HIS COMM CRACKLED, AND THEN WENT SILENT.
Crichton awoke and all he could hear was his suit creaking and the slow, near-silent hiss of air escaping from... somewhere. His burns and wounds were throbbing with steady aches. He checked his flickering HUD. Nope, pressure steady, suit power shaky. Then he realized that that hissing sound was his open comm picking up stellar noise and he listened for a little while to the sound of the universe chattering, undercut by the radio noise blaring from the Earth and its proximity. He shut it off. It had nothing to say that he wanted to hear.
Now just the creaking of his suit and his own breathing. In the distance - flashes, the destruction - he trusted - of a few ambitions, some twisted dreams and hopes on either side.
None of it troubled him. All the right people were angry, all the deserving people had got what they deserved and everyone else got what he'd felt like giving them, so for the most part, things had gone as he'd wanted – more or less, there was a glitch here and there and it wasn't perfect but all things considered it turned out rather well.
Well... except for this last bit. He was floating further and further away at a rather decent speed and the onboard damage report told him that his comm could only receive, the suit's actuators were locked so he couldn't move, his air supply would last an arn if he breathed shallowly and slowly and the suit's batteries were depleting at a slow but steady rate. He really should have checked before pulling the damn thing from its charger – or the blast that had thrown him from the Carrier had done more damage than he'd have liked.
Oh, well.
No atmosphere this time, no plunge and happy coincidences.
There was a huge flash in the distance, that ballooned out and out until he thought it might reach him, then it abruptly extinguished itself. Unlike TV and the movies, any non-nuclear explosion in space quickly dissipated. The Impactor had reached the end of its cycle and discharged the rest of its energy.
Crichton nodded to himself, set his visor to opaque and smiled crookedly at his own reflection on the inside of the plate. He was in a black suit against the blackness of space with no locater beacon, drifting speedily away from all the activity. The suit would serve him as an armored coffin to bear him eternally through space.
He decided that he liked the idea. Drift into legend, the body never found, like King Arthur: out there somewhere, just waiting to rise again. He laughed softly to himself.
Yeah, sure. Gone, damned and forgotten. The Creature leaves without a fuss. They were better off.
Why not? There was a certain kind of symmetry to that he liked. He was tired, so very frelling tired. He slept but never rested.
He told his suit to power down to bare reserves, scanned again for leaks he might have missed and did the only thing he could in this situation.
He closed his eye and went to sleep, for the first time in a long time feeling as if – at last – rest might come.
It was over.