[ 0 hours, 9 minutes, 3 seconds before impact]

...

He couldn't shake the sensation that he was falling, and the nervous looks from the engineers signaled that they felt likewise. From the monitoring station in the room outside the reactors, he could hear Di'her was singing out readings for the two Mintroks who were fiddling with a number of devices in a panicked frenzy.

From what he could gather, their thrusters were effectively shut off, and their shields were set to burnout.

None of that sounded good to him.

Tremors shook the floor, and the Oxot working with the coil reel flashed a variety of panicked colors as the rig spit out a flurry of sparks. In the far back of his mind the man also felt a flash of pain as the ship shook more violently, and then another. The sensation wasn't happy, whatever it was. Signaling to Di'her, he set off down the halls at sprint, trying his best to keep balance as the ship shifted beneath him.

He only made it halfway to the bridge before turning a sharp corner, and smashed into Syzah who had been coming from the opposite side of the fork, knocking the unlucky Siren flying across the hall.

There feeling of dread made his blood run cold. He had just tackled a child at full speed into a metal wall. That was enough to liquefy the raiders who had tried to take the ship previously, he could only imagine what it would do to an adolescent Siren.

Then, as though he hadn't almost become jelly, Syzah got up, and kept running- all while screaming a warning: “Don't turn around! Don't Turn around!”

Curiosity got the better of him, and he found there was a giant fucking robot stampeding down the hallway.

…

Sonat had miscalculated.

She had to accept that these things did happen from time to time, but she had always planned for the worst. Syzah did have the top of the line military shielding suit she'd borrowed from storage, so hopefully her miscalculation wasn't a fatal one. The issue now, really was what to do about the rampaging murder-bot that was crashing through the halls outside.

What to do... if anything.

The horrible sensation of free fall welling up around her didn't help.

From what sensors she had access to in her quarters, it definitely seemed as though they were entering an atmosphere of some kind, but that didn't make much sense. Sonat knew they were scheduled to deliver to an orbital platform, not a surface base. As fantastic a pilot Yitale was, she had never been very lucky when it came to steering this brick of a ship in atmosphere.

She pulled up a holo-screen to check on the bridge and let out a few choice cursing notes.

Yitale had never been a very good pilot when she was unconscious either: the bridge live feed cleared that mystery up. It was a total mess in there.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Sonat shut out the fear she was feeling as best she could once she noticed the blood.

No.

Now wasn't the time.

Tapping in to the ship's comm station, Sonat took command. “All crew, attention, all crew: strap into something immediately, we're in an emergency descent.”

She quickly set that to an audio loop, and checked the bridge again. She couldn't control anything from here, but she could zoom the scanners to read the holopads in the room, and figure out what was happening. She tried her best to ignore the other feeds, in which Syzah and the human were running for their lives from a death-machine. It seemed even the human couldn't deal with something that dangerous, but it could apparently run extremely quickly.

They were heading down on the planet that their platform destination should be orbiting, but from what she could make out of the main screen that she had pulled up, the station wasn't there any longer. It also read multiple incoming projectiles, and a manual override had forced all available power into the shielding.

She had to hand it to Yitale on this one, her mother certainly had some guts.

As Sonat pulled up a monitor to check on the duo's progress yet again, she saw that the human had picked Syzah up and thrown him over its shoulder as the creature continued its dead sprint. Syzah, meanwhile, was trying his best to shoot at the thing behind them with his pistol.

She knew that she probably shouldn't find this as funny as she did.

Sealing two sets of doors in the next fork they passed through, and then sealing all the others on the ship as well for good measure, would likely be enough to buy them some time. Sonat reopened the doors in the most direct path to the bridge. Based on who was present at the bridge, Syzah was going to have to try and land this thing. Far as Sonat understood, that seemed to be their only option left.

…

As the heavy doors sealed behind them, the human dropped Syzah down on the bridge floor, before falling on his back and panting with exhaustion. Whatever that thing was, he hoped that the numerous sealed gates would slow it down.

Rolling on his side, and slowing his breathing to keep the lightheaded sensation at bay, he checked the room. The crew on staff was in a panic, several of them had managed to strap into their chairs, but several more were unconscious, thrown across the ground with each new shudder of the vessel. One by one, he picked them up and strapped them in to the nearest seats. It wasn't ideal, but it was better than nothing.

Yitale had been on shift here if he remembered correctly. As he finished clicking in the last injured crew member he could find on the lower level, he headed to the elevated stage of the command platform with a nod to the few crew still actively attempting to keep the ship under control.

The Shipmaster wasn't in good shape: Syzah had propped her up against the wall, but she had a gash along her scalp, and her mane was coated in blood. Her breaths were shallow and quick, but her eyes were lucid. Quiet orders sang out in quick time- instructions he couldn't quite hear.

Syzah scrambled back away from her and ran to her seat, before strapping himself in. The little one was in charge now. Holo screens floated around the chair, adjusting to his size in a strange encapsulating bubble of information and controls, just like that he was immersed. As the man watched from Yitale's side, he felt the hair on his arms and neck begin to rise. The kid was about to make or break the whole thing, it was all on him.

A crash shook the main doors on the bridge, and a gigantic dent appeared in the center. Another, and then another followed, before metallic claws appeared at the seal; prying at heavy alloy.

It seemed this was it then. Syzah had his job, the ship-beast had its own.

With a grunt, he pulled his weapon from its perch on the wall. A sword wasn't going to be much good against something made of metal, but it was better than his fists. The wicked curved point reflected the light from the hundreds of screens and illuminations behind him as he raised it out in front of his chest. That familiar feeling was back.

Taking position in front of the door he felt the tremors as the metal shifted under the tremendous force to slowly edge the doors apart. He let his fingers curl around the grip, and respected the cool synthetic material that held the tang. He felt the familiar quickening take over as he tasted the rich atmosphere of the ship with each deep inhalation. Colors started to heighten, and his felt his feet brace themselves against the floor.

This was where the stand was made.

Just like the one before it- he wasn't going to simply wait and take what was coming for him. That wasn't how things worked here, anyways.

As the doors finally burst open, he charged.

[0 Hours, 0 minutes, 42 seconds before impact]