“To die is landing on some distant shore.”

John Dryden, (1808)

With impact became oblivion.

Stricken from heavens, her fall became an incandescent flare that began high up in the radiation swollen gulfstream that raged high above the shattered surface of Hecate#7b and, had there been any alive to mark it’s passing through the bruised clouds that mobbed ominously above the bones of that ruined Hellworld’s, the fall of the  USS Kirk from orbit looked like some biblical pillar of flame as she shed debris and rode a pillar of fire, as she transcribed a curving parabolic arc towards the unforgiving ground that rushed to meet her.

Throughout her bridge, a scene of desperation and chaos abounded as Ensign Jasmine Hunter struggled in vain with a set of helm controls that were near redundant, instead doing what she could to trim and stabilize the glide path of a hull that was fast losing its aerodynamic coefficient as parts of it detached in the howling slipstream and quickly fell aft to be devoured in the furnace wake of their fiery reentry plume.

Lieutenant – Commander Lane Hanley gripped the arms of her command – chair with grim determination as the cracked and damaged forward viewscreen revealed a stuttering image from the damaged forward visual sensors. The ailing Shran – class escort plunged and buffeted through the acid-rainclouds that habitually scored the blasted surface.

Throughout the turbulent chaos of immediate events, Lane tried to assess the extent of the damage and take stock of their painfully narrow options.

All around the cramped control space was in a state of disarray, several small fires had broken out from behind several consoles and Lieutenant Bohrigm Nil was gamely addressing the last of these with a portable extinguisher, as the automated suppression system had become one more victim to the awful patchwork of systems failures that were the children born of the Warbird’s sudden and devastating result.

Disgorged cabling and flexible duct-work hung from a dislodged service panel in the roof and swung ponderously with each yawing lurch of turbulence, like the intestines of some gruesomely disemboweled prey- beast, pendulous amongst the smoke haze that hung red under the light of the pulsing alert beacons that strobed the space.

“For pity’s sake Bo’! Leave it and strap in !” Lane protested  urgently through gritted teeth as the damaged viewscreen showed the ship breaking free from the hull-scouring cloud base and suddenly the dismal, broken grey bones of a ruined cityscape that spanned horizon to horizon seemed all too close as the ground rushed sickeningly quickly up to meet them as they descended at speed.

For all that it seemed a gesture of ultimate futility to struggle to extinguish just one fire aboard a vessel that had been transformed into a racing funeral pyre, the stout Tellarite XO shook his stubby head and retorted stubbornly, as the flames singed his beard.

“Nearly there!”

The USS Kirk continued to descend at a terrifying rate, the ruins of long – forgotten ruins of a city of the dead flashed past under her scarred hull as the ship raced towards inevitable impact at high speed.

With her impulse drive gone and her shield generator effectively slagged, the ship had become a parabolic object, held aloft by the uncertain combination of intense forward momentum and poor lift characteristics. A dead-fall glider on a one-way journey in her struggle with gravity and mass.

It was going to be a devastating impact.

Hanley tore her attention away from her stubborn friend and focused on the only member of the bridge crew that had any remaining utility and relevance to their current plight.

Lane tried to keep the desperation from her voice as she called out to Ensign Hunter.

“Helm! Can you see anywhere where you can set us down?” She demanded, although the twisted ruins of the dense former urban conurbation that skimmed past her at breakneck speed seemed to offer a dismal rhetoric to her plea.

Jasmine Hunter was in the fight of her life as she struggled to keep the ship aloft.

The desperate young pilot had lost impulse power; inertial gravity were long gone and she had only a pitiful number of working navigational thrusters left undamaged that were operating of a supply of reaction-mass that was most charitably considered as ‘fumes.’

As far as the eye could see (most nav sensors having long since failed), the city seemed to stretch out in all directions. At their current speed and rate of descent they were sure to come down hard amongst the ruins and add their twisted tribute to its whole.

Even at her most optimistic, Jasmine didn’t rate that outcome as survivable.

Still, Hunter occupied the vaulted position of Chief Flight Control Officer aboard the Kirk, despite her young age, as she was one of the more gifted flight – school alumni that Starfleet Academy had ever graduated.

~“Think Jas’, think!”~ Hunter inwardly willed herself, trying not to focus on the rapidly diminishing roll of the altimetric & attitude readouts and casting her mind around like a stage magician trying to conjure a reluctant  rabbit out of a hat before a particularly difficult room.

The gods of happenchance and circumstances intervened at that point, as the Kirk was violently shaken as the hurtling craft intersected with and exploded through the very uppermost story of what had once been a toweringly tall spire or building that loomed high above the shattered ruins below.

All aboard the bridge were thrown forward against their seat restraints with the force of impact, as a trail of debris exploded in a corona of detritus in the ships passing wake. Bohrigm Nil was thrown violently across the cramped bridge space and impacted hard against the MSD console.

The Shran listed hard to port and Jasmine was about to sacrifice the last of her precious reaction-mass to stabilize the ship and correct the sickening wobble from that impact, when something caught her eye on the sparking viewscreen and in the scant seconds that it took to register what she was seeing, she stayed her hand and actually increased the angle of bank to port with the last of her precious fuel.

“Body of water, 15 degrees to port. Estimated range three clicks and closing. I’m gonna try for a forced landing. Everyone hang on!” Hunter called out, hoping that her skill at the helm would live up to her desperate ambition as she tried to steer the uncontrollable ship towards a large blackish lake that began to rush to meet them.

“ALL HANDS! BRACE FOR IMPACT!” Hanley bellowed, hoping that those still alive throughout whatever remained of her ship were sufficiently able to rally to her urgent call.

A fleeting impression of a nightmarish rush of water blurred the viewscreen.

With a Ferengi’s irrepressible instinct for survival, Ensign Gaca had made her small frame even smaller and had already wedged herself under her Operations board. For his part, Ensign Kutka just made a small moan and somehow Orvid Phorrel looked even paler than normal as his hands clenched tightly at the straps of his seat restraints.

With white knuckles straining hard as she gripped her seat, Lane could only sit helplessly as the foreboding dark waters of the lake seemed to accelerate towards her, it’s surface an oily film of brackish green and unhealth grey.

The USS Kirk hit the waves at a relatively shallow angle, the sudden contact making Lane bite down on her lip as her head whiplashed forward from the intensity of the impact. This was followed by a sickening sensation that caused her stomach to flip as the ship ricocheted from the impact, surrounded by massive explosive arcs of greenish spray as she lifted back into the air and began  to violently skip over the murky surface like some great stone slung from the hand of a gargantuanly-powerful child.

The deck bucked with awful ferocity and the unconscious and unrestrained Lieutenant Nil was violently slammed from deck to ceiling and back again.

Again, and again the Shran skipped across the water, each time the impact became less and less until she finally came to a rest near the centre of the lake (in actuality a great crater formed from a weapons impact from a long-forgotten war, that had filled over the millennia with a toxic soup of acid rain, mutagens, radioactivity and pathogens from exotic chemical weapons.

Almost instantly, the USS Kirk began to settle at her stern, raising her prow aloft to the dun colored heavens so that her viewscreen showed only the ominous roil of clouds and flash of indolent lightning as the foul waters of the caldera began to flow into the parts of the superstructure that had been breached, until their invasive wash met the emergency containment fields that miraculously still held and thwarted their turbulent flow.

Such was the naked ferocity of her fall from the heavens that, as she sank, no one aboard was left conscious.