The dry-dock his ship was docking at had been ripped in half, and visible in the near-distance was the gilded trail of an alien projectile, one far quicker than any Velan had seen before; scorched shards of structural steel, accompanied by clouds of debris where the station's core once stood, were all that remained of Velan's destination. The remaining halves, having lost power, drifted apart, firing escape pods off in all directions as they, gripped in the iron fist of gravity, began to fall towards the Cesspit below — similar sights could be seen wherever Velan looked, all around the Cesspit, as the alien world exacted its retribution for the nuclear assault earlier. The Nemesis's rear had been entirely torn off by the alien projectile, one that was of a scale he had never seen nor imagined possible, and with it, hundreds of Velan's crew members had perished; the force of the detonation had sent anyone not strapped into a chair flying, turning many into gore and breaking the bones of countless others. The damage to his ship was immense, but the damage to Velan's people threatened to become even greater. The following instant, the Nemesis's artificial gravity suddenly failed, sending many flying from the floor and forcing them to spin helplessly, while the power-loss spread to the ship's maneuvering thrusters, and left the Nemesis itself in a terrible position. The alien projectile's detonation a few seconds later changed this lack of motion, evaporating dozens of closer ships, melting through already-launched escape pods with ease, and sending the half-destroyed Nemesis tumbling towards the Cesspit below; around his ship, as hundreds of thousands of Kalithiharian vessels flamed, burned, and broke apart, it became clear that Velan was not the only one suffering terrible, tragic losses. Nearly a third of his crew members who had survived Light's End had already been killed over Kalithihar, and unless a miracle were to occur, it seemed as the remaining two thirds would follow.
With no control over the ship's powerless thrusters, Terxah had no hope of preventing the Nemesis's rapid and unwanted descent, though this was not the most worrying thing about Velan's situation: a mere glance at the Cesspit showed that the aliens' destruction had touched everything nearby, and that much of the Kalithiharian force above the Cesspit had been utterly annihilated. The fires of these ships' igniting hulls illuminated the void of space and the Cesspit below, leaving whatever scraps remained unable to suppress the growth of an alien-corrupted skypiercer, let alone an entire damn tainted planet. As many of these destroyed ships hurtled down towards the now-unchecked, corrupted surface of the Cesspit, Velan was nearly blinded by the awful truth: if he stayed on his beloved Nemesis, he and his crew would die — if they evacuated the ship, they would likely all die shortly afterwards. A death in space was preferable to succumbing to the aliens in person...
The screaming of his crew members filling his ears, Velan, an overwhelming desire to keep himself and his crew alive, resolved to choose evacuation; whatever the odds may have been, he would not give up on life so easily when so many had died to get him there. Flames lapping at his gloved hand, Velan deployed his armored pressure shell around him, and ordered all of his crew to abandon the ship. With the space behind his shredded ship being filled with debris and the lingering influence of alien weapons fire, both of which would destroy any escape pod within seconds of its departure, Velan saw but one option available to him: land his crew on the Cesspit itself. How to do this was relatively clear, even if what he was supposed to do after he landed was not.
Realizing that he would need to get off the mostly-alien surface quickly once he landed, Velan had the Nemesis's remaining scanners search the Cesspit for intact space elevators and hangars, located within, or close to, uncorrupted territory. A few moments later, and he found the most promising candidate — a military garrison building, once home to an infantry division, which stood roughly ten kilometers from a mostly uninfected part of the Cesspit. As it was, the edifice was surrounded by alien taint. Above this structure, suspended relatively low in the burning, tainted skies by an intact space elevator, lay a small shipyard — an ideal place to look for a ship with which he could escape, Velan reckoned, honestly surprised that the station was still there. Though the orbital installation was small enough that trying to smash directly into it would likely damage it, could even send it crashing down into the planet below, and would likely force its automated defences to start shooting Velan's pod-bound crew out of the sky, everything was fine — Velan did not have to land on it when he could simply land near it. Locking the programmable destination of his ship's escape pods to an automatically generated spot nearly ten kilometers behind the border between corrupted and uncorrupted land, Velan realized that he had been swearing vigorously without even noticing it, lamenting the situation that he had found himself in as his ship came apart around him. The ten-kilometer distance between the landing zone and the aliens' domain was done so that when some of Velan's crew members inevitably landed away from their intended destination, they did not land within the realm of the alien corruption, nor did they pass through the clouds of alien taint which dominated the aliens' infernal realm: Velan did not know what these clouds would do to a mere escape pod or its occupant, nor did he want to find out personally.
His destination having been selected, and with every second of idleness potentially costing lives, Velan, glancing at the familiar bridge of the Nemesis one last, thankful time, ordered his plan executed — without reviewing where his rendezvous point had been set. A moment later, while the Nemesis struggled to stay in one piece, the roar of decompression echoed throughout its hull, and fires surged throughout the ship like an alien horde, escape pods revealed themselves from retractable compartments within the walls and the floor of the failing ship. The remaining crew members wasted no time in scrambling towards these pods, save Korthekar, who, being an enforcer, was durable and large enough to be fired out of an escape-pod tube in just his armor; Velan, an escape pod being immediately beneath his chair, simply undid his chair's harness and slid inside. Soon, all those crew members who were able enough to reach an escape pod, or who had someone nearby who was able enough to help them into one, were relatively safe within their cramped confines — at that moment, Velan ordered the Nemesis to launch its crew towards the surface of the Cesspit, even if this seemed only barely safer than his imploding vessel.
As the internal mechanisms of the Nemesis loudly struggled to accomplish its task of evacuation, Velan, secured within his pod but still susceptible to being rattled, was promptly shot out of his own vessel like a missile may have been. Many of his crew members succeeded in following behind him, their pods, and those of countless nearby vessels, forming a rainstorm of sepulchral metal that began to descend on the planet below; nevertheless, over sixty more of Velan's crew members were slain when the Nemesis split in two, trapping those about to be shot out of the vessel within their escape pods, which were in turn trapped in the disintegrating metal coffin that was now the Nemesis. This ship had once been among Velan's prime sources of pride, secondary only to his exceptional crew; one of these had been destroyed, and the other looked mere minutes away from being slaughtered either on the surface of the Cesspit, or on the way there.
Behind the wave of escape pods was nought but fire, debris, and death; the wrecks of the dry-dock and countless other vessels smouldered and splintered as they, drawn by the Cesspit's gravity, hurtled towards the alien world in front of them. Ahead of Velan, a similar scene followed, with the addition of Kalithihar's now-annihilated bombarding fleet, whose debris were now raining down on the surface of the Cesspit; the torrent of steel and weaponry joined with the tempests and firestorms below to level hundreds of skypiercers, as the humans' ships continued to wreak destruction on the Cesspit in death as they had done in life. While the human fleet fell, an alien naval force, created by the corruption, surged forth from the depths of the fallen world, leaping into the death-filled heavens and being forced to dodge the rain of wrecks they had wrought, as they charged Kalithihar itself. Nevertheless, the planetary defences of Kalithihar and whatever ships remained made short work of the alien vessels — vessels that had succumbed not only to the impressive armament of Kalithihar, but to their own hubris, which seemed as much an alien trait as a human one.
Though pockets of crashing human ships were occasionally — and accidentally — incinerated by nuclear fire or reduced to smithereens by collateral damage from gauss bursts, the vast majority of the crippled human vessels continued to rain down onto the planet below, showering the world with escape pods before they met their end. Reasonably intact yet crippled ships found themselves smashed into the surface of the world like meteors, or became skewered on the jagged peaks of skypiercers, whose uppermost floors had in most cases been obliterated to prevent aliens from using the vessels stored there — when warships slammed into these weakened structures, many of them collapsed entirely, which only added to the dust and carnage that so gripped the world they were on. Many ships, in a harsh case of irony, fell into the atomic firestorms that they themselves had created; this irony lost all of its appeal when one realized that hundreds of thousands of human beings met their end this way. Regardless of how the human ships met their final end, their calamitous arrival shook the very core of the artificial planet they fell upon.
Skewered vessels became all-too-common in the highest reaches of the Cesspit, and their burning hulks began to look like some variety of mournful metallic forest, forever glinting and shimmering in the sun-like light produced by the burning ships and stations above, or the lethal fires raging below. The rain of escape pods produced by these crashing vessels, a downpour of steel to accompany the thunder of crashing warships, touched every corner of the surface, though in light of the alien corruption taking hold on the miniature world, a quick death may well have been preferable to many of those who remained. Vessels which had ignited in the atmosphere burned until they reached the surface — in the cases where they fell into an inferno, their blaze did not cease, and such was the combined incendiary activity occurring on the surface of the Cesspit that despite the untold amounts of dust choking the skies of the fallen world, nothing but flame was visible to those unfortunate enough to witness the once-proud planet from above.
Doubtless, neither Velan nor his crew would be above the construct for much longer.
As his escape pod, having long since left the disintegrating Nemesis, continued to shake, and whine under the stresses surrounding it, Velan was repeatedly throttled by his pod's retro-rockets firing at will; amidst a haze of pain, MECS, and desperation, Velan felt his back compressing under the weight of the thrust. A moment later, he was forced to retract his pressure shell as his escape pod equipped him with a suit of standard combat armor, the pod's simple computer helpfully instructing Velan a moment later to brace for impact, and then establishing an implant connection through which it constantly reminded Velan of near the surface of the Cesspit he was. In addition to this, the pod also clearly stated that it would have to graze three separate skypiercers to land where he had ordained, and Velan, to his horror, then discovered that he had committed his crew to rendezvous on the 157th floor of a skypiercer: something that his damaged ship's emergency computer had seemingly deemed wise. Trying to change his destination at this point was impossible, for many of Velan's crew members, having had better luck avoiding debris and having not been delayed by their pods' evasive maneuvers, were already present at his computer's insane choice of destination; like with the rest of the crises he had to contend with, Velan's best option was to improvise with it, rather than struggling against the way things were. Though he was thoroughly secured to his pod by an advanced harness and had little choice in the matter, Velan did everything he could to heed his pod's advice to brace for impact.
Tumbling through the mix of dust, debris, fire, and death that dominated the atmosphere of the Cesspit, Velan's pod missed a skypiercer in the midst of collapsing on itself, before shredding through the edges of three separate structures, and eventually embedding itself deep into the battered flank of a massive corporate-style skypiercer — the well-chosen destination of the Nemesis's computer — though all of the forces acting on the unfortunate structure nearly levelled the already-weakened, truncated building. Standing defiantly against a backdrop of impenetrable dust and alien corruption, the war-ravaged skypiercer Velan had landed on was illuminated by the fires of hundreds of other, distant ships, appearing as infernal meteors in a blazing rain of conflagration that was set against the horrible light of faraway nuclear firestorms. Further in the distance, the faint outline of the aliens' domain loomed, but this was distant enough for Velan to feel almost comfortable, as he struggled within his metallic coffin. Scores of similar pods descended upon Velan's structure, slamming into its various floors with limited accuracy, though fatalities were few; escape pods were built to ensure both their own structural integrity, and the structural integrity of their occupant. This did not mean that the landing of the Nemesis's crew was a calm affair, however; such was the violence of their arrival that if it weren't for the tens of thousands of other ships crashing into the planet below, his arrival would have drawn the attention of everything within ten miles of the building, and the impacts still succeeded in shaking off much of the suffocating dust that clung to the building's upper floors. Even though the walls of his escape pod, Velan could hear the agonizing moans of his target skypiercer's superstructure, as well as the sharp shrieks of snapping metal; nevertheless, as the rest of the world bathed in fire and fought off alien corruption, whilst being rained on by the shattered wrecks of countless human vessels, one could look at Velan's skypiercer and think "That building is remarkably calm."
That was, of course, if one could see the thing at all, through the dust, taint, fire, and death that clogged the very skies of the Cesspit.