Planatae

Crashout

There's a threshold when it comes to falling out of the sky. Reach a certain speed, and landing in water results in the same exact impact as a body hitting rock-solid concrete.

Hit the surface of the ocean past that threshold, as well as and trapped within the body of a shuttle ripping itself apart, and the chances of survival grow to nigh impossible.

Jasper's contemplation of this fact was slow - a sluggishly, achingly, eons-crawling-by level of slowness that felt as though he'd spent hours of his life hanging in the sky.

In reality, it took the Skywave only two dozen seconds in all to smash back down against the planet.

If this had been a real battle, the shuttle would have come equipped with ejector seats, a built-in stabilizer system. But all the Skywave could do was tighten their seat straps and deploy a series of airbags, half of which flew past Jasper's view in a tangle of shredded canvas. It was a pleasure craft after all - no one had ever expected Alto II to be the target of a war.

There was a flash of pure whiteness as the Skywave hit the water nose-first with a sound like a clap of thunder.

Riko, who had been piloting from the cockpit, never stood a chance. The pressure of the collapsing, crumpling ship as it hit the water must have folded up his body like a piece of decorative paper.

It was a difference of a millisecond, a angle of impact occurring purely by chance, but for Jasper, who sat in the Skywave's furthermost row of seats, the crash did not lead to instant death. It did, however, result in pain beyond anything he had experienced before in his life. By the time the main body had hit the water, the roof of the Skywave had been blown off by the sheer force of their speed. The fighter's projectile had punched through the side of the craft, and so that too, had been open to the sky.

Jasper had waited until the last possible second before impact before overriding the ship's auto-controls and detaching himself from the safety straps with his seat's controls. It meant that when the Skywave made impact, his legs crumpled. They shattered against the chair, the floor - then he was flung skyward with the momentum, launched through the gaps in the shuttle and into the open air. A few degrees in either direction, and he would have smashed against what remained of the ship's metal body.

But he wasn't. Instead, he was tossed into the sky like some horrible, crippled avian creature, before hitting the water once again. He skipped once, twice, bouncing against the ocean's surface like a stone before coming to a sinking stop.

The Skywave had faced a very similar fate. Thanks to the angle and point of contact, the shuttle had skipped along the surface for a stretch, just as he had, before coming to a stop. There were enough surviving airbags to prevent the bulk of the ship from sinking.

Their disastrous fall had been spotted; aquajets were already being deployed to the crash site, racing across the waves. But for Jasper and the others, they would never make it in time.

He had blacked out shortly after the initial impact. The searing, star-bright pain of his ruined legs had been too much to handle, the oxygen-stealing speed of his flight spurning him the rest of the way.

In addition to his limbs, many of Jasper's internal organs had begun to shut down. Another stroke of luck - he'd managed to land face-up, but soon his lungs would fill with water, and contribute to the rising tally of failed anatomical systems.

In a normal human, the brain would have shut down at this point; if death could somehow be avoided, then comatose existence was an inevitable alternative.

But Jasper shared his mind with another - someone who was immune to the pressures of external stimuli.

The Old One had watched, like a distant spectator, as it warnings went unheeded, as the Skywave crawled upwards towards space, only to fall crashing down again. She had lived many lives, in many different bodies, but the actions taken by the Altonians that day were some of the most futile and stupid she'd ever experienced, in her own humble opinion.