Zarine woke to the sound of kxons bring into her ears. The sounds from the speakers reverberated in the narrow space in her pod.

  “The hell is going on?” She muttered to herself, struggling to bring her arms up to her ears in a vain attempt to muffle the sound.

  Suddenly everything lurched, making her feel sick but very much awake. The whole ship shook, throwing things around the cabin. There was also an awful grinding sound of metal twisting.

  “This is bad, real bad.” Zarine's breaths got faster as her mind spiralled. Maybe we’re near a pnet? How could that happen though? Oh fuck!

  “Crap…” She groaned. “This is going to be a very bad day.”

  She quickly smacked a panel at her right side and several screens lit up in front of her face showing warning signs and statistics. She tapped away at the panel with practised hands and cycled through the various screens trying to figure out what was going on.

  Normally the pod would have opened up and woken her up along with the rest of the crew but the system hadn’t done that. Another screen told her that the cabin wasn’t pressurised, so it would have been near instant death had it opened.

  Bouncing between multiple other screens, she found out the cause. Some “UNKNOWN OBJECT” had hit the ship and half the systems were damaged in some way, the other half were completely shut down. Fortunately, the life pods were all intact. She’d had to sit through an eleven hour css on their specs and operations before the trip, she was gd it wasn’t just for show.

  The other eleven and a half crew members were accounted for and healthy, but still asleep. Even Tyna, our resident Space Fairy, was fine but still somehow asleep in a small box on one of the pilot seats. She was in low power mode to save energy, and didn’t need to breathe on account of her being completely synthetic.

  “Tyna! Wake up!” Zarine shouted, only to realise her voice wouldn't reach the tiny fairy.

  There was another massive lurch of the ship. Another impact of “Something”, but this time the entire engine section had been hit.

  Now she saw Tyna stir and a flicker of light briefly shone off her. She slowly got up before looking around. For a brief moment, she stood there motionless, as if the cogs in her head hadn’t quite started to turn yet. Finally, when she seemed to realise the crisis they were in, like any other normal person, she went into utter panic mode.

  She darted around the cabin in a frenzy, flying between various pilot screens and system diagnostic panels. Nobody knew how those fairies could btantly ignore the ws of physics like they did when they thought nobody was watching. Even they seemed to not understand it, or just chose to portray it that way.

  It would have been cute watching her, if everything wasn’t going catastrophically wrong. Thankfully, Tyna finally looked in the direction of the pods and saw Zarine. She quickly flew over in front of the pod’s window and hit a button on the outside. Suddenly her high pitched voice rang through, still in a massive panic.

  “Rina what’s happening!? Everything’s scary and loud!” She cried.

  “Calm down you crazy Tixie. This is really important, I need you to look at the nav computer and tell me where we are.”

  “But, but… Ok” She sniffed up a big digital booger before flying over to the pilot seat. How she had learned to emute crying and snot was another mystery for ter.

  Space Fairies were weird beings that were both physical and digital, who could alter their looks on the fly. Tyna liked to appear as a small girl with a green dress and very blond hair, apparently emuting a certain character from an ancient children’s book.

  A moment ter Tyna came back with a small data pad that looked incredibly awkward for her to carry given her size. The path the ship had taken was on the data pad, but there was one major problem, half the route was gone.

  She had no idea where they were and the ship scans couldn’t figure out what they collided with. The only saving grace was that they were close to a pnet, actually way too close. Close enough to get pulled in. There was another lurch, and Zarine noticed a red glow coming from the cockpit.

  Trying not to join the little fairy in her panic, Zarine gave her instructions in the steadiest voice she could muster.

  ‘Tyna! I need you to listen to me very carefully. I want you to go to the pilot seat, hit the evacuation button and then the nding rockets. After that, come back to me, there’s a small compartment below my feet that you can hide in. It’ll be rough, but better than being here when this thing crashes.”

  “O-Okay!” She shouted before saluting awkwardly and zooming off. Moments ter more kxons began bring, indicating the need to abandon ship. She could see a couple of the other crew members stirring finally, including her older sister Reiana. There was a brief look of panic before her pod was jettisoned downwards and out of sight along with the others.

  “Tyna hurry!” She shouted into the speaker and watched the little fairy fly back and, with a little difficulty, enter that compartment below her feet.

  Barely a moment ter, her pod was shot out from the ship like a homing missile, which swooped down at the pnet. She desperately tried to not think about what awaited her on the surface, and instead focussed on trying to keep track of the other pods that were also careening towards the pnet below. Everything was so chaotic that she only managed to keep track of five before she passed out.