Mathematics of Sacrifice

Sensitive Content Warning: Graphic Injury, Imminent Death, Suicide Adjacent Content, Depiction of Isolation and Despair, Emotional Trauma

My back leaned against the cold metallic plate of a wall, eyes closed as I listened to my breath. It emerged hoarse, terse, fuzzy. I shifted my weight and winced at the pain that I felt just below the second and third ribs, where my right hand lay on the suit, pressing against the slit, protecting pitifully against the exposed atmosphere.

Silence pressed down. Around me, there was nothing but the white noise of absence, a gentle static that filled my ears like snow. Beneath it all, my heartbeat: steady, insistent, a drum counting down. Thump. Thump. Thump.

I exhaled, the sound fogging my visor before clearing to reveal the world beyond.

The ground fractured into a thousand pointed shards, each one clawing upward through the atmosphere itself. Mountains rose like teeth in the mouth of the world, their crystalline edges permeating the air with a kind of terrible geometry; beautiful and hostile all at once. The cold radiated outward in waves, even through the insulation of my suit. Each breath fogged the inside of my helmet before freezing into a thin crystalline layer on the visor.

Ice encased the ground in crystalline armor, transforming the raw stone into something luminous and breathtaking. Each frozen surface caught the distant sun and fractured its light into a thousand glittering shards, the landscape burning with an otherworldly radiance that would have been magnificent—transcendent, even—if not for what it meant. If not for where we were. If not for now.

The landscape seemed designed to kill. Beautiful in the way a predator is beautiful, all edges and hunger. The mountains towered impossibly high, their peaks lost in the thin atmosphere.

As the sun climbed higher, shadows retreated like living things fleeing the creeping dawn, and the world revealed itself in all its terrible, beautiful clarity; a vision of sublime perfection wrapped around a reality we could no longer deny. Nothing moved. Nothing lived here but me, and barely that.

As the sun pressed, the ground cracked. Steam vents broke through, pressing a mixture of water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide upward to become part of the coma of the comet.

My eyes shifted up, and in the distance I caught sight of it: a blip against the ice and stone. The Savior. Even from here, those colossal engines blazed with a terrifying, exquisite luminosity. No smoke trailed behind it because of the lack of atmosphere. Just the raw, naked brilliance of those engines and the small, insignificant speck of the ship itself, already impossibly far, already becoming memory. It was leaving. It had left. And I was still here.

My gaze returned toward my damaged suit. The breach had happened fast. One moment I was securing the device; the next, a sharp edge had caught my suit, tearing through it like paper. I’d felt the immediate pressure change, and heard the hiss of the atmosphere escaping. My hand went to it instinctively, but there was nothing to seal it. The suit’s passive warnings had started then. Soft alerts I’d ignored at first, thinking I could patch it, could make it work. But the hole was too big. The damage was irreversible.

There would be no rescue. No radio chatter. Just this place, my final resting place.

With determination, I disrupted the thought spiral. Focus. Focus. Awe was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The Savior was disappearing into the black, and I had work to do. My left hand shot up, fingers closing around the cold edge of the panel. I pulled, every muscle screaming, my legs betraying me with each inch upward. A sharp pain lanced through my body, white-hot and immediate, but I forced myself higher. Wincing. Fighting. Moving anyway.

‘Warning,’ the system announced, flat and clinical. ‘Air depletion in two minutes.’

I wheezed out a laugh; exasperated, bitter, delirious. Of course. Of course. I already knew my sentence and had accepted it the moment I was injured. The moment everything went wrong. The automated voice was just making it official now, turning my death into a scheduled event, a countdown, something administrative and absurd. Two minutes. Specificity changed nothing. Precise timing altered nothing.

I stared at the console, then closed my eyes. The console waited, its deadman switch blinking slowly red. For all the clean lines and tidy wiring, the bomb was a liar. On paper, it could go off from anywhere. A scorched relay said otherwise. With one burnt strand of copper, the remote trigger was dead. Someone had to stay behind and make sure it went. It looked like fate had already penciled in my name.

My breathing had quickened, becoming shallow and desperate. My pulse hammered in my neck, thready and wild, a rabbit trapped in my own chest. I pressed my hand harder against the wound, but it was useless. The air found its way out anyway, slipping through in invisible wisps, indifferent to my effort to hold it back.

I didn’t think it would end like this. Not here. Not on some godforsaken rock in the middle of nowhere, gasping like an animal. I’d always imagined something quieter. A bed, maybe. Old age stealing up gently in sleep, the way it was supposed to happen. Not this. Not violent. Not alone. Not here.

‘Warning.’

‘Red Line Approaching.’

It was another warning, but not of air. Of the impending action I needed to take soon. I nodded and glanced away from the console, toward the impossible sky. It was subtle, easy to miss if you weren’t watching carefully. But I was watching. I saw the sun’s slow rotation, that patient arc across the barren landscape. And then, as suddenly as light had come, darkness swallowed it. The sun dipped below the horizon, and then I saw her. Earth in all of her glory, partly hidden by the darkness as the sun waned against her.

A smile found my lips. I inclined my head toward it, then faced the control panel. It would be the last time I saw the blue pearl.

They say that in your last moments, everything rushes back. My wife’s smile at our wedding; not the formal photo, but that candid moment when she laughed at my stumbling vows, her eyes bright with joy and mischief. My daughter’s first steps across our kitchen floor, that uncertain determined patter, my hands hovering, ready to catch her. The smell of fresh-cut grass in spring, that green-alive smell you can’t recreate no matter how hard you try. My father’s voice, steady and calm, telling me I could do hard things. Friends whose names I hadn’t spoken in years. A lifetime compressed into heartbeats, proof that I had lived. That I had mattered.

I hesitated. Not from fear. I’d moved past that. But deliberately, purposefully. I knew every second that ticked away mattered now. What came next had to be exact. Surgical. Failure wasn’t an option; it had to count. It had to mean something.

And then Spock’s voice echoed through my mind. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Words spoken to Kirk after saving the Enterprise from catastrophe. A noble death. A meaningful sacrifice.

The irony hit me like a physical blow, and I laughed; ragged, gasping against the helmet. Our ends were so similar, weren’t they? The same logic. The same choice.

Except Spock came back. They always wrote him back. The hero survives. The story continues.

I looked down at my hand, at the wound below my ribs, at the suit that was slowly, inevitably failing. No one was writing me back. This was the end of the line. This was where my story actually ended.

Yet, I mattered in this moment. I was the few, they were the many. My death would save millions. Billions. Humanity had a chance.

‘Now on the Red Line.’

And that much I knew mattered for my daughter, for my grandchildren. For their future.

I placed my hand on the button. It was warm; or maybe that was just my imagination. My mind projected comfort where there was none. This was it, the moment that would matter. My death, their survival. The mathematics of sacrifice were simple and absolute. I thought of my daughter’s face one last time; not in memory, but in imagination. The woman she would become. The life she would live because I made this choice.

I pressed the button. The system hummed, acknowledging.

And the world burned white.