Violent shudders racked the spaceship as it raced topside down toward the surface, its warped metalik hull heated brick red from the chaotic entry into the atmosphere of F-moon. Oily smoke wafted black through the corridor, smudging sterile walls with its sticky soot and carpeting the ceiling in a bog stained burnt-cherry in the red glare of emergency lights. Gravity generators, yet uncompromised, bound the smoke-choked crew to their seats as they struggled for control of the torpedoing vessel. Consumed with avoiding a disastrous impact, they couldn’t fight the fire devouring the ship’s systems even though every passing second the destructive flames lessened their options and worsened the odds.

Down the hall, the priceless cargo watched in terror as the black fog collected against the impenetrable shimmer of the energy door, curling in heavy twills at the unseen corners.

Inside, thin gray death snaked through the air vents, the pitched smoke having overwhelmed the special filters meant to isolate the air in her pen from that of the rest of the ship.

Roan pressed against the energy door, too focused on surviving to react to the shimmer’s stinging bite. Peering through the thickening haze, ignoring the burn to her lungs, she took a deep breath and yelled. “Help me. Let me out. Please, someone. HELP ME.” Don’t leave me here to die.

No one could hear her over the fire alarm screeching its warning of the obvious, but even if they had, they were too busy trying to save themselves to spare concern for her. And, as bad as the air was becoming inside her locked room, it was worse in the rest of the ship.

Yelling had only succeeded in filling her chest with toxic air. Whole-body hacking doubled her over. Lungs seized and mindless with fear, her little hooves stamped frantic drumbeats across the tin floor. Cobalt blue tendrils of hair whipped about her petite body as it careened from corner to wall seeking a pure breath in the small room.

The edges of her vision blurred, and, when the floor shifted from under hoof, she was tossed down hard. Pain spiked up her spine, and she curled into a ball of coughing despair, helpless tears drowning her lids.

A reverberating grind of metal signaled the successful restart of the ship’s stabilizers. Shouts of victory trumpeted from the crew, as, for the briefest of moments, euphoric hope flared within them.

With a sharp heave, the ship tipped sideways as the stabilizers went to work. The sudden shift sent Roan shooting across the floor and slamming into the thin metal leg of her bed. Caught crosswise along her belly, her breath pushed out with a painfilled hiss. Dazed and on the verge of fainting, she hung from her abdomen. Her arms, legs, and blue locks swung free before the strained gravity generators adjusted to leave her lying folded against the floor.

As quick as they came online, the stabilizers failed, causing the ship to roll back to ceiling-side down. Gravity lagged again, and she found herself falling bottom first towards the ceiling below. Grasping onto the only lifeline to be had, her small hands clutched the bolted bed leg with a strength born of desperation as her tiny body dangled, twisting with each jarring dip until the return of the artificial gravity bounced her up to the floor above. A jarring tilt of the ship deposited her under the bed where the air was stagnant but not smoke tainted. She inhaled lungsful of the stalest air she had ever been thankful to breathe.

Determined to stay in the pocket, she braced her hooves against a metal leg and linked her arms through the slates where her sleep pad had sat before it ended up lying cockeyed half off the bed. Tears leaked. She was close to hyperventilating. Her body shook. Tired arm and leg muscles trembled with growing weakness. Her spirit quaked. The ship was in a death dive and taking her with it.

Forward on the ship, fire enclosed the gravity generators, simmering the volatile gases inside. The weight of the air shifted. Roan felt herself grow lighter. Her body lifted, levitating inches from the floor, as if filled with helium. The sleep pad floated. Then both fell back. She rose again, higher, her face nudging the bed slates, and the pad touched the ceiling. The unadorned silver locket around her neck hung above her, catching her eye. Alarm over losing the modest jewelry bulldozed through her crazed fear, and she fought with elbows and legs until her body was pressed to the floor before jamming the plain pendant deep inside the tight collar of her bodysuit.

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A loud explosion rocked the ship as the gravity generators deconstructed into shrapnel of a thousand serrated arrows. A large hole blasted from the hull. The pressurized well holding the hydraulic fluid was skewered and a fountain of flames spewed from it. The crewmate closest to the blast, the one trying to revive the stabilizers, was sliced into stew meat and his workstation was destroyed.

No hydraulic lifters and no stabilization meant no chance to avoid crashing.

The artificial gravity disappeared. The world inverted as the planet’s natural gravity took over. Ceiling became floor, and the crew fell from their stations, ending in a pile of tangled limbs in the spaceship’s domed crest.

Roan found herself lying face down on the bed slates, the floor now a close ceiling above her. The smoke shifted too, rising to smother her in its viscous syrup.

Holding her breath, she scurried to the edge of the bedrail and lowered first one leg than the other into the open space before sliding her torso down the rail, trying to both hurry and ease her way. As soon as her weight hit her hands, she lost her grip and dropped. She landed the short distance in a boneless heap partially atop her sleep pad.

Laying exhausted and gasping, brain turned to pudding, muscles and spirit beat, she let the ship’s movements take her and move her limp body along the room’s ceiling. Certain she was going to die, a reel of important moments played behind her glazed eyes: making and tasting cake frosting with Mother, holding her twin’s hand and springing through pink heather while waiting for the violet clouds to release their sweet purple rain, propping against the damp bark of the shade tree near their family home and petting Jok, the abandoned worl cub they had rescued.

Home. A stab of leaden fear tore at her center. Fingers snuck the locket from inside her jumper and pressed it to her chest. It was all for nothing.

As the ship neared the ground, it hit a wall of conifer crowns, slowing with a hard jerk before tipping end over front. Roan flipped from where she lay, hurled through the air. Her flying body slammed into the force field door barricading her pen. Her momentum partially split the electrical field, jamming her inside before it closed around her body, sealing her in. It surrounded her, suspending her in the doorway, entombed. Trapped.

Time slowed to the count of seconds as the pulsating energy delivered a waterfall of painful shocks on every surface of her body. The energy field flowed like a torrent of red-hot needles into her mouth, which had been opened in a scream, and inside her nose and ears, and against her wide-opened eyes. She felt like she was being roasted alive and feared she would combust into a fireball and be burnt to charcoal.

But nothing on her actually burned. Even as the shocks stabbed with cudgel precision into all billion of her sensory neurons and threatened to scramble her sanity, she was physically unscathed. Not a single blue hair singed. Pearlescent skin remained pale and uncharred.  

The ship was tearing apart around her, tumbling through the forest like a loosed pinball. A large portion of the ship was ripped away, leaving a gaping hole in front of her. On each rotation, she saw pristine trees in the ship’s path and then destruction left from its passing. Yet, she remained protected in her agonizing cocoon. Torn off parts of the ship hit the energy door, but it did not give. She was locked in and the dangers were locked out.

Outside the energy door, but still tethered to her neck, was Roan’s locket. The golden disc whirled and twisted, smacking the door against the door, raising the probability that it might spill its precious cargo. Everything Roan valued depended on its contents, but such was the intensity of discomfort and fear, she forgot to care. Forgot to notice.

The ship hit a tree whose trunk held strong, braking the forward momentum of the craft and splitting what remained intact nearly in two. Power to the energy door was cut, releasing Roan. She flew out of the shattered remains of the ship, her body catapulted through the air.

She flew between trees on a trajectory that missed their trunks but sent her shooting through branches and over a short clearing to land on her back at the shallow edge of a muddy pond, the force pushing her deep into the thick clay bed. Water and silt filled her mouth and nose. She was disoriented, and only instinct had her fighting toward the surface.

Mud sucked at her, shackling her in its muck. For a fleeting moment, Roan was ready to resign to the viscous embrace. Then she remembered she couldn’t die, not yet. Not without completing her mission.

She renewed her efforts, lungs burning, alight with panic. One hand breached the surface, clawing at empty air for a handhold. Little hooves dug in and with a last wild thrust, she burst from the mud’s death grip.  

Roan crawled to the shore, coughing up pond and using the bushes at water’s edge to drag herself the last few feet before sprawling in the dirt. The last thing she did before she faded was feel for the locket.

It was gone.