A/N: Just a bit of fun here. No goal here other than to have a bit of gratuitous violence. I chose to crash into TA 2475, and this location more for the fun of it than any other real consideration. Have fun reading it, because I had fun writing it.
"Where are we, Commander," asked a tall, darkly tanned man, his blue-gray eyes looking to the relevant displays arrayed about his bridge. Half the command staff were dead, and half of the survivors wore the shell shocked looks of passing through hell, seeing things no sentient being should.
"Off the charts, sir, astro's a mess, and the core is...sluggish." The man winced at the commander's report but continued to look at the displays. It didn't look good, he thought glumly. More than half his thrusters were gone. Not damaged, not destroyed, just simply gone, and a third of those remaining were inoperable, and the remainder were too far damaged to effect any realistic change of course away from the planet whose gravity well his ship was caught in. There was nothing he could do to avoid crashing into that world, but he hoped that what remained of his maneuverability capability would allow him to at least pick where he would go splat.
He would have chuckled at the thought if it wasn't all he had to worry about. His gaze lingered on a live feed of the other ship, the one that had so wrecked his ship. It was breaking apart ahead of his ship, nearly as damaged by him as his ship by it. He tore his gaze away from the feed, forcing himself back to thinking of a solution to this mess. He missed the alien ship's last moments as what remained of it blew apart. If he could only pick where he went splat, he'd better pick a good spot. Imagery of the surface was getting better all the time, likely because the birdseye view he had kept getting closer and closer. There was a likely spot. That one looked good too. Looks like the planet is inhabited. That's a nasty piece of land we're heading toward. So many mountains, so much volcanic activity. Between those cities, right there, by a river. That looks good.
The Commodore picked his spot in his increasingly limited area of influence and sent the data to tactical. He could only hope now.
It was a relatively quiet night on middle earth, an almost ordinary one in the otherwise magical world. The quiet, peaceful night was as first a few stars lit up the sky. Man and elf, dwarf and halfling, orcs, goblins and trolls and many others, alerted, watched as a significantly larger one light up the sky, drawing ever larger, ever closer, until it fell out of the sky, and for many leagues, the lands shook as a loud eruption sounded, rousing the men of Gondor, and the host of Mordor, for something rather large just fell from the sky somewhere between their holdings. It both terrified them, and set a sense of urgency in them. Something new is here.
Darius followed the sergeant along the corridor. He was a tall man at just over six foot tall with broad shoulders, brown hair, and bright blue eyes. He wore full body armor and had his helmet under one arm as he tagged along. "It's just around the bend here, Cap. We're fortunate it's right here, all things considered. Nasty bump we took." Miles, the Sergeant, said as they neared the end of the corridor. Around the bend, the straight tunnel it would have been veered off, a chunk of it rent open, letting in the light of a foreign world in, and more importantly, the air. Fortunately, all readings indicated it was breathable with a few odd caveats, though nothing major. Darius looked out of the hole, nearly level with the ground outside. There was a forest out there, providing shade, and a light breeze shifted the trees. He stood there for a moment, just taking it all in, and let his mind relax very slightly, knowing it could be a very long time until he could relax at all. He had a few thousand survivors as his responsibility, and they were all military, mostly a mix of navy and marine, with a sprinkle of army types thrown in, and he was the highest ranking survivor. Had the bridge not taken such a beating before, it might have survived the 'bump' as Miles put it, but unfortunately, by the time anyone had gotten to where the bridge should be, it was abundantly clear that the navy had lost their commanding officers, and the auxiliary bridge, which did survive, had been staffed by junior, if experienced, staff. "Sir, leading technician says he's got one of the doors open, on the river side." Darius nodded his thanks to Miles and slipped his helm on, settling it where the magnetic seals closed with a hiss, securing the helm to the neck of his body armor.
It was a brief moment of patching into the right systems before he spoke "Guns, get a party together and get them out there on a couple Rovers. There's inhabitants on the surface and someone's to come calling. We're to treat this as a first contact scenario, but let's not get too tight with protocal. We can't afford to lose people because we're not willing to fight back, and until we can confirm one way or another, we're to assume syndicate survivors made it to the surface as well." He nodded as he got an affirmative from Gunnery, "Guns" Sergeant Markoff.
Darius stepped into the air and dropped to the solid ground, joined by Sergeant Miles and the squad that had setup a perimeter around the wound in the ship. He had to get the survivors out and had to get them to a more defensible position. Hopefully they could break whatever language barriers there were with the natives and hopefully they were amenable to having a few thousand heavily armed neighbors who happened to be quite adept in their use. Yeah, hopefully.