is overwhelmed later in the fight, while troopships drop Tauran soldiers to engage the human forces on the ground. The second Tauran cruiser eventually manages to overwhelm the Masaryk'''s defenses with missiles. Knowing they are doomed, the commander of the Terran cruiser decides on a kamikaze mission by having her ship detonate close to the remaining Tauran cruiser. This in turn leads to the Tauran ship impacting on the tiny planet, causing extreme earthquake shocks, above 9 on the Richter magnitude scale. Mandella and some of his troops survive only by taking refuge in a stasis field device which slows down all movement to a crawl, including that of all energy – and thus makes them immune to all modern weapons and most outside forces. However, the Taurans have encountered the device before, and enter the stasis bubble with melee weapons, leading to a short fight with the similarly armed humans - a reduction to archaic fighting methods unseen for millennia. Eventually, the humans remove one of their nuclear weapons from the shuttle and detonate it just outside their field, destroying the remaining aliens outside. A few days later, they shut off the stasis field - in the middle of a giant thermonuclear crater, they are the only living beings left in the whole solar system. Yet thankfully, an emergency shuttle left behind by the Masaryk before her demise, enables them to return home. Arriving centuries later at Stargate, a large asteroid used as the main human staging base for the war, the veterans find it almost deserted. It turns out that in their absence, the war has ended, and the two species are now living in mutual, total peace. The war ended only after human soldiers had been evolved into clones - allowing first meaningful contact with the Taurans, who turned out to be a natural group consciousness clone species (an idea further explored in the sequel trilogy). The whole war turns out to have been a mistake and a misunderstanding. Mandella is deeply shocked by the developments, and also by the change in his own species - which has evolved into a joined group consciousness with the Taurans, lacking true individualism. While Mandella has never developed any real hate for the Taurans, this is depicted as an at least faintly sad ending to his, and humanity’s, journey. He is finally, totally, an outcast. Robbed of his last purpose,