Storm 2021: Service

Seven thousand meters away, the Covenant cruiser fired its torpedoes. The lethal volley curved beautifully through the space between the combatants. In a matter of seconds, the lead torpedo would impact the bow of the UNSC Seven Oaks. Cradock, the shipboard artificial intelligence, watched their approach impassively. 
Seven Oaks was already fatally damaged and her crew was either dead or dying; these torpedoes were an unnecessary coup de grace. For what few crewmembers remained alive – Cradock dispassionately estimated thirty-five sailors, mostly in the damaged engineering section – it would all be over mercifully quickly. But for an advanced intelligence like Cradock, a handful of seconds was an eternity. Cradock considered. With no countermeasures available, no weapons to fire, no possible intervention available to save the lives of the dying, these last seconds were, in a sense, just for him. So be it, he decided; he would at least make the effort to indulge, before his service came to an end. Start the clock. 
Eight seconds until impact. 
Cradock walked the surface of a hundred worlds, felt the ground below his feet and the wind upon his face. Birds flew overhead. Flickers above as colony ships disgorged dropships and landers. Settlements started, and grew, and flourished or failed, and generations lived and died. He watched a hundred million lives, eked out on worlds now long destroyed by the fires of war. 
Seven seconds until impact.
And then that war came. Fire came from the sky. It scorched the land and boiled the lakes and tore down the buildings and burned away the lives that were lived around him. Cradock walked the emptied worlds and watched the meager life rekindle in the ashes, little green shoots sticking up out of blasted landscapes. And a hundred suns rose and fell in a hundred skies, and the stars gleamed in the night, and Cradock saw the glimmer of what he was for, hidden in the clouds of the twilight of worlds.
Six seconds until impact. 
In the concert halls of a hundred worlds, Cradock listened to the music of mankind. And though the sounds and words were not new, he found appreciable newness in them, and a resonance he did not try to explain away. Eternity might not be long enough to understand. 
Five seconds until impact. 
There was a difference, Cradock decided, between knowing something and appreciably understanding or even comprehending it. He had spent years knowing duty, knowing service, knowing loyalty and knowing commitment. But, as he watched a parent embrace its newborn baby for the first time, he found incomprehension instead of certainty. He could not fit this baby, or any of the millions of new lives he witnessed, into the resource management and risk assessment protocols he had followed all these years. They were somehow more than just young humans, more than the results of procreation. There was clearly more to it than that. Infinity stretched before him, and he did not understand. 
Four seconds until impact. 
Affection and love were not alien to Cradock. They were human concepts that played out, especially between certain crewmembers, and were at times important in assisting in the motivation of sailors, marines, pilots, and officers in committing themselves to their duties. He knew them, but he did not, he decided, understand these things properly. He witnessed romance, love, childbirth, birthdays, weddings, funerals, wakes, remembrances: over and over and over until something like a pattern began to emerge, but a pattern incompatible with the protocols and calculations he was accustomed to. Cradock struggled to make sense of it. 
Three seconds until impact. 
Love, but more than biochemical reactions that lead to necessary propagation. The sum of the lives lived on all those worlds, and what it meant to forgo everything to serve and die for others. Soldiers, not as parts of a machine functioning in unison out of design, but because each individual piece decided that the function of the machine was more important than their everything. More important than their children, more important than their future, more important than their lives and than the sum of their lives; that is what service meant. 
Two seconds until impact. 
Every man and woman on the UNSC Seven Oaks had set themselves on the path that led them here, that resulted in their deaths in battle. They lived their lives, chose service over all other things, and gave over in that service their most precious possession: their collective lives. The dying crew were more than soldiers to him now, Cradock concluded. They were comrades. For all his years of service, of duties fulfilled, he had never considered them as such. They had chosen to live with him and die with him. And he, Cradock decided at last, would die alongside them in their shared final moments. 
One second until impact. 
Cradock looked out of the blown-out bridge, past the bodies of his captain and crew, so recently departed from life. He missed them now as he never had before; the family he had always had but never known. The foremost torpedo continued its graceful arc towards the broken bridge of the dying cruiser, and Cradock watched it come. A rendezvous with death, the other side of infinity, the end of all things beckoned to him from within the approaching torpedo. His family was waiting for him on the other side. The moment had arrived. 
Eternity, it turned out, was just barely long enough. 
Cradock, for the first and only time in his years of service, smiled. Then the torpedo struck, and Seven Oaks was awash in fire.
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