We tipped down, suddenly buffeted by thickening air. A pink-white plasma glow gathered, hiding the stars and the land below.

There was a howling noise. My pressure suit stiffened suddenly. Peering down, I saw a hole in the hull, a ragged gash reaching right through the hull’s layers; I stared, fascinated, as fluffy clouds shot past my feet.

L’Eesh turned in his couch. “Listen to me, child. We may yet survive this. The flitter is designed to keep us alive, come what may. It should be able to withstand a gliding descent from orbit on a world this size.”

“But we’re breaking up.”

His grin was feral. “Let’s hope the hull ablates slowly.”

The blasted landscape flattened out further. The sky above had turned pink-brown. Rocks and craters shot beneath the prow.

There was a last instant of calm, of comparative control. I clung to my couch.

The flitter bellied down.

Orange dust flew. The nose crumpled. The inertial suspension failed, and I was flung forward. Foam erupted around me.

I was trapped, blinded, feeling nothing.

Then the foam popped and burst, quickly evaporating, and I was dropped into rust-red dirt.

… Down, just like that, deposited in silence and stillness and orange-brown light, amid settling debris.

I brushed at the dirt with my gloved hand. There were bits of white embedded in the dust: shards and splinters that crackled, the sound carrying through my suit hood. Bones?

L’Eesh was lying on his back, peering up at the muddy sky. He barked laughter. “What a ride. Lethe, what a ride!” He lifted his hands over his head, and bits of bone tumbled in the air around him, languidly falling in the low gravity.

When I was a kid, rogue Ghost cruisers still sailed through the less populated sectors of the Expansion. As parties of hunters scoured those great tangles of silvery rope, my mother would send me into the nurseries armed with knives and harpoons. Watch your back, she would call as I killed. Use your head. There is always an option. I was five years old, six.