The little freighter set out just five minutes after everyone boarded.

It was dreary, quiet affair at first. Their pilot was long gone, along with the rest of the crew and everybody else who had been abducted. Rock, one arm barely working, one half of his head in bandages, and both eyes blurred with medicine and the distance of deep thought, was the closest thing they had to a pilot capable of handling a craft of that size and complexity. He seemed like he knew what he was doing, though—that was putting it lightly. He laid out procedures with a cold, heavy air of authority. He was on a spacecraft, on its bridge; this was what he was trained for more than anything else. Sitting at the helm in his full dark-blue-uniform spacesuit, helmet on and sling removed, it was hard to tell there was ever anything wrong with him.

They emerged from the shadow of the ARK, drifting through noiseless space with only the hum of the engines. There was weightlessness inside the vessel. The crew's substitute pilot had disabled all artificial gravity generation, including inertial compensation. He said he didn't trust it.

The dark, dim-lit bridge, with its rectangular windscreen panels and vividly-glowing console, was suddenly a scary looking thing, easily identifiable for what it truly was: a fragile mess of electronics, steel, polymer, and glass that would soon serve to narrowly separate them from a horrific, fiery death during atmospheric entry. The chamber, with its low ceiling and narrow overall width, still had enough seats to accommodate pretty much everyone. Badge, the only other member of the crew with any piloting experience, had been asked to sit alongside at the helm, ready to take over if anything went wrong. Everyone else had been distributed without much concern, save for Tau, who always seemed to find his greatest usefulness at the ship's sensor array, and Jam, who was told bluntly to sit as far away from the console as possible. (Her latent EM field, though not powerful enough to be a hazard, didn't play nicely with the instrument panel.) It didn't really matter where everyone was, though, as long as they were buckled in. They had their headset radios in their helmets to keep them in contact.

The planet grew in their vision until its spherical surface began to take on the proper appearance of a horizon. Its sheer enormity, glowing vibrant blue against the black depths of space, only then became truly apparent.

"We're gonna be entering the atmosphere at about 29,000 kilometers per hour," Rock's voice, raspy with fatigue, suddenly broke the silence through everyone's radios. "We're goin' in hot—keepin' this quick so we don't present an easy target. That means this won't be comfortable." He began procedures for entry. Switches flipped and clacked; the cockpit lights went out entirely. Thrusters fired, and the ship groaned loudly as it began to tilt very steeply upward in a disorienting fashion. "Peak deceleration may reach well over 10 G, so keep your lower bodies tense, keep the blood goin' to your head, and stay with us."

Suddenly, a steady, slow drum beat came through as some calm, smoky, classic blues-rock tune began to thrum through the ship.

"... And the music's so you don't have to hear the ship creak like we're about to... break apart, 'n... die," he added, as if an afterthought.

They very well may have soon been thankful for it as the shaking and rumbling began, the golden, fiery glow washed over the windscreen, and, contrary to all sensibility, it suddenly felt as though they were racing up a vindictive, supernatural elevator at a million miles per hour, smashed into their seats like lemons being juiced while their unaffected pilot made casual, weaving, snaking (utterly nauseating) turns left, to right, to left, to right, over and over to bleed off speed like a slaloming skier.

...

Somehow, over the sound of the reentry, the bluesy soundtrack Rock had supplied, and the flapping of his own lips, Ace could be heard growling aloud: "You're gonna make me hate this song...!"


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It may have felt excruciating, but it wasn't long-lived. Their speed was brought to a manageable level quite quickly, and soon, they were blasting down through the stratosphere and beyond.

They were over the uninhabited—or, at least, undeveloped—side of the planet. It looked to be either dusk or dawn, but it was probably hard for the passengers to tell which on an alien world without any frame of reference for what was north and south, or which way the planet rotated.

Rock was silent through the previous banter, and remained that way now. They had no idea what to expect, so it was considerably more stressful than flying over empty countryside should have been. They were finally low enough to start taking in the scenery—and low enough to take fire, if there was going to be any aimed at them.

For the more observant viewer, the dim lighting of the fading/incoming day would show a series of plains blurring by below, random streams breaking the monotony of rolling, grass covered hills. More specific details were hard to be seen at their height and the dimness of the sky, but the area laid out below them was now obvious. It was peaceful looking, for the most part.

Yet something ignited in a fiery red out in the distance. At first, it could easily be mistaken as some sort of weapon at first glance, perhaps a small missile directed at them, but this would be a false presumption. The streak of red continued upward into the sky before bursting into a more intense glare. To anyone with the right knowledge, it appeared to be a signal flare.

The new light began to float gradually down, maintaining its intensity for the moment, marking its location in the sky.