The Nextworld Invasion and the Death of Magic - 16. Chapter 16 - The Crash

Nine minutes later, Dorjin boarded the eel shuttle. The thing was like a huge slimy snake with an interior large enough for soldiers to stand upright. There was a cockpit and control station where the oversized animal’s head should have been.

“About bleeding time!” the pilot shouted at Dorjin as she entered. “Stow your gear and strap in.” He did not wait for her and activated the engines.

The ship lurched forward, and Dorjin wobbled on her feet but managed not to fall. She took her seat and let the pilot do his job.

“This is eel shuttle seventeen,” he stated into the ship’s microphone. “Disengage the umbilical tube.” There was a pop from the back of the craft. “We’re loose.” He hit several buttons. “Formation, this is eel shuttle seventeen. We will be moving into position in ninety seconds.”

The long, slender craft slithered through the atmosphere over Nextworld, and the pilot did not hear Dorjin unclasp her seat’s harness, nor did he realize she had crept up behind him.

“Autopilot engaged.”

They were the last words he spoke. Dorjin grabbed his face from around one side of the chair, smothering his mouth as she thrust a dagger into his throat. She yanked the wicked blade from his neck and snarled, “What’s one more kill, if it gets me out of being part of the genocide of Earth?”

The pilot flailed and clawed at Dorjin with his fingers becoming weaker by the second as his blood pulsed from the vicious wound, and a moment later, he slumped forward. Dorjin released the seat’s harness, shoved the man’s corpse to the floor, and she replaced him. She wiped the blood from her hands onto the dead man’s shirt.

The eel shuttle drifted into formation. Multiple ships were preparing to follow a massive, translucent, biomechanical command vessel when it opened the barrier between Nextworld and Earth. Through the pale skin of the living ship, soldiers were visible, moving around inside. The fleshy exterior of the enormous frigate was covered in quills like a porcupine, and from a distance, they made the huge organic machine look hairy.

None of the Humans’ sky-ships were aerodynamic; it was not wings that provided them with their ability to fly. They were instead powered by magic, but it was twisted, grotesque, dark, Human magic.

The eel shuttle Dorjin was in did not possess a stick or a wheel, and she thrust her hands into its controls. Two containment units were filled with a warm, viscous gel that was directly connected to the living brain of the vehicle. There were no buttons, dials, or levers in the controls, and all Dorjin needed to do to pilot the ship was adjust the positioning of her fingers in the thick slime.

A flash in front of the spiny command ship alerted the soldiers in the other attack vessels that the portal to Earth was opening. Massive dark spots appeared on the sky that coalesced, and the convoy began to pass through the barrier.

Dorjin followed, but as soon as her shuttle was in the skies above Earth, she began to descend through the atmosphere.

“Eel shuttle seventeen,” an angry voice crackled over her ship’s speakers, “don’t break formation!”

Dorjin replied in the gruffest, most manly impersonation of the dead pilot she could muster. “This is eel shuttle seventeen,” she grunted. “I’m experiencing a malfunction with my mapping system. I’ll drop back and get it sorted before regrouping.”

“Hurry up!” the voice on the other end snapped, and Dorjin watched the shuttle that had been behind hers as it shifted up through the formation into her ship’s position.

The command vessel opened fire on the citizens of Earth, and Dorjin knew this was her chance!

She yanked her hands from the slimy controls, which left no residue on her fingers, and she disengaged her shuttle’s systems and its tracking beacon. She also deactivated the machine-animal’s life support. Her ship was suddenly undetectable by all Human tracking systems except visual, but the other sky-ships were now raining death upon the inhabitants of yet another Earth city, and none of them noticed that one of their number had disappeared.

Dorjin’s falling ship was silent and dark. She could only hear the muffled rushing of air outside the vessel, and her heart pounding frantically in her chest as she watched the ground getting closer. She knew the eel shuttle needed to get just near enough that the abundant life on Earth would camouflage its signal. That always happened when sky-ships got too close to the forests of Earth; they became very difficult to track from Nextworld. Dorjin worried that if she reactivated her eel shuttle’s systems too soon, she would be found.

“One more second,” she whispered, “okay, now!” and she brought her ship’s power back online. She did not want to fall any farther, and she hoped she was close enough to the ground, but the eel shuttle’s magical engines sputtered.

Despite an upward pull that slowed the descent, the thing continued to fall.

“Dammit!” Dorjin grunted, and she thrust her hands back into the gel that controlled the brain of the living shuttle. She tried to force it up, but she also only managed to decrease the speed of the fall slightly.

The eel shuttle hit the canopy of the forest with a horrible shattering and splintering of branches. They pummeled and rattled the ship as it crashed down toward the Earth, and it destroyed multiple ancient trees in the process. Dorjin was thrown from the pilot’s chair, and her head slammed against the floor. She was swallowed in unconsciousness, and the eel shuttle came to rest in the forest.

Back on Nextworld, by the time the officers recognized that one of the ships in the attack was no longer appearing on their scanners, it was already too late. The other eel shuttles and the translucent command ship were involved in the annihilation, and they could not be sent to hunt for the lone lost ship, now invisible against the backdrop of life in the forest of Earth.

It was night when Dorjin awoke. Dried blood was streaked across her forehead, and her hair was matted, but she was not actively bleeding. She groaned, sat up, and gingerly brought a hand to her injury. She then patted herself down and found that she had a number of sore spots, but nothing major to worry about. Dorjin located and activated a flashlight, and she grabbed her pack. It was still where she stowed it, and after finding her dagger, she made her way to the exit.

The fleshy external sphincdoor of the eel shuttle would not disengage, and Dorjin had to force the muscular exit to release. She managed to get it partway open, and she slipped through. The living portions of the vehicle had died, and its remains were already beginning to stink.

Dorjin’s head was spinning, and she grabbed her compass out of her pack and slung her bag’s strap over her shoulder as she staggered away from the wreckage.

The sky was moonless, and the forest was dark; it was noisy. Animals and insects were creating a cacophony that was compounded in Dorjin’s ears by the sound of warfare in the distance. She had not had time to come up with a proper plan before boarding the eel shuttle, and she did not know where she was going. The only thing Dorjin did before leaving her quarters on the whale-blimp was to swap out a lot of her battle gear for things she would need to help her survive in the wilderness.

Her bag was supposed to contain a map of Nextworld, but she had replaced it with a map of Earth. She was supposed to have garrot wire, flasks of poisonous metal, even a collapsible crossbow, all of which she had exchanged for things she knew she would need. She packed an advanced first aid kit, multiple extra packets of rations, a small spade, water purifiers, and a micro sleeping bag that could be folded down to fit in the palm of her hand and was protective against very low temperatures if it became cold during the night. She was grateful that the air was warm.

Dorjin had known she was going to kill the pilot before she boarded the shuttle. She planned on flying it through the portal when the command ship began the attack. She had also intended on ditching the eel ship once she was on Earth, but the crash was not part of her plan, and she had no idea where she was supposed to go now that she was here and vehicleless.

Dorjin was struggling through the dense underbrush, making her way away from the onslaught she could hear in the distance, and she leaned against a tree. Sharp pain suddenly rang out through her finger, and she yanked back her hand.

A fairy had bitten a tiny chunk of flesh out of her pinky.

“You foul beast!” She jabbed at the carnivorous little creature with her dagger, but it flitted backward in the air away from her and shot off into the trees.

With no further sign of it, Dorjin focused on her wound. She opened the first aid kit, and she groaned as she applied a little ointment. “Monster,” she grumbled, wrapping her finger in a gauze bandage. “Hope you weren’t carrying any diseases.”

There were only two more hours of darkness before the dawn began to break, and they passed uneventfully as Dorjin trudged through the forest. She did not know where she was. She did not remember the Earthian name for the city Kalthrin had attacked the day before, but she was heading away from the slaughter.