Hear, then! I die, and you who receive this transmission — whatever your world or ways — hear my tale. I am Crunar, son of Creyen, of a lineage I can trace to ancient Earth itself. I am the last of my line, the last of my people, and I die. But I die well.

 

Of old, my people had a settlement orbiting Io. The elder records say that it was first a mining station, but long abandoned when we arrived and took possession, naming it Silverhome. Here I grew to manhood among a hardy folk. I was only eleven in my first battle against raiders, and by sixteen I had mastered the neurolink and could handle a battleblade as well as the most seasoned war-pilot.

 

But I did not understand treachery. With most of the other warriors, I was away on a false rescue mission when Silverhome fell. The debris field lingers yet, a tombstone immortal wrapped around the glimmering belt of Io. We left no such memorial to the slayers of our kin.

 

What point, to recount my journeys and deeds in the long years since? My exploits may be heard among the terraformers who toil despairingly on Triton, in the salons of decadent Galileo Station, and even the subterranean settlements of Mars. But what matter? Every foe I have vanquished, every danger dared, all my deeds are as nothing compared to this last adventure.

 

Bereft of kin and companion, I wandered out into the Kuiper belt aboard my battleblade. For awhile I guarded the sleeper ship Phoenix VII as it crossed beyond the Oort Cloud. May it know a safe journey through desolate space; and in 30,000 years, when it reaches Gliese 1061, may those archaic starfarers wake to all the hope in which they departed Earth long ages agone.

 

As for me, I stumbled upon a derelict science station from the days of the Jupiterian Empire and made it my hermitage. Few raiders journeyed out so far, and I felt weary. I thought the days of high feats had passed for me; truly, it troubled me only that I had no successor to wield my battleblade after me.

 

But fate’s summons found me even there. An escape pod, hull scarred and systems failing, passed within range of my sensors. I hastened out to retrieve it, and brought the fragile vessel aboard my station. Sure enough, the pod contained a stasis chamber, and therein a young man still clinging to life. I revived him, and heard his story.

 

His people inhabited a jewel-like cluster of crystal habitats on a large asteroid deep in the belt. They had grown and delved the structure themselves by experimental technology — unheard of enterprise! — and thought to build a new civilization. But the splendor of their crystal city attracted the attention of an enemy so terrible that the youth shuddered to describe it. It was a vessel or thing that had slumbered for untold ages, dormant, in the catacombs of Quaoar, a thing from beyond the Oort, an alien and incomprehensible thing. They called it the Severer.

 

With a white-knuckled grip on my arm, the youth told that though the Severer had decimated their settlement in a dozen successive attacks, one crystal citadel remained. But the Severer would surely find it and destroy it.

 

I left him in the care of a nano-surgical module. He would live, and have his escape pod to bear him away. But I boarded my battleblade for one final journey. My mind remained vigorous; the AI enfolded me in the throbbing vastness of the neurolink, and I felt myself one with the sleek armored hull. The fusion reactor came smoothly awake, its smoldering energies thrilling my being. With a burst of utter transcendence the stardrive carried me across incomprehensible leaps of space.

 

Forged by the sapients of Enceledus at their zenith, the battleblades exceed all other spacecraft, and their secrets are forever lost behind the encryption walls of the Enceledae. My armor was scarred and scored by a hundred impacts that would have shattered lesser vessels. My energy beams had sundered a Tritonian dreadnought. But for all that the battleblade is just a weapon, only as strong as the mind that wields it.

 

A month’s journey brought me to the place the refugee described. I encountered neither mind nor machine on my voyage. But at last my sensors detected the ruined crystal cities, a weird and wondrous devastation among the barren asteroids. Did I come in time? Time enough to seek the enemy.

 

So I coasted in the detritus and transmitted my challenge: “I am Crunar, son of Creven. I am come! Where now is the Severer?”

 

I had not long to wait. It came from the far side of a colossal asteroid; slithering across space it came. How to describe the Severer? It was metal, machine, but an alien mind drove it. No human could have devised that bizarre and chaotic shape. A pandemonium of purple metal and billowing flame rushed to meet me. We fought.

 

Such a battle! My rail guns pounded the Severer’s shifting carapace, and I shook and twisted with the raking claws of its strange energies in return. A dozen times I scorched it with the beams that shatter comets. Ice and ore exploded around us in that long struggle. For two days we fought; neither of us would flee.

 

My battleblade at last sundered. Critical armor failure. Fusion reactor at twelve percent. My sensors dimmed.

 

But at the last I detected the Severer’s weakness and released my remaining missiles. The terrible shafts of the Encledae drove into the enemy and exploded in a flash of white glory. Shards of the slain Severer flung out into open space, back whence the monster had come.

 

The end comes soon. But you who hear my tale, remember! A warrior strove and triumphed here, among the silent stones. Tell it in the circle of your elders. Tell them I died well.