Star Wars The Bad Batch: The Runaway

Chapter 1 - Crash Landing

Thank you so much for clicking on my story!! I hope you enjoy it!

○●○●○●○●○●○●○

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

IT all started with the engines failing. The pilot, a fifteen-year-old girl named Callista, (most of the time she shortened it to Calli) cursed as multiple alarms were going off, telling her that other systems were also giving up.

"Good one Calli. You managed to steal a cruddy ship!" The teen grumbled before slapping the control panel as if that would somehow magically make everything alright. Her entire body lurched forward when the ship suddenly came out of hyperspace, and through the viewport, Calli had a partial view of a planet. It appeared to be mostly land, thank goodness, spotted with many small bodies of water, but nothing larger than lake it seemed.

Well at least she didn't come out of hyperspace into a meteor shower or a black hole. She might have a fighting chance of survival if she can crash land with style on the surface - without blowing up that is.

The ship groaned as it got caught in the gravitational pull, it's nose catching fire as it entered the planet's atmosphere. Calli gripped the controls like a lifeline while the ship headed straight for the ground and she heard explosions - coming from the engine no doubt, that shook the vessel.

Just hold out until I land, then you can blow up completely. Calli silently told the ship in her head, beginning to flip switches and press buttons to start the intense landing process, all the while calm as if she wasn't less than a minute from a possible death.

The fates seemed to mock her apparent bravery and calmness when a new alarm began blaring, and after a quick check she saw that one of the wings had torn off.

As surface grew closer and closer, Calli's heart pounded against her ribs, and she tried to remain calm. But when a chunk of metal on the nose of the ship suddenly came off, she couldn't stop herself from jumping as it hit the glass window, causing it to crack, but not shatter. Calli then remembered that there was an escape pod and decided she'd rather take her chances with that than staying on this ship that might come apart before it even hits the surface. The crack becoming bigger and another alarm sounding as the oxygen levels began dropping from the breach in the ship only further Calli's resolve.

Unstrapping the seat belt, Calli got up from the pilot's seat, grabbed her bag that carried all her belongings and hurried out of the cockpit, doubling back briefly to swipe an oxygen mask mounted on the wall by the exit and put it on before hypoxia became another in an already tall stack of problems.

She made it to the escape pods at the back of the ship in less than a minute, thankfully it wasn't a very large ship she'd stolen. Well.... borrowed without permission sounds better. It was nothing more than a simple scavenger ship, barely held together by rusted bolts and a prayer before every take off that it'd hold together until the next stop.

If Calli had had more time and didn't have a group of thugs she'd swindled money from on her tail, she would have chosen a better spaceship to make her escape. At least one that would have gotten her from point A to point B without any mishaps. What's the point of a ship if it doesn't even hold together when it's going .2 past light speed?

Another explosion caused Calli to lose her balance and fall forwards, her head slamming into the durasteel wall, making everything fade in and out for a brief moment while briefly seeing stars. Calli grabbed onto the door of the escape pod to steady herself but didn't waste time and hit the button on the control panel nearby to open the pod. She was lucky that this tiny ship even had a pod at all. It was the last one in fact.