CHAPTOR ONE

Nathan sat, compressed in a fetal ball, in one corner of the spacecraft. Tucker was pacing around, stopping every five minutes to glance through a porthole. Paul was in the communications room, watching as the lines of communication slowly began to falter. Benjamin sat next to him, the final line of communication with earth. Denis was asleep, by some miracle, on this day that seemed to lack them absolutely. Jeff was in the excercise room, apparently attempting to forget the world's problems by distracting himself. Jack was in the next room over, scanning the viewscreen, waiting for the first hit.

--Six hours before--
"Mr. President, I don't think you want to do this."
"Dammit, John, I don't know what I want to do. This is the last straw. They're openly declaring war on us, and they outnumber us three to one. We can't win, this time."
"Sir, the nuclear option is the most drastic we have available. If we choose to use it, we will be changing the planet, forever, " said John, a member of the Cabinet.
"He's right. If you decide to do this, someone else in the Nuclear Club could decide to retaliate against us."
"Everyone else in the nuclear club is an ally of ours, Bill."
"In peacetime, yes, sir, but if we make the first strike in a nuclear war, annihalating China, what's to stop them overreacting, thinking we'll overreact, and destroying us?" said Bill, another member of the Cabinet.
"Nothing. I can recognize that. I don't like this option any more than you do, but our conventional defense forces don't stand a chance."
"Sir, I don't think I can convince you to stop this, so I'm just going to leave. But I am going to close with this, sir. If you do this, you will forever be the person responsible for it. You cannot shift blame for this event to anyone. Good day, sir."
"Good bye, John," the President said, as the doors to the War room closed again. Normally, a cabinet meeting would never decide the fate of the world, but a first strike in the Chinese invasion had been the total destruction of the Congress. The US was finally overmatched, the President knew it, and he could not bear to accept the fact of defeat.
"Sir? Are you all right?"
"Fine, Bill, thanks. Just thinking. You can go now. Spend some time with your family. If this doesn't work out, who knows what might happen."
"Thanks, sir, and good bye. Good luck with your decision."
Luck, the President thought wryly, what I wouldn't do for some luck.

CHAPTAR TWO

The International Space Station is a fantastically complex vehicle.

It travels at seventeen thousand miles per hour, in a two hundred ten mile high orbit, around the Earth.

Its integrated Environmental Control and Life Support System is capable of controlling dozens of factors, in all of the interconnected modules.

Normally, it carries a crew of three. A supply flight, packaged with a module full of scientific instrumentation, had been launched the day before, and now lay, locked, on the underbelly of the station. The flight was carried out by the space shuttle Discovery.

Currently, there were seven astronauts onboard the ISS. The three standard crew, namely, Paul, Benjamin, and Denis, and the four visitors.

These seven people were destined to be the last human beings alive in the universe.

The ISS does not currently maintain a systemic capacity to generate its own oxygen, nor, for that matter, water. Advanced filtration and recycling systems enabled a standard crew of three to last for months, but with the current party of visitors, it would scarcely last two.

CHAPTAR THREE

"Mr. President, are you sure about this?"
"General, do you think I would joke about this? Fire the missiles, now. Preferably before the Chinese take over the West Coast," the President snapped sharply at the commander of North American missile defense programs. Missile defense was the term used, oddly enough, despite the actual goal being decisive offense.

The President of the United States, the "leader of the free world", had terminated the negotiation process, abandoned all hope of a diplomatic victory, recognized the futility of a traditional war, and thus proceeded to his final option; the nuclear one.

The United States is armed with an unknown number of nuclear missiles, but the general count is assumed to be somewhere in the low thousand, probably somewhere between one and three. Each missile, otherwise known as an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), carried half a dozen warheads, and each warhead has two megatons; equivalent to two million pounds of dynamite.

Together, the United States nuclear arsenal, even just the ICBM arm of it, was more than capable of wiping out a landmass as large as China. Factoring in bomber strikes and submarine missiles, one sees why the US was so dangerous at the height of the cold war.

However, the United States is not the only member of the so-called "Nuclear Club". Russia, England, France, India, and China are all members as well. Most of these countries had small, negligent stockpiles, which posed basically no tactical threat to the United States, or any other nation, barring an extremely tiny one.

Russia, though, was a literal nuclear bank. It had been actively producing nuclear weapons at maximum speed for the entire course of the cold war. While much of its original stock had been disassembled, and even more had fallen into disrepair, it still featured enough to wipe out the United States. At least, that was the idea, until technicians realized that years of negligent service had wiped the coordinate data on half the rockets, meaning that nuclear weapons were now bound for random areas covering the planet.

Now, before one is tempted to think that the narrative has jumped over itself, consider this. The United States hastily launches its entire nuclear arsenal. The Russians have long since had an automatic detection network for this, and their socialist government had engendered a disrespect for their own people so effectively that the entire firing system for the Russian nuclear arsenal was automatic.

Effectively, this meant that the moment the President of the United States gave the order, and the moment it was carried out, the Russian nuclear arsenal was automatically preparing a counter attack. But, the degradation of the computer equipment meant that now the Russians were blindly firing on everying on the Earth.

An odd first step in a total nuclear war, but an oddly poetic one. Rather than mutually assured destruction of the two nations who had been brooding a cold war for dozens of years, both nations had totally avoided firing upon one another, and yet come to the same result. Nuclear weapons could certainly be written off as a horrific invention, but to do so would neglect to include the advantages of nuclear power, slim though they are.

So. Thousands of nuclear missiles were beginning the classic arc trajectory that would take them across the earth. The world was coming to an end, and the crew of the International Space Station was around to see it.