Mei was navigating through Tau Rubycon, and I was following her closely. Some corridors of the ship were blocked by debris, some were exposed to the outside environment -the atmosphere of the spaceport-, whereas some others had few signs of damage. The original interior design of the ship was screaming "Luxury! Richness! Comfort!". Except now, it was a surreal scene with walls, doors and various objects standing in places they should not - and probably even could not under normal circumstances. Some furniture were standing inside the walls, electrical wiring had entangled every object in existence and was shorting in places, creating bright arcs and a distinct buzzing sound.
Mei took me through such a hellscape and near the bridge of the passenger ship.
"Listen." she said, stopping me in front of the door to the bridge. "You need to announce the ship's current state to any passengers that might still be inside, and inform everyone that our shuttle can take a few people to safety."
"Sure."
"While you do that, I will-"
Our conversation was interrupted by a man's moaning from the bridge. I instantly opened the door and saw quite a disturbing scene. Two pilots of the vessel were in seats side by side. The one on the right was stuck between an instrumentation panel and the seat itself, and was apparently in extreme pain. The one on the left was... with the best possible description, his body was obliterated by the impact.
Two words escaped my mouth.
"Ismael... Leonardo..."
Mei also stood still in shock, for a few seconds before urging me to get back to work. We were interrupted a second time by Leonardo just then.
"Ship... I got... working... can not... back out."
He was using all of his effort to talk, screaming in agony in occassions.
"But... can go... insi- inside... un...block!"
"You mean we can take the ship into the actual habitation section, into the city to unblock the way?"
"Yes... but quick... on battery..."
"The ship is on battery power?" asked Mei, which Leonardo confirmed by nodding with difficulty.
"The clock is ticking then." I said. "Going into the atmosphere above a celestial city... that has never been done, not with a ship of this size. But... if we want the other incoming rescue ships to have a chance, we need to unblock the spaceport entrance. If Leonardo is right, we have a solution already, we just need to implement it."
"If we do that, this ship will fail and fall down over the city." Mei said.
"We just need to keep the ship on the center axis of the cylinder, then the artificial gravity by coriolis force will have no effect on the ship. We can hold it there with little power."
"Lost of people have gathered around the debris site, and now we were about to announce our evacuation plan." Mei said in worry. "How do we move a ship this large safely when it's encircled by masses of hundreds, if not thousands? We might end up crushing people by accident or blasting them with engine exhaust."
"I guess they will have to take the hint once the ship comes back to life." I said. "We might have 5 hours of power, but then, we might also have 10 minutes. I wouldn't trust bridge instrumentation anymore."
"We had sent the doctor to explain to people the evacuation plan." said Mei.
"Let's hope he made it out of the ship by now, otherwise he will be coming with us."
At this point, Leonardo's screams cut the conversation again for a while. However, Mei and I were in a silent agreement that helping him out of the seat was a secondary concern right now.
"Lodos is still docked to the starboard port of Tau Rubycon." Mei argued this time. "We will damage our shuttle and perhaps render it inoperative."
"I would rather let incoming larger ships handle the evacuation than our little shuttle." I argued back. "The shuttle is not important right now."
"Alright, but how will we make it out of the hell zone then!?" she asked.
"Look." I said. "We are just a handful of people in this ship. We will save thousands by doing this."
Mei looked into my eyes, not saying anything.
"Mei, we always find a way. You know it."
"What if, this time we don't?" she asked. "Is that it then? Do we just... die?"
"You can always think of death when we are actually dying." I said. "We are stalling the plan, let's get to work!"
Leonardo, who had given up on being helped out of his seat, pointed us towards the relevant controls that were still operational on the bridge.
"Mei, you are a ship navigator. You take the flight controls, I can handle keeping the systems alive."
"Yes... yes, of course." said Mei.
I re-started the propulsion systems of Tau Rubycon, which took about half a minute. After that I gave Mei the signal to start maneuvering the ship. The large craft shook the spaceport and started blasting tiny pieces of debris everywhere. We did not have any camera views, but at this point, people should've been screaming and running in pretty much every direction.
Mei gently dragged the ship along the spaceport's entrance frame, leaving black marks and ruining the paintjob on the walls.
"The door into the habitation segment is not open." Mei said. "But the external door is stuck open. If we were to breach through both doors, the city would lose air into the vacuum and decompress."
"Valid concern, but the city is already decompressing through a large hole on the side of the celestial." I said. "The leak we create would be incomparable."
"Well, go ahead then."
Using Tau Rubycon's newly-earned authority over the celestial -due to the transponder tag it was given earlier by the celestial command crew- I commanded the internal spaceport door to open. This would allow us to leave the spaceport into the city rather than out to the vacuum of space; something that rarely ever happened in history. An air jet was created as the atmosphere of the city began leaking into space, since both the external and internal doors were open. Luckily for us, a city for 150k people was too big to decompress and lose pressure within minutes.
Mei carefully navigated us into the city, and I commanded the internal door to close, to stop the leak. Only about ten seconds into our journey above the city, environmental alarms of Tau Rubycon started wailing.
"External temperature reads 34 degrees celcius." I said. "If it is this hot high up here, it is probably about 40 degrees or more on the surface."
The regular habitation temperature of celestials were usually kept around 20 degrees celcius, so it was apparent that the fire was going on for quite a while.
"Hell." said Mei. "Look ahead."
Large portions of the city inside the celestial was engulfed in flames, as well as the forest on the outskirts. Some of the forest had already ran out of flammable material and were just patches of black soil and ash by now. Looking at the pattern of the fires from high above, it was clear where the fire had initially started. Interestingly, the origin of the fire seemed to have no particular importance to the functioning of the celestial, so there was a good chance that it was just a small forest fire that got out of control.
The flames were bending towards the hole on the side of the celestial due to the air flow. Fortunately, it was likely not strong enough to suck people out of the streets into outer space, unless, of course, one happened to be very close to it.
"What's the status of the shuttle?" Mei asked. I checked the internal sensors, but the light on the starboard aft docking port was not lit anymore.
"No more shuttle, it's gone." I said. "You know we shouldn't have named it Lodos in the first place."