"New mission, Commodore," Coyott said.
Aster sighed, blinking sleep out of her eyes. The transmission had woken her from the first real sleep she had had in days. She had had to pull her ship off the unnamed, T0 planet in the barren Salinc system that her spaceship had been parked on to receive the transmission from her homeworld, the planet Fidele. "Really, Coyott? Can't it wait for a few more hours, until morning?"
"It is morning, on Fidele," Coyott said, unfazed by her cross tone.
"Not on this Spode forsaken planet," grumbled Aster. "Well, anyway, what is the mission?"
"We need you to go to the nearest planet of the Selznic Empire," Coyott said. "Convince them to establish a trade route with us."
"The Selznic Empire?!" Aster said, hardly believing that her empire could be so stupid. "Is this some kind of bizarre joke? Or have our superiors all lost their minds?" The Selznic were a race of radically religious creatures that held a powerful empire of many solar systems. They had declared war on the Starlens thirty planetary rotations ago.
"They offered to make peace with us. A trading route would be a good way to strengthen the possibility of an alliance," Coyott replied. "Believe me, I think it's a doomed mission too, but what can I do about it?"
"Okay, well then I guess I'll be off," Aster said, turning her ship toward the nearest Selznic Empire system. With a flip of a switch her ship jumped to lightspeed. In seconds she was orbiting the star.
Three planets were in the system. One was a barren T0 planet like the one she had landed on earlier. The second looked lush and green, and registered that it was currently inhabited by creatures that hadn't reached sentience yet. The third was the Selznic planet. It was even more beautiful than the second planet from space; covered in forests of light blue trees, and dotted with pink spice geysers. However, Aster wasn't particularly interested in the view, nor did she care. All she wanted was to get this over with. She hated negotiating with the Selznic, because they were zealots. Logic, or even money did nothing to motivate them. Neither did guns. They just spewed religious nonsense and threatened you because you didn't follow their religious practices.
Aster knew why her empire was sending her on this mission, however. It was punishment for sparking the war with the Selznic in the first place. She winced as she recalled that incident…
The Selznic were refusing to answer her transmission. Really, they specifically request peace talks and then ignore her attempts to talk? It was annoying. More than annoying, plain rude.
Fine, if that's the way you want it, Aster thought, and dove her ship down into the planet's gravity. The Selznic probably wanted to show there superiority by forcing her to come down and meet with them in person.
But as soon as she entered the planet's gravity she knew she was wrong. It wasn't pompousness that made the Selznic not reply to her transmissions. No, they were just luring her onto the planet. Into a trap.
Five Selznic ships were laying in wait for her. They were blue, camouflaging perfectly with the trees. They were twice the size of Aster's ship, equipped with heavy laser guns. The Starlen commodore rolled her ship out of the way of a laser blast from one of the ships, only to have her ship struck by a round from one of the others. The impact sent a violent shudder through her ship, smashing her against the instruments of her ship. In the minute it took her to regain control, her ship was hit by three more blasts. She wheeled the ship and sent a proton missile toward one of the ships. It spiraled toward the ground, exploding on impact. One of the remaining four ships rammed into her's. Warning lights flashed on her control panel. The ship was heavily damaged. It was shedding bolts and sheets of metal. Nothing critical had fallen off yet, but Aster doubted it could last much longer. One blast could finish her off.
Aster maneuvered her ship around, and dove straight at the ground, pulling up into a horizontal position seconds before the ship would have crashed. She skimmed the ground, under cover off the trees. The Salznic ships were confused by her tactics, but Aster knew it would only last momentarily. She shot up through the tree, straight toward the clouds and through the planet's gravity.
Her ship reentered space with a sickening grinding noise. She needed to get repairs very, very soon. The Selznic ships were just exiting the planet's gravity when she left the system, jumping to the closest system that had space travel. She didn't even pause to read the name of the empire.
A transmission from Mission Control was beeping gently at the corner of her screen, but she didn't have time to worry about it. Her ship was practically about to combust.
"Sorry Coyott," Aster muttered through gritted teeth as she guided the ship into the system she had jumped to. "But currently I'd rather live."
Aster managed to get her ship to the planet, and was just opening the transmission screen to bargain for repairs when her ship failed completely. It spiraled out of control, entering the planet's (which was called Relical) gravity roughly, and hurtling toward the ground. She was heading toward a city.
Gadzooks! Aster thought, trying to pull the ship around in attempt to crash somewhere else. The ship only moved marginally, but she could see that only a few feet away from where she was going to crash was a pen of strange looking animals. She shifted the ship's course so instead of crashing into one of the city's houses she would crash into the pen of animals. Better to kill animals then sentient creatures.
The ship was approaching the ground rapidly. Parts of it were flying off and burning up in the heat of entering the gravity.
This is going to hurt, Aster thought a second before the ship slammed into the ground.
She was right. It did hurt. A lot.
Through a haze of pain she saw some of the city's inhabitants approach the shattered ship. They didn't look happy, and were carrying guns.
Oh hell, was Aster's last thought before darkness clouded over her vision.