The hushed silence of the Bruchsal Parteikongress Chamber as its podium-hinged speaker began a long and heavily-practiced spiel was palpable enough to cut with a blade - And sample the saline and bitter taste it left in his or her mouth. But the speech paled in comparison to recreating the agony and misery of that fateful solar night.
Of course on Zwickau it hardly mattered - Even if the sun dimmed out every twelve hours it wouldn't be terribly easy to tell through the cloud of nebulous smog or perhaps the wisp of a Walker Nebula; so comparable that a differentiation was useless. When blaring sirens awoke roughly half of the station well short of its shift rotation, denizens ran in all directions. Some of them ran to Zwickau's lone cramped hangar - A salvaged model of a bygone civilian time when snubfighters didn't need to be scrambled at a moment's notice.
One of them was a man who once believed in stories of fame, fortune, and glory. While the speech couldn't have properly conveyed the desperation that his twelve-man squadron faced in that short, brutal melee at point-blank, it did well enough. Some had to excuse themselves from the immediate area. Others openly wept.
Helmut Von Stierlitz openly wept as the Wraith-class lurched and zipped out of the single-layer hangar, but this was perhaps due instead to the sheer number of years it had been since he'd ever been at the controls of such a craft; An early maneuver behind another Wraith tagged as hostile by a static-filled Zwickau Fire Control nearly caused him to black out from the number of G's incurred by the action. It was clear that there were three sides in the skirmish centered around the lonely Kruger-mined husk of an insurgent base, but they all shared the same Daumann-derived dark grey hulling. And as the speaker broke as gently as possible to the audience, it was more than likely that none of the sides could tell each other apart.
It wasn't clear to Von Stierlitz given the profoundly dangerous conditions who was who, but he watched a dagger-shaped cruiser part the mists in front of him and then split in twain - hull perforated with smoky green emission - The Hessians were likely followed here by their mutual foe. A reverberating shockwave followed, and he lost contact with Fire Control.
In a voice nobody could hear any longer, he tersely rattled out names of his wingmates. None replied. Evading fire from identical ships and identical people on opposite sides of a line in the sand, he weaved through the remains of an Oder-class - Once his original posting before his defection so long ago.
But perhaps Bruchsal heard his voice two weeks later, or at least his name, as the long list of nearly one-hundred lives lost in the catastrophe were alphabetically recited. The audience may never have known that Von Stierlitz died in a blazing fireball, putting an end to his own life and that of dozens of Donau crew-members as he rammed his immolating metal ship through the Bridge...
...But a mere speech couldn't re-create that. The emergency assembly adjourned, and the words were written on the tears that fell from the eyes of those that listened to it and were taken to Zwickau's final moments with a solemn mantra on their lips.
