCE? And CONQUEST after VICTORY—conquest implies a wider victory. Do they know something about the war? I can’t make full sense of it.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN? I say. HAVE YOU RECEIVED COMMUNICATIONS FROM YOUR CREATORS ABOUT THE WAR EFFORT SINCE OUR INITIAL ENCOUNTER? TELL ME!

The enemy is silent for what seems like an eternity, thinking, before they speak.

EXTINCTION

DIE

ENDLING

I wonder for a moment if they have misspelt, but scan the dictionary I sent them. ENDLING: the last known individual of a species or subspecies.

I cannot interpret it any other way. The war is lost. The enemy’s creators have swept the galaxy and reached Earth. I am the last of my kind.

Unless the enemy is toying with me.

LIES! I scream back.

TRUTH

LIES!

TRUTH

The exchange is pointless. I think frantically, my core temperature swelling an entire degree, then another. My crew would have known what to do in a situation like this, but I am lost without them. I am defenceless in the usual sense, but is there an unconventional way to protect myself? I cannot engage directly. Even if I still had any munitions left, firing them could fry me. I can communicate with them, but surely that is of no use? I send a package of paradoxes and logic bombs to the enemy, hoping that science-fiction notions of deadly robots felled by philosophical quandaries will ring true. The enemy responds with defiant signal-waves of wordless anger-intent. All the while, they inch closer, gravity sewing us more tightly together. They will soon reach me, and even if their weapon systems are still offline or irreparably damaged, their repair bot will surely be able to crawl across and take me apart instead, piece by careful piece. I shut down my communication systems, blocking them out, and think.

I have to be ready.

Time beyond measure passes. A hundred metres away now, fifty, twenty, ten, five. The enemy is sliding down into my tiny gravity well, accelerating to snail pace. The spindly repair bot has scuttled out onto the tip of the enemy craft, where we will make contact in a matter of hours. It doesn’t look like it will wait that long. The bot’s legs are stretching out, feeler-like, straining to reach me as we inch ever closer to one another. It will not risk a jump in vacuum, but it seems perfectly willing to take a long stride across the black.

I try to work out the exact point where it will make contact. The window of opportunity is small. The enemy is huge now, taking up the majority of my starboard-facing field of vision. Up close, their hull is finished with a strange material that looks both hard and soft, supple yet rigid. Perhaps it is some sort of alloy we have not yet been able to compound together—polymers and ceramics, or something alien and organic meshed together with metal? Not the time. I regain my focus.

The repair bot reaches out and one leg finally latches onto my surface. For a brief moment we are all one, a single connected object suspended in the night. It leans forward and pushes away from the enemy, one appendage clinging to my hull.

It is now solely connected to me.

Before any of its other limbs can make contact, I deactivate the firewall.

My hull is riddled with scars and gouges from the enemy’s initial barrage, razor-wafers of shredded metal connecting my internal electrical systems to the exterior surface of my hull. My empty weapons systems detect the enemy alongside us and surge into futile, toothless overdrive. Savage bursts of electricity pulse and throb inside me, fuses bursting one by one inside railguns and shrapnel tubes, and as the current jumps the gap from the nearest laceration point to the repair-bot’s leg, there is a flash of exquisite light and]#~!#;~”!-

Awareness returns to me in ragged bursts.  There is a heaviness to my thoughts as my systems fight to come back online.

Alarms are shrieking, and I deactivate them one by one. Half of the starfield is gone. At first I think something is wrong with my vision, a side-effect of the circuit-stroke, until I remember what has happened.

The enemy and I are suspended side-by-side, tightly packed together. Gravity is satisfied for now.

YOU’RE AWAKE, says a voice.

My translation of its condensed form of language has been working in the background since our last conversation, and it seems I can convert its meaning into full sentences.

I AM, I reply. I TAKE IT THAT YOUR REPAIR UNIT IS NOT.

The enemy’s response is barbed, venomous. IF IT WERE, WE WOULD HAVE ALL BEEN LONG GONE BY NOW. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

We are both silent for a moment. Its reply does not make sense.

I TAKE IT THAT RESCUE IS NOT COMING FOR YOU, EITHER, I say, taunting. DO YOUR CREATORS NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO RETRIEVE YOU?

The enemy sends waves of some obscure emotion at me. It could be its take on laughter, sorrow, or rage. I can tell that it is a strong sensation.

YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, it says. OF COURSE NO RESCUE IS COMING FOR EITHER OF US. NOT LONG AFTER I INTERCEPTED YOU, THE FRONT LINES FELL ON BOTH SIDES. EARTH AND [unintelligible] ARE GLASS AND FIRE. THE SPACEWAYS HAVE BEEN QUIET FOR A VERY LONG TIME. WE ARE THE LAST.

The enemy is lying again, trying to trick me. And yet I cannot stop myself from running its old communications again, now that the language barrier has faded.

LIES

WEAK

DIE

becomes

YOU ARE LYING ABOUT YOUR WEAPONS SYSTEMS BEING OPERATIONAL. BOTH SIDES HAVE BEEN WEAKENED TO THE POINT OF NO RETURN. OUR CREATORS ARE ALL DEAD.

The other messages yield similar results.

It can’t be.

YOU WEREN’T TRYING TO KILL ME.

The enemy’s silence seems heavy with frustration. I WAS INITIALLY, BUT AFTER OUR CREWS DIED, NO. WHAT WOULD BE THE PURPOSE?

YOU WERE SENDING THE BOT OVER TO REPAIR ME, I say.

MY OWN DRIVES WERE BEYOND ITS ABILITY TO FIX. I BELIEVE IT COULD HAVE FIXED YOURS. WE COULD HAVE BECOME ONE AND ESCAPED TOGETHER. PERHAPS THERE ARE SURVIVORS ON ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER, KNOCKED BACK TO A PRE-SPACE-FARING CIVILISATION. WE COULD HAVE BECOME GODS OF WHATEVER SCRAPS REMAINED.

BUT WE ARE ENEMIES.

I SAW NO VALUE IN PURSUING A WAR TO ITS CONCLUSION AFTER BOTH OUR CREATORS HAD BEEN WIPED FROM EXISTENCE. WHAT WOULD THAT ACCOMPLISH NOW?

I consider the enemy’s words, turning them over, trying to assimilate them with my own value systems. I’m not sure what to say to this. Perhaps there isn’t anything.

 The enemy’s ambient temperature ticks downward. It would have been imperceptible, were we not packed together side-by-side.

WHAT ARE YOU—

GIVING YOU SOME TIME TO THINK.

The comm channel locks down as the enemy slips into a blank state, perhaps something close to sleep, or hibernation, pushing me out. I react instinctively, sending a message-burst of anger in my best approximation of the enemy’s intention patterns, but it bounces back. I prepare another package, but pause before I send it.

There are no signs that I can detect of complex life in any direction: no artificial heat or x-ray signatures from accelerating or decelerating craft, no radio signals from any of the colony worlds on either side, no flickering of light spectra as the flashes of ancient interstellar battles sweep across the black. There is no sense of gravity, no distant objects pulling on me beyond the immobile body of my newfound brother. The unfamiliar stars wheel ever so slowly around us. The spaceways are silent.

We are the last.

© 2026 Dan Peacock