“Mayday! Mayday! This is Scout 2-5-Niner. Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck. Catastrophic damage to main engine. Our location DFY1-3-6-zero. Coordinates ….”
Annika managed to twist around to look at Phillips.
Had he lost his mind? They weren’t down, damn it! The captain could regain control ….
But when she glanced at the captain, she saw that he was either unconscious or dead, clearly in no condition to use his many years of experience to save them, to land the ship, or at least control the crash.
Phillips was trying to set the ship down.
They were so fucked!
It was the last thought that crossed her mind before her senses exploded with input that they shouldn’t have and couldn’t process—air they hadn’t brought with them, grinding tears along the sides of the craft, leaves, branches, meta-glass, metal and bolts flying all around.
Screams.
Then blackness.
She didn’t think she’d been unconscious more than a handful of seconds—maybe not even totally unconscious at all but rather stunned—in shock. Her mind seemed to be all out of whack—running at super speed then half speed as she tried to survey and assess her surroundings/danger using only her animal instincts.
Those told her the presence of smoke and dust and other unidentifiable particles were a serious and imminent threat and she began clawing mindlessly at her safety harness. It was purely by accident/desperation that she managed to free herself, not by intelligent design since she wasn’t currently capable of reasoning through her problem. She fell out of her topsy-turvy seat when she’d managed to release the grip of her harness and then scrambled mindlessly around the jumble of debris until she basically fell out of a hole ripped along the side.
Her stomach went weightless when she didn’t immediately connect with ground. She screamed, flailing the air ineffectually in search of something to grab.
Instead, after what seemed an interminable time falling, something grabbed her.
She screamed again, this time with a mixture of terror and instinctual animalistic challenge, flailing her arms and legs and trying to find some sort of flesh to rend with her fingernails and teeth in what her animal mind perceived as a fight for survival.
She managed to fight her way free only to discover she was in freefall again. The second time the ‘something’ hit her from behind and grabbed a tight hold, she passed out.
