Exodus
The great battleships of the Home System Coalition’s Fourth Battlegroup smashed their way through what was left of the Colonial Alliance’s defending action, clearing a wide swathe through the line and steaming through at full throttle headed for interstellar space.
Close behind, the Seventh Battlegroup were engaged in fierce fighting with the remnants of the single-ship fighter swarm released by the CA’s carrier-hives before they were annihilated. Batteries of lasers dispensed killing energies with the kind of pinpoint autonomy only machines had ever achieved.
And behind all of these incredible, yet utterly insignificant war machines, the Doomsday drives fired their first and final song, a sixty-two gun salute for the death of classical physics as the energies ripped through the fabric of space and time to reveal the truth beneath.
All the vast scientific, industrial and military might of the Home System disappeared in an instant, leaving the shattered and ravaged universe for the rest of us to fight over.