Fire in the sky

The sky burned - and then Sola was suddenly thrown to one side. Dustin gripped the arms of his seat as the ship span around him despite the inertia dampening and gravity plating. “What the hell was that?” He asked, dragging his focus away from the burning planet and to his crew who were equally as shocked. Meli’s answer came through first. “Weave bubble collapse on a massive scale. That… thing, whatever it was just jumped inside a gravity well. Whatever’s not burning down there is now dealing with tsunamis and major ground shakes.” As soon as the Velca had finished speaking Emely piped up. “Multiple requests for aid captain, a lot of the escapees got hit by the fireball in the sky but some made it - but they’re only small shuttles, they’re not built to take the kind of gravitational lensing that we just rode out.”

Dustin shook his head to clear the dizziness the gravity shift had caused. “Yril’k, any hostiles still around? Nothing? Right.” Then he gestured to the screen. “Plot a course, launch all shuttles, triage and help as many as we can. Trea’k, take the spare station and help Emely allocate resources, Yril’k, plot flight paths and use the guns to clear any debris that you can to speed things up. Rye - tweak the scanners, if there’s anyone alive down there I want to know about it the instant we’ve saved everyone we can up here.” Then he thumbed the ship-wide communicator. “All hands, hostiles have fled but we have a major search and rescue operation to undertake. Medical, prepare for immediate incoming casualties.”

The next four hours were a blur. For the first time, Dustin found himself in a leadership role rather than as one of the shuttle pilots - with all the new recruits, there were plenty of people who could handle a shuttle, but only one who could sit in the captain’s chair. Despite that, he pulled up multiple camera feeds, watching his crew work to save as many lives as they could. The situation on the escaping shuttles were varied. Some were newer models and the inhabitants had little problems besides a loss of main power. Those, unless they were drifting back into the inferno Emely and Trea’k left until last. Others were not so lucky.

Dr Bleu and her team had arrived on Sola just in time it seemed; when Dustin couldn’t stand sitting still any longer and went to help move the injured occupants of a shuttle to the medbay he found the doctor stretched literally thin - the Queri having extended herself in all directions to oversee a half dozen different procedures and treatments at once. Victims began to pile up, at which point Dustin was given a tablet, a grav-stretcher and told to move those patients listed on the tablet out of the main medbay and over to one of the cargo bays where a secondary team of medics were busy with the more stable cases.

Updates chirped to him through his communicator as he worked. The number of shuttles with living occupants grew lower as time passed, many thankfully because of his crew’s efforts but some due to the tragic brutality of the situation. Then, a call he had been waiting for clipped in. “Dusty, Rye here. Got the scanners tweaked to max gain. The signal’s shit as all hell, but we’ve got confirmation of a handful of possible survivors planetside - and an escape pod from the cargo ship on the fifth planet’s moon. Their comms must have been totalled on impact - Emmz is sending one of the faster pilots over to see if what I think is a lifesign really is one.” Dustin nodded, sagging against a bulkhead as he did so. “Good work, both of you. Can we get to the survivors on the planet?”

There was a pause for a moment, then Meli spoke. “Not yet, li’ah’a. The atmosphere is still too hot for a shuttle to attempt re-entry, and Sola needs time to run a diagnostic to make sure there was no serious damage to the hull from that weave bubble collapsing before we put her into a gravity well. They are about as safe as they can be however - an aquatic research facility far away from the epicentre of the gravitational shear. Limited ground movement in the region and any major water movement will have passed overhead without issue.” Dustin felt himself slide down until he was sat on the floor. “Ok. Send a shuttle as soon as it’s safe; I’ll head back to the bridge in a moment.”

The crew of the Solar Ascent worked in shifts throughout the night; Dustin, after a brief discussion with Bleu had authorized the doctor to issue stimulants to a handful of staff to help keep them alert while others took the first break - a two hour exhausted nap before returning to the business of saving lives. The medical work wasn’t pretty - Bleu taking the coldly clinical approach that in the circumstances, survival of as many people as possible was the priority and regrowth nanites could deal with any issues when the immediate concerns were done. Thus, where normally a patient with a mangled limb might have had it healed up at the same time as the multiple chest injuries were worked on, here instead the doctor applied sedative and cauterizing laser to remove and seal the limb in a matter of a few moments so that her team could deal with the life threatening problems and move on to the next incoming case without fear of the limb injury causing the patient to bleed out.

A brief moment of cheer went through the crew at the successful recovery of the escape pod from the cargo ship. She’d been one of the sort that had only a small crew compliment - and of the ten she had aboard, fully eight had survived with only minor injuries. Dustin listened to the second mate’s explanation that their losses had been a single loader, killed instantly when the hostile aliens had crippled their weave drive as part of the initial ****, and the captain. Apparently, the tall thin crew of the cargo vessel came from a species that shared the human concept of the captain going down with his ship. Assuring them that he would make mention of the man’s bravery in his report seemed so hollow in the circumstances, but it appeared to give the survivors some comfort.

Sitting in his ready room with his head in his hands early the next morning, Dustin’s brain ached. He hadn’t slept - Bleu had been **** to issue the captain with stimulants, but the automat had a near-bottomless supply of coffee. None of his loves had mentioned the fact that he was drinking espresso rather than mocha, slamming the bitter drink back as if he had a grudge against it every two hours like clockwork. The scientists had been rescued from the planet and had arrived a half hour ago - Meli and Rye finally deeming it safe to send a shuttle; judging by the damage the heat shielding had still taken, they had cut it very fine regardless.

With a growl of frustration Dustin punched the table. While the majority of the people he’d rescued were out of it - either through sedatives to keep them stable so that the trauma and shock didn’t turn them into additional worries for the doctor, or due to anaesthesia because of a need for major surgery - the scientists had been largely unscathed. They’d been able to confirm a few things - their location had kept them safe, and they’d done the only thing they could in the circumstances; use their equipment to keep records.

“It’s a little imprecise I’m afraid.” Their leader had said, a haunted look on his face. “We all wear life monitors - part of the colony healthcare system - but the mesh started to fail pretty badly just before whatever they did to the sky happened. The data isn’t perfect - some of their weapons put out a lot of electromagnetic distortion, and of course if the limb you are wearing your monitor on gets severed you might still live but would show as dead… but based on the data we have, only around ten percent of the population were still alive by the time you arrived in the system. There really was nothing you could do, Captain. We lost almost that many in the first volley before the cargo ship got their distress message out.”

The scientist’s words had helped a little to relieve Dustin of any guilt about not getting there quicker - but even so. Meli reported the total tally of those saved. Not counting the cargo ship’s crew, they had rescued a little over three hundred people; after a brief discussion Rye had also arranged for a crew of the more technically minded of the fire team to head out after they’d gotten some rest to retrieve four or five of the larger shuttles she thought could be salvageable. Three hundred sounded like a great number - until you put it into the context of the total population the scientists had reported the planet having prior to the attack. Staring down at the table, Dustin’s vision blurred; at first he thought it was tiredness until he felt someone - Trea’k - gently wipe the tears from his cheeks. Turning to look at her having not even heard her enter the room he let out a cry of anguish as the Vex’ess woman pulled him into a soothing embrace. “Four hundred and fifty thousand… Nearly half a million dead, Trea’k... Why! WHY?”