Celeste died. Celeste was killed. Mercilessly. Painlessly. Celeste, the creature conceived, created, and birthed in deepest space was murdered, slayed, terminated by her life support systems, never to be resuscitated. A spent cosmic macro-organism, sentenced to drift, to float, a dead star child, her inert eyes fixed for all eternity on a thriving miracle of biology: the new-born planet. The endless thrusts of nuclear propulsion, detonating warheads that brought her this far had long since ceased.
Celeste decelerated weaving through the Kuiper Belt, victim of her own inbuilt inhibitors, retro-powered explosions tiring, staying her, exposing her to the distant gravitational pull of our far-off sun.
Exhausted, no longer serving any purpose, she was granted her one final wish: to live for minutes longer before they killed her. She berthed in orbit between the strange dwarf sun Cacoethes, its only planet, and the huge moon, Celebre, which cast a permanent shadow over the green and blue orb lying below, spinning calmly in solitary space.
Celeste gave birth. Her impatient baby wriggled free of her. With her umbilical cord cut, the mother slept for the last time in her twenty-five-year life.
*****
From Predatory by HJ Furl on Amazon:
