"All Fleets, the Crucible is armed. Disengage and head to the rendezvous point." Hackett sounded calm, if not tired as he directed the Alliance fleets; his voice patched throughout the SR2 Normandy's intercom. "I repeat, disengage and get the Hell out of here."
Tali heard the words, but her attention was on the pain in her chest; a pain infinitely worse than the energy burns and shrapnel wounds she had received during the mad dash to the conduit in London. The engines weren't revving up for a quick jump to the Sol Relay, and as she realized why, she blessed Joker for his dedication. After a long moment, the engines jumped to life, and darkness swallowed the injured Quarian's mind, her last thought being that they waited. They had waited as long as they could.
–-
In the cockpit, Jeff Moreau struggled with his beloved ship, almost physically aware of the wave of energy creeping up behind the Normandy as she made her approach to the Sol Mass Effect Relay. As the ship exited from FTL near Pluto, he breathed a sigh of relief; they had made it. They had left the unknown energy behind. Hopefully, they had enough time...
WARNING! WARNING! HAZARDOUS ENERGY LEVELS APPROACHING!
Jeff cursed as he quickly calculated the Relay jump to the fleet's rendezvous, and sent the activation code to the Relay. The ancient machine spun up and tossed the System's Alliance Frigate into the void, surrounded by a field of element zero. The alarms silence momentarily, but the subspace sensors continued to track the build-up of energy left behind them.
"Edi, keep those alarms down, please." Jeff called out. His hands rapidly move display after display on the holodisplay as he assessed the energy and fuels reserve left after the battle for Earth. Thankfully the ship's stealth systems held out during the combat and the ship had sustained minor damage; mostly energy wash and shrapnel from nearby ships being destroyed.
"Got it, Joker," Edi's disembodied voice responded from the speaker next to the cockpit chair. He suppressed the sudden worry about how the AI's chassis fared after the combat on the surface, as the sensors picked up the energy wave traveling along the subspace highway behind them, and quickly catching up to the ship.
"I need all the energy you can give me!" he patched through to Combat and Engineering.
"Rerouting all energy to main engines!" Chief Engineer Adams replied, the alarms from the Engineering consoles loud enough to register through the speaker. The ship lurched as the inertial dampeners tried to compensate for the red-line speeds that the pilot was forcing on the ship. Multiple alarms sprung to life on the console; the ship would not be able to maintain these speeds for very long; especially not in the delicate environment of the Element Zero bubble.
True enough, the ship's engines began to fail, and the wave of energy washed over the ship, destroying the Element Zero bubble, and ripping the ship into real-space with a shuddering crash. Dozens of alarms filled Jeff's display; he pushed them all to the side to survey where exactly the ship had been ejected to.
He was not pleased with what he saw.
–-
In the medical bay, Doctor Chakwas pulled herself off the floor and dusted off her uniform as she checked her patient again. "Sometimes being a medical officer on a warship is not all that great," she muttered. "Give him another dose of Medigel, and double check everyone's securely strapped in. Something tells me that we are going to have more of what ever that was shortly," she commanded to the nurse on the other side of the unconscious soldier on the table.
Glancing at the notes on her omni-tool, she confirmed that all critical patients were stable, and went to check on the special case. Quickly decontaminating herself, she approached Tali's bed, wincing at how close to the other wounded soldiers the Quarian's cot was. "We really need to get her to an isolation unit before she gets infected with something her immune system can't handle," she muttered. "While I'm wishing, I might as well ask for stable ground," she cursed as the ship shuddered again. "Joker, what is going on up there?" She called through the intercom.
"You might want to strap in, Doc," Jeff's voice replied. "This is going to be a bumpy ride."
–-
"EDI, I need your help," Jeff called as he closed the comms circuit with medical. Again, there was no response from the AI. Fighting off the feeling of panic within him, the Alliance pilot brought online the maneuvering thrusters, and called down to engineering. "Chief, you there?"
"Still here, Joker. What's the situation?"
"Bad. We need the impulse engines yesterday. We're caught in a gravity well, and going down quick. We've got maybe ten minutes before we're paste on whatever rock this is."
"I'll see what we can do," The Chief Engineer's voice was grim as he cut the communication.
"Combat, any chance we could launch a distress beacon before we enter atmosphere?" Joker called.
"Already on it," Samantha Traynor responded. "You just focus on getting us out of this in one piece."
"Easier said than done," Joker muttered as he closed the communication. Before him on the view screen was a large moon, orbiting an extremely large gas giant. He knew that without the impulse engines, there was no way the ship could exit the gravitational well of the planets, and even with the maneuvering thrusters, on the approach vector that the ship was currently on, landing safely would require all of his skill. And half the thrusters were offline from the energy blast.
"Easier said than done." Fingers never stopped moving as he adjusted the available thrusters to level out the ship as it entered atmosphere.
–-
On a nameless moon of an unknown gas giant, a fireball raced across the sky, sending winged creatures exploding out of treetops and into the sky.
Shortly after entering the atmosphere, the fireball coalesced into a black and white vessel, leveling out from a steep descent and into a more level landing. Unfortunately, there was no clear place to land. The ship had made an approach directly toward a forested mountain range, and there was no time to pull up. Banking hard, the ship made contact with the ground at moderately high speeds, driving deep, burning gouges into the forest floor as it crashed into the mountain. The silence that followed seemed unnatural after the roar and crash of the previous minutes, and slowly; almost cautiously, the native wildlife returned to their calls and songs.