Final Word Count : 559
Ben kept tapping his finger on the control panel, awaiting recalculation results. Entombed in the bulky hardsuit, he surrendered any attempts to find a comfortable position. Clouds of space dust, slowly drifting by, was his only company. As the timer was ticking down he thought to himself. Just how much did it all cost?
Roughly speaking…
Research and scientific division, with all the institutes, factories, crews and living space was around 30 billion total. The space station was basically a box, attached to the Main Body, nothing fancy, still 50 millions. The Main Body, still mindbogglingy advanced, was 500 million by itself. Rockets were 200 million apiece. There were 11 test launches, before his crew boarded. totalling in 2.4 billions. Fuel for open space maneuvers, to unfold and aim the Main Body ate a meager 100 thousands. 5 space suits, well… actually 10, each 200 thousand, another 2 million. 5 lives of the cosmonauts lost during the 11th test flight. Even after everything, he still couldn’t place a price tag on a human life.
All that. All the world's efforts were wasted due to a malfunction in the coils that transmitted the charge from the accumulator to the emission array. It was a simple electrical part, which cost was just a rounding error in the total. Less than a thousand. Due to miscalculation, it wasn’t able to operate in the freezing vacuum of space. And the redundancy system still used the same coil.
They couldn’t contact Command back home, due to the Leviathan interference, but it’s good to have instructions for every bolt and wire on-board. Both written in 4 different languages, and meticulously grafted onto their front lobes over half a year of preparation. After a three hour investigation, the crew found the problem. But they still had to come up with the solution.
It was simple. Stupidly simple. Someone would have to manually jam a screwdriver into the circuit board, the moment charge was ready. The suit would work as an improvised key and the astronaut’s body as capacitor. Two volunteered. And a simple game of rock-paper-scissors decided that he would be the one to sacrifice himself. With Roderick as a back-up, in case if anything goes wrong. As he was adrift in space, he still can occasionally see the face of his friend inside the helmet. Contorted with pain, and blood pouring out of every orifice, immediately freezing into a crown of crimson thorns. At the last moment Rodd pushed Ben away, trying to say some one-liner about getting a family, before he was cut mid-word, as the electrical charge went through. Ben spent his entire life getting here. Abandoning most of the simple and quiet joys in life, in the favor of the promise of the stars. To be someone in the history books. To matter. And all that was for nothing.
The Main body successfully fired. The space around Leviathan was turned into a cold blue plasma, before cooling back into nothing. A solid chunk of reality was undone. Folded into itself. Once the particles stopped their invisible dance he saw it. A huge, bloodshot eye, on the cosmic body, throwing him a glance of incomprehensible hatred, as it sped up toward Earth. They couldn’t stop the impending doom.
The calculations on the computer finished. The Leviathan will reach Earth in two weeks.
