Surviving Daions were absorbed harmoniously into Coalition populations. That's what Coalition history recorded. In reality plague survivors were abused, ostracized, and lately their descendants were disappearing - relatively unnoticed - from the sec...
"Looks like the handle for a manual hand crank," Lissa said, not impressed.
"Well, yeah, this is," Leo agreed. "But," he said, drawing out the word as he gave the handle a shove and started rotating the circle in the floor. Heavy decking scissored closed across the top of the tunnel gap, covering the small pit completely and interlocking in the same pattern as emergency doors. Leo kept cranking and a smooth, third, thinner section of decking slid across the top and then lifted to be level with the floor under the current flooring. It hissed as the mechanical autoseal inflated.
"So, rather than escape the same way you got in, we're both now stuck in here?" Lissa asked.
"The lifeboats already deployed." Leo gestured at the integrity screens which were now flashing that all bay doors had been manually released and all bays were empty. "Which is exactly what we need, or the emergency system for this lifeboat won't initiate," he said, pointing at the floor he was standing on.
Dockland's hull groaned and screamed under the gravitational pull yanking both ships toward the planet. Leo dropped into his seat at NavCom and set a course for projected, safe atmospheric entry in between clicking himself into the seat's safety harness.
"You're going to want to buckle in, too."
"Dockland doesn't have engine control from here!" Lissa yelled.
"No, Dockland doesn't," Leo said, nodding agreement as Lissa clicked into the safety harness where Mollin usually sat. "But this lifeboat was designed to save Dockland's command crew and has its own engine with enough solid fuel for a single atmospheric descent," he added. "Wow," he said with a chuckle as command entry points he'd read about appeared on the antique screen.
Leo couldn't help but smile at the flashing confirmation message. His eyes were shining with nervous excitement as he punched in the final command and handed over timing control to NavCom's automatic systems. External temperature warnings flashed on all the screens applicable to that monitoring, and incorrect atmospheric entry warnings flashed on every other screen. Exactly as they needed to.
"Come on come on come on," he murmured once all the panels went black.
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Shiner's thin hull was never meant for atmospheric entry. It began ripping open into a ballooning, shower of shrapnel, creating so much drag it ripped open Dockland's heavy outer hull around each dock lock. From the lifeboats in high orbit, the two big ships combined into a single, extinction event meteorite burning down through the outer atmosphere. Unlike the component transporters, the speed of approach wasn't slowed by the engines and the flare of entry never dimmed as the wreckage plummeted.
As designed into the hull, Dockland's forgotten sensors tied to the active life support system detected the gravitational increase and presence of external atmosphere. Component pieces separated as the ship fell. Antique, automatic methods, created by builders paranoid enough to believe such war-required crash measures were necessary to limit damage to a planet, deployed and ripped apart Shiner in the process. Dockland's half-burnt parachutes and anti-inertial explosions spread the crash site across a narrow swath of land and ocean stretching a third of the width of the planet's largest continent.
