Word Count: 516
The tiny ship rattled and groaned as it tore itself apart, a brass band of bangs and explosions chimed throughout the craft, muffled only by the ever present deafening doppler of the ship's alarm.
High pitched metallic screeching ripped through the fast escaping atmosphere a souvenir left behind by a terawatts X-Ray laser. To his surprise Grady could still hear the grinding of his teeth inside his helmet. An internal crunching sound that played in time to every groan, creak and crack the ship made as it tumbled in free fall hurtling towards the planet.
Wisps of blue-white smoke, accompanied by the unmistakeable burnt copper smell of an electrical fire began to fill the cabin. Grady stared at the back of his gloved hand sure that if he could see his knuckles, despite his natural skin colour, they'd be bone white. He yanked hard on the joystick control, planting his feet firmly into the floor under the flight console as he did so.
An intense vibration that seemed to drown all the other ship's gripes and groans, alerted Grady to the fact that he was transitioning through the planet's upper atmosphere. He looked out the small round window to his left, the worrying cracks that had appeared during the start of the attack had seemingly stopped growing.
Beyond he could see a thousand strands of golden fire streaking down from the heavens above, each one representing a craft just like his. He caught a glimpse of a dozen blooms of light as a seemingly random scatter of them were burnt out of the sky by the relentless enemy fire raining down.
The ship buffeted around as he pleaded with it to stop spinning. The joystick control seemed to want to rip his arms from their sockets. He lent back, stiffened his body and with all his might pulled. Grady let forth an agonising scream as his suit's servos failed to give him the support he so badly needed.
He plummeted through thick cloud cover created by the charred debris of the crafts preceding him. His jaw ached, his eyes stung from the various chemicals now floating free and burning around him.
Four hundred metres before the ground the ship burst through the dark shroud at subsonic speeds. If the calculations were correct, the landing zone was soft marshland.
Grady had enough time to wonder if the crash safety systems would work before the craft hit exploding the ground around it into a plume of hot mud and gas.
Some time later he was standing on the edge of their makeshift camp. The darkening sky above was awash with pinks, reds and golds as the invading craft streaked relentlessly down from above.
He didn't see it as genocide when he was on the Ark ship, twenty light years out and no direct concept of what they were doing.
"Rather them than us." The Captain had said.
Now as he watched the beginning of the extinction of an entire sentient race, the knowledge that the Captain's statement was true did little to quell the tears stinging Grady's eyes.
Cryptogee
