"New plan! Shortest path out, maximum burn!"
"Warning: shortest path requires entering the gravity well of Ursuris Prime."
"That's my destination planet?" The nav display confirms it; we're way too close to the system, herded further than I thought. "At least I'm headed the right direction. Emergency descent to the facility coordinates!"
"Current trajectory will result in uncontrolled atmospheric entry. Additionally, the planet is experiencing Category Five storm activity."
"The dragons or the storms, Bebo. Pick one."
The dive toward Ursuris Prime is pure survival instinct, a purple-and-green monstrosity filling the viewport while seven Gorganths trail behind us. Something in the cargo hold shifts with a metallic bang, and Buttercup lurches sideways, suddenly lighter than the manifest weight should allow. The crates shudder against their restraints, but the sound is wrong, hollow, like the mass inside them has changed. No time to investigate. The ship groans with a sound that means money I don't have.
The dragons peel off at the upper atmosphere. Ambush predators, not atmospheric flyers. They know better than to follow prey into a gravity well.
I, apparently, do not know better.
"Come on, Buttercup, come on, sweet girl—" The controls shake under my grip as the ship punches through turbulence that rattles my teeth. "Emergency landing at the research station!"
"Multiple system failures." Bebo recites damage with the calm of someone reading a grocery list. "Shield generators offline. Port thrusters compromised. Hull integrity at seventy-threepercent and falling. Unable to achieve controlled descent to facility coordinates."
Through the viewport: dense jungle canopy, purple rain with an acidic sheen, terrain that screams nothing here wants you alive.
"How far off are we?"
"Facility landing coordinates located forty-seven kilometers northeast of projected crash site."
Forty-seven kilometers. In a hostile jungle, on a planet with compromised security, with cargo that weighs twice what it should and hums at body temperature.
"Bebo, tell me we can make it to the facility."
"Negative. Gravity well has captured the vessel. Recommend immediate emergency landing protocols."
"There's nowhere to land! It's all jungle!"
"Correction: there is everywhere to attempt landing. None of it is optimal."
The ship shudders again, and the controls fight me, and the canopy rushes up too fast, too green, too real. My hands know what to do; I've trained for this, run the simulations, kept Buttercup's emergency systems in the kind of condition that made Mother call me obsessive. Slowing the descent from instantly fatal to maybe survivable is all muscle memory now, the work happening faster than the panic.
We hit the canopy.
Trees explode. The hull screams. Something tears away from the ship's underside with a sound that means expensive repairs I cannot afford, and then impact, and the world becomes violence and noise and the absolute certainty that I'm about to become a very stupid statistic in OOPS disaster reports.
When the chaos stops, I'm hanging upside down in my restraints, staring at what used to be my control console and is now abstract art made of sparking wires and shattered displays.Purple rain hammers against the cracked viewport with a hiss that confirms acidic.
"Bebo?" Shaky. "Bebo, status report?"
Nothing. The kind of nothing that means either my ship's AI is dead or the entire computer core is offline, and either way I'm alone in a crashed ship on the right planet but the wrong part of it.
Three tries to release my restraints without landing on my head. When my boots hit what used to be the ceiling, my legs buckle, and I grab the pilot's seat until the shaking passes. Emergency kit. Cargo. Beacon. That's the order.
The cargo hold is worse. Two of the six crates have torn free from their restraints, temperature regulation displays flickering between normal and dangerous. Something inside the nearest intact crate ismoving. Not shifting, not settling. Throwing itself against the durasteel walls hard enough to make the metal flex.
Not tissue samples. Whatever ApexCorp classified as "biological specimens" is alive and very unhappy about the landing.
A crack spiders across one corner of the crate. Then another. My hand finds my tool belt by instinct, fingers closing around the grip of my molecular torch, backing toward the emergency exit with my pulse in my ears.
The crate shudders one final time and goes still.
Ten seconds. Twenty. The only sound is the hammering rain and my own breathing, too loud in the wrecked hold. Whatever was fighting to get out has stopped, and I don't know if that's better or worse.
