Resistance is Futile, Oblivion is Inevitable

The Eradication of Earth

This is a sequel to "The Adept". If you have not first read "The Adept", please do so before you read "Resistance is Futile, Oblivion is Inevitable".

Tuesday, 22nd of September, 2064. The apocalypse had come and gone in the form of aliens. Legend has it that a group of three took down the leader of them all, known as the Misorak. Now we needed to be prepared for another invasion, just in case, so the Planetary Defence Agency, or the PDA, was set up. I, Private Jeedey, a descendant of the legendary Adept, joined two years prior to 22/09/64, but the exact date of the start of my service is still a mystery, and will certainly continue to be for eternity.
I was in the rocket testing sector #372, and, believe it or not, I was testing a rocket with my team. From what we could tell, it was perfect: it was light, fast, strong, and could be used for the rarely needed VTOL ships. "We should show Rocsar" Beurc said. Rocsar was in charge of all ship creation, missions, and pretty much the whole of the PDA. Thankfully, most of the team agreed with Beurc. In hindsight, I'm glad that I was overruled on this occasion.
On the way to Rocsar, the alarms started wailing, and they were louder than I'd thought possible. The red lights constantly blinked on and off indicating a failed lift off. But no ships were supposed to go up today, let alone fail. A blaring voice came out of the speakers and the voice sounded like it was a news report.
"We've received confirmation now: the Earth's inner core has melted the outer core and the majority of the mantle. The reason is unknown at this point in time, and it's believed we'll never know. The ground beneath our feet will melt in approximately 15 minutes. We recommend..." And just like that, the panic spread faster than wild fire. My friends and I quickly realised something that no one else seemed to realise: we're in a base full of space ships. I knew of one close by with no thrusters, but that didn't matter; we had the one we'd been testing.
We ran against the flow of people, who were trampling over everyone else like wildebeest, to LP729, where we knew what we had to do. Xia set up a course for a planet that had been theorised to hold life known as EY639B. All planetoids have names like that. The first 2 letters represent likelihood of being dangerous going from AA to ZZ, the three numbers are how far it is from our planet, and the last letter is how close it is from its star compared to the other planets in its system, for instance, A would be the closest, H would be the 8th from its star. Yirank, Noroc and Simone checked fuel and refilled if necessary, Beurc, Fejos and Luis attached the thrusters, and I set the auto-release of the ship for 5 minutes time. It would be a close call, but we could do it. I rushed frantically back to the ship to help out but the flow was still strong. Brother turned on brother for survival. By the time I got to the launch pad, there were only 2 minutes left.
The thrusters had been attached, and as I got on board the last fuel tank that had been used to refuel was being taken off of the ship, and I thought it best to help. Less time taken struggling with carrying it out, more time to sit and prepare for take off.
As I stepped off of the ship while helping carry the tank, I realised we had a problem: the floor of the launch pad was boiling. Not metaphorically, it was bubbling in some areas. We needed to go. We threw the tank as far as we could and ran to the cockpit, strapped in, and realised something we had forgotten about: the auto-release still needed 20 seconds. 20 seconds we couldn't afford to waste. Xia believed the best course of action was to set the thrusters to maximum, and as she was captain, it was done. As the auto-release released us, we would shoot up escaping the planet and heading to our salvation. At least, that was the plan.
The thruster's heat was all that was needed to create a gaping hole. The only thing holding us up was the auto-releases that hadn't released yet. With 5 seconds left to go, the auto-releases fell into the hole, dragging us with them. We could feel the heat as we plummeted further and further. Faster we fell, until we had the feeling of slowing down. As we felt ourselves rise, it got slightly cooler, and then cooler still, until it was cooler than when the ship was on the ground. We had escaped. The auto-release had released us halfway down and we had slowly but surely got out of the chasm and flown away.
The celebrations lasted for a whole of 30 seconds before they felt a rumble and heard a huge explosion. When we looked back, we realised why. The Earth was gone. Boom. Gone forever. And it had knocked half our systems offline, including controls, automatic and manual. We had a course set, but it was no good if we couldn't direct the ship. We were stuck stranded in space.
We took a look at our new course. We would briefly get caught in Jupiter's gravity and then head straight for a planet labelled as JX277A, or as we now call it, Juxsta, where, as we couldn't control our speed, we'd crash land. No one could've predicted what we'd find there.