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They stared up together, and then she stiffened with a quick, convulsive gasp. High above them, the cobalt sky blossomed with light-a brilliant, flaring light, bigger than any five stars and brighter than a score of them. A light which had come from another universe to die ... and taken fourteen months to reach their eyes.
It glowed in the depths of space like a searing beacon-beautiful and defiant, yet somehow forlorn and lost-a glorious diadem marking the trackless graves of the men and women of TFNS Defender who had died to save an Earth not even their own. It grew and expanded as they watched, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone, snuffed by the breath of eternity, and Richard Aston felt his wife sob against his shoulder, weeping for her dead at last.