Saa'be

flee

"Perhaps, we move before we are flattened," The Pilot says with a bleary kind of midnight humor. "My arm hurts enough without other bits of me being smothered under a Warbeast's hoof."

The Gunner and The Mechanic exchange one last look, then The Gunner looks to The Pilot's pale face. There is calculation, then movement. The Gunner starts towards the Marshes, pulling The Captain and The Mechanic on with her strength.

The Recruit follows, helping The Pilot. Her eyes keep phasing in and out of focus, like her mind is wandering away then returning.

The plains stretch before them, distance expanding as the goal hovers in the middle distance, the marshes a smear on the horizon. Because of the expanse, a straggling group of crash survivors may seem no more than a series of stationary bodies to an aircraft moving at speed. But if the pilots of the Conglomerate ships were to look closely, they would see that the grey and peach splotches against the verdant lowlands are moving, a shuddering crawl.

Around them, downed Resistance ships molder amid flames, orange slashes across the once proud mica hulls. None in their small party look hard at the twisted limbs in the wreckage. They are either blessed or cursed to all have survived the crash, due in part to The Pilot's skill. Most of their force is in splinters, black and grey flecks against the field as Conglomerate infantry soldiers hunt down any survivors.

The Resistance knew the price for failure. Not slavery, but annihilation, a strange preference, but a necessary one in the bid for freedom.

The five shipmates wince as Conglomerate ships strafe remaining Resistance airships, comrades screaming to their deaths in twisted metal structures. The chaos of the stragglers above is just enough to provide them with some semblance of camouflage, just another five wandering souls doomed to be exterminated by the Conglomerate troops when the warbeasts reach them.

There is an inevitability about the way the great warbeast plods towards what remains of their own ship. Its long steps cover distance in slow strides, the range of its legs balanced in part by how long it takes to complete a step. Their time to reach a buffered distance from their crash is measured in strides that shake continents.

They move as fast as they dare, slowed by The Captain with his gruesome, grievous injury and stymied by the need not to attract attention. Above them, the horns of the warbeast begin to bleat triumph, the beasts themselves joining in with bellows loud enough to cause tremors in the earth. The sonorous clangs make the loamy grass seem to tilt underneath The Recruit's feet and he stumbles as he moves, trying to stay upright for the sake of The Pilot but struggling to keep a steady stride. For her part, The Pilot only smiles dreamily when he apologizes, her mind somewhere between here and unconsciousness.

What was pale sunslight of an overcast day dims inexorably towards the peach of sunset. The Mechanic and The Gunner struggle under The Captain's weight, his blood leaking out of his leg and side, a clear crimson trail for the Conglomerate to follow in their search for survivors. The Recruit quails and shivers with every Conglomerate ship that passes overhead, fearing it will mark them. The Pilot quietly reassures him in her lucid moments, calloused hands on his arms, finally bidding him to set her down so they can amble together. The line of fluid trailing behind The Captain is an unwanted signal to the Conglomerate where they have gone and The Mechanic's cool eyes seem to be waiting for the moment to shift loose dead weight. The rest of the crew is not on his side now, but that will change quickly when the suns sink below the horizon line and they become fugitives in the night.

The warbeast has reached their downed ship now and the Conglomerate infantry has descended when either The Mechanic or The Pilot looks back to track their slow flight across the plains. Both know that once the infantry confirm there are no bodies, the trackers will get involved and make sure that the crash was fatal. The Mechanic suspects because faces on their ship are familiar to him. They were no simple Resistance war ship. There was something important about what they were carrying.