Post by Kite on Jan 8, 2012 2:22:20 GMT -5
The midnight city was never quite drowsy enough to sleep, like an insomniac rolling around in bed deep into the night and well into the morning. The nighttime sky was clear, awash with stars... so perhaps that was why the sparkle, the twinkle of one particular star seemed to change in texture. It seemed... to swell, o curve across the sky. Surely, a falling star was not a terribly unique occurrence, but not this kind of falling star. In fact, it wasn't a star at all. In space, it was a screaming, roaring object shrouded in a reddish fire well before it was even entering earth's atmosphere.
Space shuttles have considerably more grace than the average space pod, but this one was not nearly as aerodynamic as a spacepod that saiyans might use - this wasn't, in fact, even remotely like the spheres that Saiyans used as spaceships. It had edges, it was stylized, like old victorian achitecture, embrossed with brass and steel accents, gleaming as it heated in the entry sequence. The fins that spun on its center of gravity and on the tail end, the altered Afslaan engine that acted like a kind of warpdrive, were made of a sturdier black metal, like the true bulk of its chassis.
Within, green eyes cracked open. Kite was terribly weak at this point - she'd lost a lot of blood before she got in, and a week with nothing to eat hadn't done her any favors. The child was more important than she was, she felt... why hadn't she thought to pack any additional food? The Stellarnaught had packed cured meats and treated meals for weeks, in an adult's stomache - but a child? Sure, her species made damn good use of what they ingested, using somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-95% of it for the purpose of sustaining life processes... but a child ate a lot, even so, and she'd decided he was more important.
Just the same, she shook some of the insistent fatigue away, and concentrated as she grabbed the two control levers on the ship's console and put her feet onto the pedals. The hull was beginning to heat up now... there were alarms going off, and the child was instinctively grabbing her and clinging like blazes, but she couldn't concentrate on more than one thing at once. Not now. The roar of the fire around the pod soon drowned all of that out anyhow, and the heat was climbing. It was tolerable for her and the child, and coolant kept it from getting out of hand, but it was an experimental technology at best on her homeworld - astronautics was a science in its infancy. The vibration made her teeth rattle and her head buzz, but still the engine trucked on, pushing ever downward.
It couldn't be right... how fast would she be going when she hit? She grunted, adjusting the angle a little as the cloudline passed, pulling up in a steady arc until she was nearly skimming - it was black as midnight, but that wasn't amiss in her eyes... there was glow on the horizon though - she dimly associated the colors with not-fire... and it was at that point that the whole world she'd lived in for the last week gave a hideous lurch - there was a KRUNG sort of noise, and the sound of hte engine changed as the whole machine took a dip earthward, accelerating. The controls jumped from her hands, and she darted her arms forward sleepily, hauling up for all she was worth, the steep descent again dipping upward. The light was rushing towards her now, brilliant towers of light gleamin ahead of her. Then, the ship hit something.
The world gave another HARD lurch, and the controls were yanked viciously from her hands again, hurting her a bit this time, making her grunt and wince, wrapping her arms around Wheat tightly, clasping him to her. The world went mad - spun, bounced, hit and tumbled for what seemed like an eternity, making her vision swim and head fuzz over, blacking out quite quickly in the onslaught of one hell of a landing.
Eventually, on the outskirts of the city proper, the path of the comet came to an end, scraping to a halt on a nearly empty highway, leaving a path of destruction in its wake - it'd hit a hillock a mile or so out of town, bounced along the highway for a few thousand feet, then rumbled to a stop just under an overpass, steaming and red hot, this alien machine that fell from the sky with all the subtlety of a thrown stone.
Space shuttles have considerably more grace than the average space pod, but this one was not nearly as aerodynamic as a spacepod that saiyans might use - this wasn't, in fact, even remotely like the spheres that Saiyans used as spaceships. It had edges, it was stylized, like old victorian achitecture, embrossed with brass and steel accents, gleaming as it heated in the entry sequence. The fins that spun on its center of gravity and on the tail end, the altered Afslaan engine that acted like a kind of warpdrive, were made of a sturdier black metal, like the true bulk of its chassis.
Within, green eyes cracked open. Kite was terribly weak at this point - she'd lost a lot of blood before she got in, and a week with nothing to eat hadn't done her any favors. The child was more important than she was, she felt... why hadn't she thought to pack any additional food? The Stellarnaught had packed cured meats and treated meals for weeks, in an adult's stomache - but a child? Sure, her species made damn good use of what they ingested, using somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-95% of it for the purpose of sustaining life processes... but a child ate a lot, even so, and she'd decided he was more important.
Just the same, she shook some of the insistent fatigue away, and concentrated as she grabbed the two control levers on the ship's console and put her feet onto the pedals. The hull was beginning to heat up now... there were alarms going off, and the child was instinctively grabbing her and clinging like blazes, but she couldn't concentrate on more than one thing at once. Not now. The roar of the fire around the pod soon drowned all of that out anyhow, and the heat was climbing. It was tolerable for her and the child, and coolant kept it from getting out of hand, but it was an experimental technology at best on her homeworld - astronautics was a science in its infancy. The vibration made her teeth rattle and her head buzz, but still the engine trucked on, pushing ever downward.
It couldn't be right... how fast would she be going when she hit? She grunted, adjusting the angle a little as the cloudline passed, pulling up in a steady arc until she was nearly skimming - it was black as midnight, but that wasn't amiss in her eyes... there was glow on the horizon though - she dimly associated the colors with not-fire... and it was at that point that the whole world she'd lived in for the last week gave a hideous lurch - there was a KRUNG sort of noise, and the sound of hte engine changed as the whole machine took a dip earthward, accelerating. The controls jumped from her hands, and she darted her arms forward sleepily, hauling up for all she was worth, the steep descent again dipping upward. The light was rushing towards her now, brilliant towers of light gleamin ahead of her. Then, the ship hit something.
The world gave another HARD lurch, and the controls were yanked viciously from her hands again, hurting her a bit this time, making her grunt and wince, wrapping her arms around Wheat tightly, clasping him to her. The world went mad - spun, bounced, hit and tumbled for what seemed like an eternity, making her vision swim and head fuzz over, blacking out quite quickly in the onslaught of one hell of a landing.
Eventually, on the outskirts of the city proper, the path of the comet came to an end, scraping to a halt on a nearly empty highway, leaving a path of destruction in its wake - it'd hit a hillock a mile or so out of town, bounced along the highway for a few thousand feet, then rumbled to a stop just under an overpass, steaming and red hot, this alien machine that fell from the sky with all the subtlety of a thrown stone.