1.5 - Caius

  He could feel his eyes being pressed inward as the Parvus tore through the wormhole at maximum speed.

  Caius kept his gaze fixed on the nothingness ahead.

  Or so he thought.

  A brief instant of darkness. Like a blink he didn’t remember allowing himself to make.

  —Then a new horizon filled the viewports.

  Beyond the overheated shields, a planet orbited in the distance. Blue, with two smaller satellites flanking it. It grew closer by the second.

  Too close.

  “Warning. Speed exceeding expected parameters. Agua orbital proximity exceeding expected parameters. Activating front thrusters to avoid critical threat.”

  The front thrusters activated, shifting gravity briefly toward the viewports.

  But they were going too fast — they would be entering the planet’s orbit within moments.

  “Danger. Impact imminent. Calculating evasive maneuver. Impact unavoidable. Redistributing shield power to zone of impact.”

  He barely had time to process the alert before the ship groaned — the kind of sound that preceded structural failure.

  “Report! What hit us?” Caius shouted.

  The answer came an instant later, hesitant.

  “…S-Sir, it’s the Tabula Picta!”

  “Damage report! Now!”

  “The lower section took most of the impact. Scipio has already sealed the breaches, but we—”

  The officer froze.

  Two enormous shadows drifted past the Parvus, tumbling toward the planet below.

  The Tabula Picta — split in half.

  Its vertical arm, the longest section, had been completely sheared away.

  The Parvus had slowed too fast. Or the Tabula hadn’t slowed down fast enough.

  Caius was certain it was the latter.

  Moments later, from both halves of the ruined ship, hundreds of landing pods launched like insects fleeing a burning hive.

  His voice cut through the chaos of panicked officers. Many had family aboard that vessel.

  “Finish your report, officer!”

  “Scipio has sealed every breach, sir. But we’ve lost contact with the lower hangars, residential sector, prison block, and lower cargo bays. I can’t yet provide a full assessment of casualties.”

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  “Warning: Speed exceeding expected parameters. Agua orbital proximity exceeding expected parameters. Unable to reduce speed.”

  Scipio warned there were more pressing matters.

  The collision had hurled the Parvus into an even faster descent.

  The planet was already pulling them in.

  They were plowing through the Tabula’s debris, racing toward Agua.

  Caius paid it little mind. He’d seen worse.

  But he hoped the officers wouldn’t notice — a distracted crew was the last thing he needed.

  Much of that debris wasn’t metal.

  It was human.

  “Noooo!”

  A girl screamed behind him, voice breaking.

  —Akane Taira had noticed the bodies pressed against the edge of the viewports, it seemed.

  “Admiral, we lost the prison block, sir,” an officer called.

  He tilted his head.

  “What? Was the lower hull so heavily damaged?”

  “No, sir. Someone overrode Scipio’s controls and detached it.”

  The Parvus was never built for planetary landing. Some sections were designed to detach autonomously in emergencies, equipped with independent descent and landing systems.

  The prison block was one of them.

  “Someone, huh? I’ve got a good guess… but it wasn’t a bad call,” he said calmly.

  His voice rose. “We need to lose weight! We are landing on the planet.”

  Silence swept the bridge as the detached prison block surged ahead, splitting into segments as it began its descent.

  “Send word: abandon ship,” Caius ordered. “Anyone able to reach a landing pod is to do so.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Scipio, jettison everything nonessential — half the weapon systems even. Plot the best trajectory for emergency landing.”

  The planet’s pull had them completely now. Its main continent already filled the upper edge of the central viewports.

  “Calculating. Trajectory confirmed. Uploading data for emergency descent.”

  “Activate bow thrusters! Flip the Parvus upward!” Caius thundered.

  The ship tilted violently as the command executed.

  From outside, it must have looked as if the vessel were shedding its own skin — containers, pods, entire transports peeling away and burning up in the thinning upper atmosphere.

  The Parvus completed its rotation. Now the bridge faced the sky, the main thrusters aimed directly down toward Agua.

  “Redirect all shield power to the stern. Rear thrusters, full burn!”

  “Sir! The heat and atmospheric stress will destroy the nozzles! They’ll explo—”

  “Do it!” he barked, without even turning.

  The Parvus’s engines roared. The surrounding air ignited into a firestorm — but the ship’s descent began to slow.

  “Warning: Main thrusters three, five, and six overheating. Collision with planetary surface in sixty seconds.”

  Caius clenched his teeth at Scipio’s alert. He was doing all he could.

  In the end, luck — and steel — would decide.

  “Warning: Main thrusters three and five lost. Thrusters one, two, four, and six overheating. Collision with planetary surface in thirty seconds.”

  “Now! Activate lower-hull thrusters!”

  The ship tilted again. The view shifted — from blinding cloud cover to an endless expanse of blue.

  Ocean.

  “Warning: Impact imminent.”

  As the scorched hull neared the water, a wall of superheated steam erupted upward, swallowing the Parvus in a screaming white shroud. The fog came too fast, too dense to outrun.

  “Warning: Main thrusters one and six lost.”

  Then came the impact.

  The jolt shook every deck.

  —But the Parvus held.

  Status alerts flooded holoscreens in red. Officers shouted over one another.

  “We’re losing speed, Admiral!”

  A second impact followed — harder — then a third. Through the flickering fire beyond the viewports, a shoreline tore past beneath them.

  Sand.

  Then tall shapes igniting in the ship’s wake.

  Trees.

  With a final, guttural screech of tortured metal — a sound like some deep-sea creature being torn apart — the ship stopped.

  “We made it! We landed!”

  A voice burst out, half-cry, half-laugh. Others joined in, cheers erupting across the bridge.

  Caius slammed his palms against the armrests and rose — joy suppressed; satisfaction measured.

  His instincts had been right.

  Landing the Parvus backward — using its rear thrusters as brakes against descent — had worked.

  Luck, yes. But no other ship could have survived it intact.

  And no human on board would have attempted the same maneuver.

  He looked toward the still-fuming viewports. Beyond them stretched a forest. A new unexplored world.

  Caius turned back to his crew — men and women still shouting in disbelief and relief.

  “Officers, report.”