The cargo cruiser Douglas' Disciple shuddered as something, somewhere on it exploded. Captain Layla Markhavian doesn't even bother looking at the flashing damage report screen, nothing on it mattered anymore; it would just be one more item among many. She merely stood with her hands clasped behind her back, watching the main viewscreen through the smoke hanging in the air.
The battle with the pirates had been a hard one, and their numbers were greater than Markhavian had ever seen in her twenty years in space. The Disciple had ultimately won, destroying most of the pirates, and sending the survivors fleeing for their lives, but in her view it was the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. The Disciple would soon fall into the atmosphere of the mining planet Hope (an irony not lost on her), and burn up with her still on board
“Captain,” Lieutenant David Smith called as he entered the bridge, “ evacuation is complete.”
“All survivors are off the ship?” she asked, not looking away from the screen.
“Yes, ma'am, it's just you and me left.”
“You get out of here too.”
“And what about you, ma'am?”
“David, I have been with this ship since it's first voyage, and I'm going to stay with it to the end.”
“I thought you'd say that. I'm staying too.”
“You are to abandon ship, that is an order!”
“I cannot obey your order, Captain; there are no more escape pods. I sent Baker and Pertwee off in the last one personally.”
Markhavian sighed, watching Hope grow larger and larger in the forward viewscreen; it took up most of the image by then, “Your funeral then, Lieutenant.”
“Permission to speak freely, Captain?”
“You have permission to stop calling me Captain; say what you want. These may be your last words, choose them well.”
David walked through the smoky room, standing next to her as she watched their destruction approach, “Captain... er, Layla, I need to confess something to you.”
“I know you smuggled that whiskey on board..”
“Not that, something else.”
Layla turned to look at him, “What is it? We don't have much time left,” as if to emphasize the point, the alarm signifying a containment breach in engineering began to sound; any corpses in that section had just been vaporized.
David took a deep breath, choking on the smoke only a little, and looked deep into his captain's eyes, “Layla, I have been your second for a long time now, right?”
“You've been here almost since the beginning, yes.”
“Well... I've never been able to tell you this before, but....”
“Spit it out, David!”
“I love you.”
Layla blinked a few times, trying to process the sentence. After everything that had happened that day, and what was going to happen in the next few minutes, she could not wrap her head around the statement.
“You...?
“I love you, I have almost since the very beginning. I thought it was just admiration at first, but then I realized it was love.”
“So you're the one...?”
“Who left a Valentine's Day present outside your quarters every year and then erased the security footage? Yes.”
“I would have had to write you up for that! Doesn't matter now though, I suppose,” she looked to the screen, only a sliver of black space remains visible around the planet, and then back to David, “Why didn't you say anything before?”
“It seemed inappropriate, and then there's the whole fraternization policy. You are my captain after all.”
Layla smiled sadly, “I wish you'd told me... there would have been time....”
“We have time now, if you don't mind breaking a few rules.”
“I suppose that it would be okay to break the rules just this once. Do you have any of that whiskey left?”
“Yes, ma'am,” David nodded smartly, and dashed away to his quarters. He returned a minute later to find Layla still standing there, hands together behind her back, staring at the screen.
David holds the bottle out, “What is this, David, no glasses? Our standards have fallen,” Layla said, taking the offered bottle, opening it, and taking a long drink without taking her eyes away from his before passing it back.
“Do you think this is going to hurt?” he asked after taking a long swig of his own.
“No, once the ship starts to break up, we'll go quick. She wasn't meant to land planetside, you know? I suppose it will be nice to not be alone at the end.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“I wish we had more time. I wish you had said something earlier. Maybe we would have gotten out of this business; settled down somewhere...”
David nods, “I don't think we would have.”
“No, me neither, but it sounds good,” Layla stepped forward, and put her arms around her second-in-command, and pulling him close.
The two officers' embrace became kissing, and as the surface of Hope becomes larger and more detailed on the screen in front of them, their kissing became more.
Captain Layla Markhavian and Lieutenant David Smith died that day, going down with their ship as it burnt up in the atmosphere of Hope. The crew mourned, their friends mourned, the company would name future vessels for them, and tales of their sacrifice would spread through the appropriate circles, but there is one thing those story-tellers would never know: in the final minutes of their lives, they finally found what they had always been searching for. For the first time in their lives, they were both truly happy.