Titan 242 has Fallen

Crash: Part One

The crash had been unexpected. But perhaps all such things were. No one every really expected to crash but they should have been prepared for it. After all space travel was still fairly new and so many things could go wrong. However it was what caused Anita to wake up in her sleeper pod, the alarm blaring as the pod attempted to eject her for her safety. She had ignored that, slammed the lid down, and prayed to the universe that she would live as the ship seemed to vibrate to pieces.

This ship to a new planet had been her choice of punishment and it seemed about right with her luck that it would end with a fiery crash. She had closed her eyes tightly and buckled herself back into her sleeper pod's harness while the alarm blared all around her. She had been in debt, her family had died and with them came a huge swelling of inescapable debt to drown her. It was either prison on a mining planet where she would work for forty years to pay off the debtors, or exile on a new planet with a bunch of others to never return to Earth again.

After they had seized her family farm and everything except a few things like the clothes on her back, she had decided she had enough of the shit heap of a planet she had once called home, and had taken the choice to be on a settlement ship. She had packed everything she had left of her earthly belongings. Which had amounted to two duffle bags packed full of clothes, some tools she managed to save from the leech debt collectors, a few pictures, several jackets (including her father's old rawhide one that she kept out of sentimentality more than anything else), her mother's empty jewelry box (the leeches had taken all of the jewelry, right down to her parents' wedding rings) that had a tinny sounding tune that played when it was wound, and a few books and the quilt her grandmother had made for her when she graduated. What was left of her life lived in the two duffle bags that had been stuffed inside the sleeper pod below her.

Anita felt grateful for that, that they were safe there and away from the tearing and ripping that the ship seemed to be going through. She didn't know how long it took but there was a great roaring sound as if the entire world had ripped in two and then a jarring that shook all of her bones and made her feel like her body would simply tear apart. It was such a force that she felt her vision dim and then go black.

Everything came back with a rattling cough and Anita struggled in her harness, getting the buckles undone before shoving open her sleeper pod. Her lungs strained as she coughed and coughed and coughed. Her head ached in an unbearable way but she finally managed to escape the pod, hitting her knees as she fell to the floor. The room felt topsy turvy, like everything had been shaken around in a salad spinner. She inhaled the slightly smokey air and covered her mouth, looking at the other sleeper pods. She staggered to her feet and to the next pod. She fumbled with the latch and yanked it open.

The woman inside was weeping but alive and she grabbed at her. "It's okay. The ship stopped moving. We need to get out before the smoke gets worse." The words croaked out of her as she shook the woman and to her surprise the woman nodded, tears still falling, and slowly crawled out of her pod. Anita went to every other pod, opening them up and telling them the same thing she told the woman. Everyone was alive, scared and half of them crying, but alive. Once she was sure she had gotten everyone out of their pods she staggered back to her own, coughing harshly into her arm as the smoke seemed to grow thicker. "Get your stuff. We need to leave." She grabbed her two duffle bags from underneath her pod and headed for the door she had been brought in through.

There was no movement behind her and she turned around with a scowl. "If we don't leave, we die from smoke inhalation, we need to get away from the crash!" The words snapped out of her and several people flinched but moved to their sleeper pods mechanically. There was still weeping but Anita didn't want to deal with that, they needed to get out of the ruins of the ship and to fresh air. Her level c first aid training and her first responder training was rising up inside of her. She had spent two years at the volunteer fire department in her small town and this was no structure fire but it was all relative wasn't it?