Barrens · Part 1
The Affair
Episode 1
Nobody knew why they called it Salnamor; the galaxy that is. I mean, Salnamor, that's the unified term for it; the Jinrek call it Sal'Namor, the Helsanites Sa'Lnamora, the Ynezelians Xalanore, and the numerous spacefaring species of Avarana all referred to it as "Salvarana" - lately, at least, because they were doing particularly well in an intragalactic popular entertainment contest. When they weren't doing that, they called it Salmanor. The Helsanites, currently, are situated closest of any of the species just named (and there are many, many more, each with their own barely-varied takes on the name, most adjustments being made to render the words pronounceable with whatever mouthparts they bared). They were around 3000 light-years from the Ynezelians, 1500 from the Avaranans, 1100 from where most of the Jinrek lived (Premantel borders the Levan Bel quite closely; most experts agree that the situation is "uncomfortable," but "stable"; same on the Premantelian border with Avarana), and, just for good measure, a dangling fruit from the tree of scale: the Levan Bel was 8000 light years from Xenthelna. The finest astronomers in each of these nations, and many more yet to even be contacted by this particular galactic community, all agreed that the galaxy was much larger than this, and that, generally, they ought to have heard from each other via intragalactic methods by now; but they didn't let it trouble them. The finest galactic historians, in comparison, were quite troubled; they wanted to know whether or not the other uncontacted-in-this-time civilizations still called it Salnamor, or, if their theories were truly incorrect: whether or not they even called it Salnamor at all.
It was exactly this that troubled the Jinrekian researcher Alastel Junclaro while she sat in what the station-bar's staff knew as Booth J42, a four-person booth (capable of seating five if you were to pull over that chair over there), at which she sat entirely alone. She was no historian - far from it; she studied aerosolized life for the Kintela corporation - but she was troubled by it nonetheless, because as she sat, drinking a beverage known as a fhuline - an incredibly vague term for all beverages containing a solvent (it was called 'profine') that was intoxicating to both Jinrekians and, relatively inexplicably, the Helsanites; the Jinrekians had two arms, two legs, and a mouth; the Helsanites were spacefaringly intelligent hypermotile slime mold possessing what you'd call a central nervous system - so did the Jinrekians, of course, but they looked none alike. She was actually drinking what Jinrekians call a fhelina; it is a simply-brewed starchy beverage detested by many who partake heavily in fhuline beverages, but enjoyed by slightly many more, and, at any rate, in an establishment not actually owned by a Jinrekian, she didn't expect much better; it was a Helsanite place, as she was on floor 17 of the space station bearing the Jemel-side of Exolane Gate JQ-98291. Of course, the relationship between the two was merely statistical - the Levan Bel was open, almost more than any other nation-state in the galaxy, to all species, granting them a nearly universal and equitably distributed opportunity to fall at great speed through the tattered remains of whatever social safety net they'd invested in some many ages ago; and, perhaps more relevant to the matter at hand, there was a Jinrekian drinking establishment on floor 15. It was the only one in the entire station - not surprising - and she'd taken that gamble quite often and borne all sorts of rewards for her efforts, so she opted for the Helsanite institution first, knowing that, at the very least, most people there would leave her alone, and the bartender wouldn't. It wasn't (particularly) a matter of discrimination - Helsanites had their share of regressionists, just like any other nation in Salnamor, but generally, they were better than most - it was mostly that Helsanites were simply more private than Jinrekians. Alastel was quite fond of what most people more properly referred to as the classical Helsanite shyness, especially in a situation like this. Even if the bar were to suddenly become packed (it wouldn't; anybody coming into a Helsanite institution is ordering takeout, even if 'out' is a bench in the station) she'd come to expect a relatively standardized two seats of space between her and the next individual looking to place an order. And, perhaps most importantly, nobody was bound to randomly show up in her booth, trying to engage her in conversation. But why was Alastel troubled by the fact that all of the individuals around her referred to the galaxy in generally the same way? The battery on her table-top computing device had died, and she was bored of straining her neck at the one she carried in her pocket all day, and, this is important too: she felt less stupid listening in on others after the third fhelina. Everyone around was saying Salnamor, however the hell they said it, but they were saying it nonetheless. It almost made her uncomfortable, and she couldn't tell why, until she realized that most of the public chatter was referring to the aforementioned popular entertainment contest, and that she didn't really care for Salnamor on Holo (or anything vaguely like it - people called her words including but not limited to "boring"), leaving the last time she remembered everyone around her in public saying the name of the galaxy in all of her tongues as the Last Disconnect. When the nebulae flared, she was just a little girl, about fourteen (in the last 1,000 Standard Years, the average lifespan of the average Jinrekian was 682 S.Y - societal collapse robs generations of much, but it didn't tend to rob them of medical know-how). She'd grown up in the Levan Bel, as her parents fled Premantel in S.Y. 9643 with (some) of the rest of her family. When the Disconnect happened in S.Y. 9776, her grandpa had been dependent on a medication from far-away Alamedria, still a kingdom then; he died two weeks into the forty-year event that shaped her early life. She was in a restaurant planet-side, on the planet she grew up on, watching some show she'd long-forgotten, when the channel suddenly flipped to the news; even after 10,000 standard years of spacefaring history, no true faster-than-light technology that didn't require warping space and then driving through it existed, so the news took about three or so standard days to reach her system, carried on the back of, probably, an urgent courier-ship instead of the standard fare most information receives: deeply encrypted and tacked onto any craft with suitable facilities that takes up an info-shipping contract.
Salnamor... Xalanore... Ghyunasal... if you were in a place with particularly good food, you probably heard it all, just like Alastel did, and was now.
She shook it off, convincing herself she had to. In reality, she didn't. Crossing into Jemel from Exeter on her exo-craft had, as galactic exo-lanes are wont to do, thrown the two magnet-driven fields (the craft emitted thirteen fields) completely out of calibration during the jump. She was stranded at this gate, operating on her mission to Jemel-VI - someone had reported a cloud moving strangely, with their own eyes, even, not even a drone - entirely alone, the last time she'd spoken to someone she knew personally being yesterday, on the Exeter-side of this same gate; she'd had a meeting. She had a moderate-sized team of three autonomous-instructable droids on her shuttle, and they were working dutifully in concert with the ship's on-board computing systems to recalibrate the fields. Typically, it took half a standard day, and they'd only been at it for two hours - which, as Alastel found herself surfacing the same thought, she proceeded to think that three fhelinas was a sizeable quantity for just two hours. Quite naturally, as if right at home - not that she could do this at home, where she'd simply pull it out of a refrigerator - she pulled out her hand-held, and ordered another.
After a short audio-call with her automated assistants, she learned that the recalibration on her ship was taking longer than usual. She, nearly immediately, proceeded down to the Jinrekian drinking establishment two floors beneath her, found a much-smaller table to claim, and irritated claimants (many women, many men, and two Ynezelians of their third sex - nobody cool) to the second stool until she finally found some working traveler in her precise predicament. They both stood there in silent, understanding peace, one neither of them ever expected to have or replicate ever again, as they drank and stared at their hand-held phones. It was more or less the same peace they'd have found if they'd situated themselves without the intoxicating beverages in similar proximity while waiting in one of the space-liner docks on the top floor; simple public trust. Alastel knew she'd never felt grateful to do this, simply because she'd never been forced into the chance, and was convinced the woman half-standing, half-sitting on one instance of the many stools of awkwardly universal height lining the station compartment, which was, itself, pretty sizeable, actually, and you could even call it a little big - but anyways, she felt pretty convinced that the woman across from her (not nameless, but nameless to Alastel) felt the same way, because outside of doing this for four and a half hours, the only real interaction the two had had were a relatively brief but deeply interactive and engaging conversation about the quality of the profine-mixed drinks here (tolerable, middling, many justifications exchanged), and a few instances of them showing one other something from their respective hand-helds. On top of the evidently mutual gratitude, any observer - there were hundreds, of course, and they didn't matter, and barely any of this would matter, too - would have identified Alastel and her stranger-associate as very tired, in a manner independent of that induced by the profine, and they'd be right. It was exactly how Alastel knew, at first glance, that she'd had the slimmest chance of ending up in this unusual truce: the one-thousand meeting stare borne only by those having chosen careers in a series of choices during which not even the faintest ideations of meetings were fathomed prior to committing to the career. God, were there meetings, and both of them had shared similar associations with any individual stranger on a one-on-one basis during any number of these meetings, but it was always the person speaking in the meeting that made it difficult to endure, and in this meeting, hardly anyone spoke.
At some point, Alastel had balanced the longing for bed with a desire to maximize sleep before her coming 'day' - she slept whenever she could, really, but the one thing she could credit her employer with was complying with the law requiring her to receive adequate doses of sleep while traveling alone - and closed out her tab in Galactic Standard Credit (for a mild fee, being in the Levan Bel and all). She was a tad surprised at her degree of intoxication; she knew she was smiling, which was weird for her in public, and she also knew she was standing, and walking, just a bit weird, but in a way directly suggestive of her perfectly legal imbibement; after 192 S.Y. of life, she'd, finally, destroyed that bit of anxiety in her head that told her even this degree of intoxication was an utter embarrassment, and was looking forward to carrying her slight smile for as far as she could; she expected it would last a distance equivalent to about four hundred meters (not that she numbered it in her head; she was imagining a food stand she'd passed earlier), because by this point in her life she now, also, understood that walking with her intoxicated posture was likely to aggravate a set of muscles in the lower right of her back that she dearly, deeply hated.
Oh, whatever, she thought.
She walked out the undoored - well, there was a gate, but she didn't know that, and it was hardly ever used anyways - entrance to the bar (well, you'd call it a bar; like anything else, it had around 92 names in Salnamor, but none of them were actually 'bar') and, unusually hastened after leaving such an establishment, immediately proceeded on her route back to her ship, but she quickly realized that the night of drinking had left her in a reasonably different perceptual state than the one she'd left the Helsanite spot in; after a few fhelinas anyone susceptible would feel at ease, but this, what she was faced with in face, body, and brain, was much more typical of intoxication of a higher magnitude. She'd trodden this path many times, and was in no danger at all, but it struck her across the headspace so particularly in this moment because - again, as had happened before, but at a higher level of abstraction - she'd never been here before. This station, at least. It wasn't shy about it either; like any other station she'd frequented, dropped into, or otherwise liminally inhabited, it was full of corridors lined with compartments rented out to all kinds of commercial tenants, these corridors never fully explaining the full spaceprint of the station due to the sheer quantity of hidden mechanical workings maintained by robots, the occasional organic person, and a great deal of public funding - yes, even in the Levan Bel; they didn't fund a lot, but they certainly funded the thing in which any half-read passerby was most likely to spend their usually-boring hours dawdling around. This station was like all the rest, save for one remarkable repeated feature she'd never seen in space-bound environments throughout her entire life: at regular intervals, massive, abstractly geometric but still ultimately arc-shaped (they varied; it was clearly an art installation, too) arcs of wood were emplaced. They were beautiful, imposing, and obviously not structurally relevant - there was gravity, even if induced, but it was "holding" up four more floors; give me a break - but more than anything they were made of wood. To Alastel, it was a planet-side material, largely decorative; you'd build something real out of wood if you were bored as a child, maybe, but more likely you'd just carve something, if you were so wood-inclined. She came from a planet of trees, yes, as did many countless individuals all across the galaxy - nature is quite fond of the tree - but she also came from a planet of astonishingly destructive weather, so a tree had never been anything but a symbol of the dual-edged character of nature to her; life gave her the tree, yes, but it also gives the tree to the house. Appropriately sensitized to analytical interpretation of the humble tree, the meaning of the wooden work sprawling before her was immediately clear in her mind:
I am a part of this.
It was a pleasant experience until that. She hadn't expected something so raw, so deceivingly simple and egregiously interpretable, and was certainly not fond of the way it immediately imparted an ominousness onto her. She wouldn't stop thinking about it in vague, abstracted feelings until she reached the food-stand she had remembered earlier.
Jemel was not a very populated system, which was abnormal considering its closeness to the galactic center, the frothingly economic heart of interstellar exchange, diplomacy, and culture (which was also well-doused in most particular electromagnetic forces; you do most of your business inside over there) but it became much easier to parse when the beholder beheld the planetary children borne by the parent star, Jemel Prime. As an exostellar exobiologist - she, like most others, hated the imaginary tone of the title, and preferred a trite "ExBio" in reply to the unceasing questioning on her occupation inherent in leaving the house - she spent much of her life in pass-through systems like Jemel, populated with nothing in the way of intelligent life, but undeniably full of thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of previously undocumented tree-like lifeforms. This was not an exaggeration; outside of the full endowment of atmosphereless rocky almost-spheres, Jemel was home to a nearly-unprecedented seven forested celestial bodies, four of which are found orbiting the exact same gaseous giant, lingering ominously firmly in the middle of the planetary distribution in stark defiance of nearly every conceivable statistical trend applicable here. Her intended destination in Jemel on this trip was, unfortunately, not one of those forested moons; instead, it was one of those Jemelian planets that might as well be classed with the rest of those barren rocks only briefly mentioned earlier, and truly would be, if it were not for a strange, sulfurous, methaneous - but wisp-thin - atmosphere wrapping it, and some strange ammoniacal pools found not-rarely on the surface; yes, indeed, it was Jemel-VI, nicknamed "Lesnel" by local Helsanite Levanelians working in gas extraction around Jemel-VIII, the previously-mentioned gas giant too boring for durable affectionate pet name acquisition (not that Lesnel fit any of those qualifiers; '-snel' being a relatively derogatory Helsanite suffix most literally associated with a noxious mucosal excrement serving an agonistic pheromone-like purpose in a common avian species on the Helsanite home planet). As much as Alastel was aware it would make much more sense to feel as if she was chasing any of the numerous arboreal specimens anywhere else, and to find a sense of comfort in it, she didn't, and wasn't; the object of her homing, targeting, but ultimately wandering desire was, today, Lesnel. She was excited! And alone-but-for-bots in her craft - which, in the interest of lessening repetition, might as well be specified as a Thundelex 10-P SLX built to the KQST-class Alamedrian naval explorer specification (worth every unitarian mark it cost, even when factoring in the degree to which the 4-kelvin freezer unit required hurt the proverbial wallet), capable of truly trans-domain navigation - was possibly the safest time to admit it, even if half of the trappings on the 10-P were immediately suggestive of said interests, and she was already known on several gate-stations for bearing a faint smell of ammonia; not from Lesnel (she'd never been) but from other bodies infested with it in their own atmospheres.
Alastel's 10-P was in the middle of broad space - a spacefaring term for the macroscopically barren regions between planets when operating within an established stellar system and not passing through an asteroid belt - when an alarm sounded. It was an intermediate-level warning, dealing with one of the millions of neutron channels in the craft's post-fusion core. As her travel agenda had factored in information deposition and acquisition across the way, she was nearing Jemel-III at the time; this was one of the forested planets of Jemel, a hotter one at that, and she (seemed to, presumably) have acquired some information parcels intended for a small trading post on the planet (there wasn't much else there). It wasn't technically legal, but it had never been made impossible, so she always did it, mentally, anyways: she knew it had to be about thirteen melnets of data, too, because storage was running her about 1,000 watts of energy (the fusion core, mind you, obviously did not care, but it was visible after some napkin-work in the head, after you remembered there weren't other places for energy to go out here), and the last time she had an open contract for data of that size (orbitally inferred genetic data, from a new and ultimately debunked technique, for an entire planet in Xenthelna) it dealt her the exact same minute blow to energy capacity. Despite the fact that an alarm had just sounded, Alastel was thinking about all of this, too; her automated help was more than enough to handle an intermediate alarm, or at least recognize when they weren't. In her time - it was Standard Year 9,954 - this was actually disappointing, even for budget robots, or at least, it would be, if the KQST specification was not inherently an absolute pain in the ass to pilot. 'Naval explorer' tended to conjure up images of an elegant seafaring craft, half-immersed in the water, at complete mercy of the waves, in most galactic youth - it was truly consistent, despite the distance, and it was actively studied by psychologists, but that's a story for another day - but the KQST-class Alamedrian naval explorer specification, quite frankly, treats the entire universe as an ocean, save for those 'oceans' considered too expensive for massive-scale scientific investigation. Yes, that's right; there were many nerd-children across the galaxy that had a perfectly accurate conception of what a KQST-class craft looked like as well, and they only suffer minor social penalties for displaying this ability. The scientific-living-entity-helmed-drone nature of the craft had little to do with how difficult it was to operate - the Levanelians themselves made an even-more-costly alternative specification that was a dream to operate, and, correspondingly, a nightmare to purchase - that was, instead, determined largely by the fact that it had "no default control regime" (the most-oft touted line from the committee that designed the specification; it has been parodied in even Salnamor Night Live, an annually-galactically-televised semi-theatrical event operating adjacent to Council Day, the yearly event recognizing the formation of the Galactic Council). It was one of the most famous euphemisms in galactic history. See, in order to manufacture a craft at (relatively) accessible pricing that was still capable of serious all-domain scientific work, the Alamedrians - demonym for multiethnic citizens of the Alamedrian Confederacy - decided to design the ship with independent locomotive motifs for each of the domains it was likely to penetrate: land, just a little bit above the land, way above the land, space, broad space, and massive bodies of liquid. It was, ultimately, quite good at whatever it had to do in any of these places, but it certainly didn't look good doing it - bearing four unique sets of engines at its behind, and fitting an enormous array of in-craft services through sheer abuse of the fact that thrust may be routed through the center of mass as a means of appeasing the lords of physics - and it didn't feel good to make it do these things either, as it featured, quite literally, four different sets of controls, and doing any serious regularly-cross-domain work can either involve what might as well be musical chairs (the specification calls this layout the "Quad-Box" - also parodied) or, for an optional fee at the time of assembly that Alastel was happy, but not too happy, to pay for, the pilot may select to operate from a rotating control deck; sitting at the single-helm in this configuration, anchored to face out of the (admittedly pleasant, almost beautiful) basically-spherical glass window into the void, did nothing to make rotating the deck feel less like playing with a toy for children. It was about the time that she got around to lamenting this herself that Alastel noticed the intermediate alarm disappear, only to immediately be replaced by an Intermediate-High {C2, Chemical} warning; this one appearing directly in her field of vision, emergently (but with some class, which was strange) blinking, thanks to her ocuvisor.
This was a problem. She had only been on board a craft experiencing a C2-C warning once before, on her way to a research site in Xenthelna. A member of the cooking staff working a High-Throughput Oil Bath had failed to check whether or not a bag of flash-locked flinir - delicious scran, flinir - was actually flash-locked (a special case of a temperature-removal process, perfectly suited for food, but requiring special storage processes beyond mere temperature maintenance). The process, actually, deprives the substrate of water, but food materials must be treated with helxenthimine and substrate-specific co-crystallants prior to flash-locking in order for their delicate pre-cooking structures to withstand the process at all (but, with the compound applied, they withstand it perfectly, and helxenthimine is only toxic to around forty percent of the galactic population, none of which were Jinrek as Alastel was). This is, generally, unless cross-contamination occurs, a pretty safe operating regime, until oil baths become involved, as helxenthimine truly despises oil, and its co-crystallants might as well see it as the devil incarnate. Plenty of solutions exist - the most commonly employed is yet another pre-treatment process, of course, just as the least commonly employed is - but none of them mean a thing if the food-to-be-cooked is presumed helxenthimine-free. Forty were killed, one-hundred and seventy two wounded, and the incident was very nearly shown in food-preparation textbooks the galaxy 'round forever if it hadn't happened while docked on-planet, and a generally habitable one at that, during an unplanned refueling stop (fuel is so much more expensive on-planet these days). She'd escaped unscathed - she was four decks up, and materials are quite strong in spacecraft, believe it or not; most deaths were in an adjacent dining hall with very little blast-sealing separating it from the site of the explosion. This fact, in contrast, was to be shown in galactic textbooks forevermore; just in far-costlier texts typically purchased on loan at a young age - but it was tough to forget the sensory experience. She'd heard a few real explosive actions before; naval displays on-planet, pyrotechnics; but every part of those experiences had been engineered to reduce fear while maximizing rewarding, warm awe, and the discharge she'd experienced at the hands of (as she still believed, worth-the trouble) flash-fried helxenthimine was more or less the opposite.
In response to the warning, as a precautionary, galactic-council-mandated measure, Alastel's 10-P immediately pivoted toward the nearby Jemel-III. Onboard, deterministic computing systems knew immediately, well before their pilot, that the emergency had nothing to do with the propulsion, yet - and they definitely knew the 'yet' part, too - and began cutting the supply of energy to everything else on the ship in exchange for pushing more, more, and even more to the forward propulsion systems. Most drastic of the measures taken completely autonomously as a matter of craft-state included a substantial reduction in internal atmosphere homeostasis, as well as an anti-EMF magnetic field generated specifically to prevent exposure to harsh stellar radiation that could change her life permanently in a matter of hours - but, again, software of the simplest form known to the galaxy knew quite innately that she'd be on the surface of Jemel-III, one way or another, well before that. And, so, toward that fate she - literally - accelerated, at a level of force almost uncomfortable if it weren't rare enough to be enjoyed anyways, no matter the circumstance (again she was hit with memories, but at this point, she truly couldn't spare the time for them - yet, like anyone else, they still appeared, in a moment of time she'd remember for quite a while - but ever so quickly still! - extending their own lifespan in her mind, whether or not she wanted that being completely external to the happenings). In a sudden moment of agency, she reached wildly with her right hand to a place off to her side without much in the way of even a glance, grasped around, found the tablet-shaped object she was looking for, and yanked it over; being on an articulated arm, it never carved the exact arc through space that her own arm wished it would, and this was never more irritating than when said arm was acting out of nothing but the instinct for survival - but she didn't have time for that. She did have time for aggressively tapping out the command she'd reached over to run with more ferocity than she'd ever typed anything, though, and thankfully a concordant velocity. At the conclusion of her furious typing, a semi-neural software interface began an interpretation session, dumping the raw flow of data through the ship's deterministic computing core and producing a natural-language scenario readout guaranteed accurate if run under known conditions (as offputting as it sounded, it was also pretty obvious to her that the assumptions of millions of unknown-to-her persons with varying levels and content to both their agenda, power, and qualification for being in their position were at best dubiously preferable to an assembly not trained on their work directly at all, but instead the known universe of possible work done by their own machine - plus, these days, it told you when it hadn't seen that scenario before anyways). Just as it was in 85.7% of all queries, according to the most recent data, the interpreter had seen the scenario before - out near Forax space, believe it or not, but it's not like anybody at Thundelex was at liberty to disclose that, or could even know it without three weeks of effort - and it was dire. Three of seventeen secure gaseous containment canisters used to supply a variety of compounds necessary for craft operation had failed from an electrical issue. The location of the failures - the three forward-most on the solar-facing side of the craft - was highly suggestive of a failure in one of three non-medical targeted anti-hazard fields, that had led to a precipitously strong induced current in wiring near those canisters. Secondary signals (too many to enumerate - the thing was loaded with sensors) suggested an uncontrolled chemical reaction had broken out as a result of this, and was set to immediately threaten the in-craft environment. She threw the screen panel out of her way at a pace that could break a neck, and was out of the chair before the arm on which it was mounted recoiled hard, bouncing off an unseen blocker of a shared material when reaching a maximal angle of turn set by said blocker in a way suggestive of deep, immense pain - but she was out of her chair well before it could come back at her, darting quickly to a compartment on the rear wall, above the door to an intermediate space between other compartments. Inside of it was a snugly-fit box, almost as if purpose built for the compartment (it was, by law) which she ripped out of its lodging so hard that it would probably fit snugly no longer. Again, acting instantly, she lifted it up by the handle with both hands, and moved her hands as if shaking dust out of the heaviest carpet in the galaxy, so hard that she was afraid it would fall out of her hands, exactly as trained. The moment her arms could no longer move downward, the trajectory of the suit inside was set: the bottom of the box sprung open instantly, and a fitted, feature-complete Disaster-spec Outsuit sprung out, directly toward the floor of the ship - but before even a pocket-latch could hit the floor, particularly mounted and polarized magnets implanted in the outsuit and her flight clothing found each other through spacetime and closed the distance to their designated mount points perfectly according to plan.
Perfect! Okay... Head, feet. Head, feet. Head, feet...
She had two more things to find, but it would take but one strange, diagnostic action: she immediately jumped up two and a half feet and jammed her hand, intentionally, into a latch in the roof of the cabin, found a handle, and pulled it. It was on a rope, which itself forced open two other compartments to her left and right via mechanical action alone. These opened about one hundred and twenty degrees, leaving their contained objects at the perfect positions for imminent access: a Disaster-spec helmet was at her torso, ready to be grabbed, and a pair of similarly-prepared boots appeared at the level of her feet, lodged-by-committee into its own specially designed foam to accommodate the quick shoving of feet into the holes of the boot with little-to-no movement of the apparatus at all, but not at all impeding removal of the foot-boot complex. She obliged the suggestions of both compartments, dashed back to her seat, and belted in. From C2-C alert to belting, the entire sequence had taken about seventy seconds. In most C2-level scenarios, this was too slow, as the intended time from "alert-to-suit" is generally forty-five seconds, give or take about ten - but both the projected safe average and the interval of confidence were larger for C2-C situations, anyways, due to the heterogeneity of the disaster class. At any rate, in the same amount of time, forward propulsion systems had consumed forty percent of the fuel supply, leaving Alastel at seven percent total supply remaining, and entering the atmosphere of Jemel-III at sub-light speeds. The necessary anti-hazard field for such an activity was, diligently, kept well-intact for this task, and dialed well down after backward-propulsive systems slowed the craft (notably, this too consumed more energy than you might expect, as it required pseudo-gravitational wave emission to keep endured forces livable). Watching another readout, reading faster than she ever had before, Alastel's hands had now moved to the ship's actual, manual controls in preparation for a loss-of-autonomy event - she had no reason to believe it was particularly likely here, but deterministic energy-provisioning systems are designed to ration energy away from automatic piloting as a last resort, and not having her hands near the joystick at the time it happened, if it happened, would be a sentence to death. The atmosphere of Jemel-III - a crisp, cool blue, pierced by countless, uncountable snow-covered pine-like trees for as far as either eye or satellite can see - dominated the view out her viewport now, and she was beginning to see the faint detail of flora below, but she was still too far away to see trees. Then, another alarm sounded.
LOSS OF AUTONOMOUS PILOTING IMMINENT. PREPARE FOR MANUAL CONTROL in 00:29... 00:28... 00:27...
She was, genuinely, deeply surprised by this. Autonomous piloting loss was truly a last resort, so much so that most of the time it happened, it happened unexpectedly, unannounced, often due to direct failure of related components. Something different was obviously happening here; most likely, that the deterministic-probabilistic symposium of autonomous operators identified the inevitability of such an unexpected event, and simply started expecting it. This was amazing! She'd know exactly when to expect force to start transferring through from the craft to her controls; when to bite back. That was the killer, and a computer had stared it dead in the eyes and bounced it on her behalf - or at least, that is what she earnestly thought, until the next sound to break through a wall of salience into her brain. It was impossible to put into words; the type of sound you hear in a cinematic production during a massive, terrifying, doom-condemning mechanical failure, so bizarrely pitched that you feel as if you're hearing what a pet hears when it hears a whistle you cannot hear, but it can; so disconcerting that, to the brain, it simply cannot be real (and of course, in the truest sense, it wasn't - it was invented, or perhaps discovered, a thing only a machinating, living mind could have brought into existence). Later in her life, she'd be able to describe it accordingly:
At first I heard some whistling; localizing it, it was almost whirling, not exactly in one spot. Then, quickly, a tiny discharge, probably explosive, but almost high-pitched; definitely on the outer edge of the craft. After that, it was basically turbulence; I think the atmosphere was ripping my ship apart, but my ship isn't made of paper, right? Compartments were probably vibrating, I think. Some of the stuff I saw inside afterward was consistent with that. It did that for a while, I think - couldn't really pay attention - and then there was, I mean, you know. I was getting pretty low after that.
It would take her quite some time, though. In the moment, all she really knew was that at twenty seconds to doomsday, the whistling started, and the "turbulence" - a grievous euphemism, here - started exactly at zero.
Convulsing, all-powerful bursts of compressed atmosphere buffeted against the craft like fifty-foot waves do a wooden mothership, but all while traveling at approximately one landform per second. The core of her cockpit - seat, controls, screens - was all stabilized about the same frame of reference, but mechanically, and the rebounding of far-futuristic alloys can only do so much to curb the fact that that rebounding is occurring within a spring made of metal, and all of this occurring within a spacecraft literally coming apart at the seams no less. The highest-amplitude shocks of air still hurt, considerably, and the craft-belts weren't much more than permission to think about things other than flying about the cabin like luggage right now. They were meaningfully more futuristic than the stabilization technology keeping her generally in the same area; these were rubber belts controlled, again deterministically, by firmware in the seat to both contain passengers in the most trying of conditions while minimizing damage to soft and hard tissue - ultimately, due to the forces involved, passengers still ended up looking like passengers of a past era, in lower-tech craft, traveling slower, working with a bit more time and a bit less force. Nature cares for not much else other than energy; and specialty craft-belts are a necessity, not a luxury - and an extremely sharp pain; well, dueling set of pains, in her shoulders, at two of the highest-pressure contact points with the belts, aching like a double-displaced heart attack with every excruciating tumble of the craft, reminded her of this.
A number of tumbles later, all the while incredibly aware and acting quite successfully to minimize the rate of rotation of the craft while delicately applying forward propulsion when her sense of gravity told her to do so, but not thinking of much else, she had a moment of clarity with respect to her sight out of the viewport: she could almost certainly recognize the flora on the ground as tree cover now. Make no mistake, the 10-P still had reasonable altitude - Jinrekian eyesight is quite good - but she was too close for comfort in this state. At the next chance she got, aligned the right way for only a moment by the forces the atmosphere reactively impinged upon her ship, she gave the 10-P much more throttle than she had been, and gained quite a bit of altitude, and thus, some more time to think; but she appreciated another gift much more, which was a temporary loss of pitchwise rotation on the craft. Quickly, she rotated into an awkward, but well-engineered, emergency glide position - but it wasn't functional. The craft was stalling, sinking through the air, probably because some of the craft, somewhere, was gone, leaving it incapable of truly slicing through the air in a way amenable to it, and instead performing a doomed, cheese-grater like action with respect to its movement through the fluid.
Not good.
She kicked out her left foot to a sort of pedal - it had some framing to it, much more for kicking than depressing, and there were, in practice, very many ways to successfully hit it with your foot in order to get it to actuate - that triggered a special subset of emergency behavior the 10-P possessed that not many others did. Frankly, if she had been any other scientist in this scenario, it was at this point that she'd be doomed - but operating spacecraft was a passion of hers, and it saved her quite a bit of money, so kitting out a craft for a scenario like this was less about the right to brag, and more about exchanging fears. She'd never practiced anything quite like this, but it wasn't dissimilar from things she'd do in other craft for fun, and that pedal she'd just kicked was going to help her accomplish this: the emergency measures it triggered were, more or less, a one-stop-shop for mostly-unpowered atmospheric flight with a nearly-destroyed craft. Instantly, barely-macroscopic pipes lining the walls of the craft exploded, freeing a fluid that ran rapidly into many of the exposed holes in the craft - all of this happening from the injection of one catalyst she'd been very glad hadn't accidentally ruptured into the pipes on its own, mind you - solidifying rapidly in the face of the atmosphere beating down on it. Then, a last-ditch capacitor she hadn't drained yet was immediately put on allocation for a new craft-radiated field that served to both displace air around the craft in an aerodynamic geometry, and - this was the part she didn't understand - tether the ship to the forces creating that displacement. The net effect was a much-improved gliding experience, but due to multiple constraints - the solidified blocking fluid would still chunk off from the forces, and the capacitor would only last for two minutes - she was still nowhere near out of trouble, and due to how utterly fast she was traveling, it certainly was not going to be how she landed; entirely, at least.
She moved quickly to point the 10-P downwards, and quickly found that the air displacement field was struggling: it had a few identifiable weak points pushing her backwards more than was ideal, and she had to angle downward more than she'd like just to pretend like she was flying instead of falling. This didn't really run contrary to her plan, though, but her nerves regarding both certainly did. She looked over at her remaining flight fuel, and the picture wasn't good here either; the stuff was too abundant to really put numbers on it at the pace this task demanded, but internally, subconsciously, she thought she had just enough, but it definitely wasn't how she typically liked to project things. After that, she realized she could make the trees out again, and it was time to move. She grabbed the controls, tighter at least, and tried not to move them an inch, until another flight alarm sounded, not particularly urgent in tone due to the typical contexts in which it activated, but an alarm nonetheless, letting her know she'd entered the flight-level altitudes for the navigated planet calculated according to universally-agreed-to methods that produced a rather arbitrary number for anything other than flying when all things were considered; underneath here, she knew it was going to feel like somebody had added cornstarch to the soup. Much less comprehensibly, her plan wasn't even to float in the soup; it was basically to stir it.
She rapidly pitched the craft upwards, not making any attempt at converting that pitching into a change in her direction of travel, until she was pointing directly upwards, looking at the terrifyingly empty, baby-blue sky. At that point, she hit the forward propulsion with another foot this time, controlling the throttle with great intent while watching a screen instructing her to her altitude. Alastel, also, because of this, thought that the back of her craft must not be damaged much at all: she was traveling quite fast still, but couldn't feel much, if any, air movement past her during this exercise - the fate of that section of her craft was of course still very knowable to her, but checking via a screen or some other method of actual interaction hadn't even crossed her mind, and certainly shouldn't have. It didn't even matter; the engines were working, and that was all she needed. Compared to the previous sequence, this section of the flight felt as if it took ages; she was doing nothing other than watching her altitude, watching her velocity, applying fuel at intervals to slow down to a safe impaction speed. She knew where the ground ought to be - it was determined by satellite survey, not anything on the ground, even a robot - but she lacked any knowledge on where it actually was, and even less awareness, now, of where the trees were. Then, she realized - still piloting, still keeping velocity relatively survivable - she didn't know much about Jemel-III at all. She could hardly remember the altitude at which she recognized the trees as trees, either, and most importantly: she didn't know how big the trees were. Still piloting, moving at about seventy meters per second, she defeatedly sunk forward about a centimeter, and then the back of her craft struck a particularly remarkable example of V. enelami, a pine tree reputed the entire known-galaxy 'round for growing, in good conditions, to a maximum height of four hundred and two meters.