Top-shelf Empyrean Oracles are too expensive for scenarios with this kind of risk, so they stick you with a three-to-one if you're lucky or a ten-to-one if you aren't. They wire your brain to a system your grandmother wouldn't trust to help her cheat at cards, stick you in a hull about as space-worthy as the bicycle you got for your 13th birthday, and load it down with kinetic busters and repeating gauss cannons. There’s not enough room for the cooling systems required to run lasers, and antimatter is reserved for people with odds better than two-to-one, you assume.

The devil is in the details: the acceleration, turning radius, and relative motion. Fights are almost always decided before any weapons are actually engaged. It's better if they don't know you're there until it's too late, but they do. You were a little late disengaging the ion engines, and they picked up your vacuum trail. Not that you could’ve known if nobody had told you. Bad luck, really. You say words that'd get you dishonorably discharged if anyone was listening.

You launch the busters earlier than the Oracle recommends because you're pretty sure these privateers have laser cannons. You think you remember that this model overestimates how those affect the momentum of solid objects moving at relativistic speeds. You're hoping that they'll see the first buster coming and engage their own Oracle's weapon systems, creating a cloud of superheated shrapnel that’ll kill them long before you’re in range. They'll have to bank hard down to dodge, and that'll make it easy to pepper them with cannon fire. For someone who got a C+ in Tactical Psychology, it's a well-laid trap.

You were half-right about what they'd do, which is worse than being wrong. They bank down, but if they've got lasers then they don't use them. While you try to make a new plan on the fly (something about leading them back on your old ion trail), you get so deep in the details that you nearly miss the Oracle putting a tiny pinprick of blue light in the corner of your vision, almost a full second before it's actually there. They trained you for this. You bank hard up (always up, never down), and you slam your hand down on the rad shield switch hard enough that the plastic breaks about 45 milliseconds too late. You feel a warm glow across your whole body, and your heart sinks.

You launch your remaining munitions, but it's a formality. It’s something your grandmother's law-man will be able to point to in order to argue that you died with 'honorable conduct', so she can get a small fraction of the pension she's owed. When you've confirmed that you've launched everything and still haven't hurt them in a way that matters, you pick a random direction and deploy both the chemical thrusters and the ion engines to max. Your chemical fuel is gone in just under a minute, but it's done its job. You're out of range.

You rip the Oracle interface from the nape of your neck. Your heart is pounding so hard that you barely feel it, despite how it tweaks your nerves on the way out. It could've told you with reasonable accuracy how long you had left to live, but you're mad at the Oracle even though it was doing its best. You decide to find out the old-fashioned way. You engage the medical assessment systems and prick your finger on a needle that extends from the console. You tell the system to assess the sample for ionizing radiation.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Doses in excess of 1000 cGy are almost always fatal, and after thirty seconds of processing time you find out that you're clocking in at a healthy 1,209. You're dead, and your body doesn't know it yet.

Before you suited up to leave, you snuck a smoke into the seal between your boot and your pant leg, which is common practice among Empyreal irregulars. You spend a few minutes carefully pulling it out without breaking the seal because that would be sensed and counted as dishonorable conduct. You pull out the defibrillator from the medical unit, and short it to produce a bare arc you can use to light the cigarette, which you place between your lips. Cigarettes aren’t permitted on this model of ship because the air filters don't have a way to filter out the ash particles, but you're not particularly worried about lung cancer anymore.

As you smoke, you consider your options.

You could, theoretically, call in through the subspace relay and get picked up. They'd put you in the medical ward and try to save you, though, which is bad. Not only will it not work: it'll bankrupt all the people who cared about you.

The quickest way to die in the ship would be to detonate the remaining chemical fuel, which you could do with a chisel, the shorted defibrillator, and some persistence.

Electrocution would leave a prettier corpse for your grandmother to cry over at your funeral, albeit with some interesting scarring.

Ultimately, though, you decide to do the most painful thing you can come up with, because you're an angry and bitter person.

You send out a subspace ping, but by the time anyone gets it, you're at relativistic speeds. You direct power away from the air filter and all other non-emergency systems so that you can give the Oracle more cycles to work with. You have to disable about thirty different security measures to get the oracle to accept your given destination. The error margins are huge. You don't care.

For the first two days, you can't manage to choke down even the blandest nutrient slurry, and you begin to be sure that you're losing lining from your esophagus. It's like the worst stomach bug you've ever had.

Then, you get better for about three days, which is when you know that you made the right choice.

By the time you enter your home system, you're moving so fast that one hundred and thirty seven years have passed, even though it's only been five days for you. All your friends and family are long dead, having long since reaped the benefits of your supposedly heroic actions. It's been seven days for you, and the radiation liquefies your body from the inside as the medical unit does the same to your brain to dull the pain. You're just aware enough to smile as you see that the Oracle got you on target. You die as your ship breaks up on reentry, scorched on the inside and out.

The ball of super-heated plasma that used to be your ship makes a crater of Empyrean’s local headquarters.