Then it broke.

A shrill, piercing alarm cut through the cabin, red lights flashing in frantic bursts against the walls. The console screen flickered, displaying a string of error codes Y/n had never seen before.

She was losing altitude.

Her gloved hand flew across the controls, fingers dancing over switches and buttons that had kept her alive for years. But the systems were failing one by one—life support flickering, navigation spinning, thrusters sputtering.

Through the small viewport, the planet loomed. Blue and green and impossibly vast. Earth. The place her parents had always talked about with a strange mix of longing and fear. The place she'd only ever seen in old photographs and outdated documentaries.

She'd made it.

But she wouldn't for much longer, unless—

Smoke. Thin, gray, curling from beneath the console.

The ship screamed again, a sound like tearing metal, and the entire cabin pitched violently to the left.

Y/n slammed against the harness, teeth rattling, vision swimming. The horizon tilted. The sky rushed past. Green blurred into brown, into gray, into—

Impact.

White. Then black. Then a ringing silence, punctuated by the hiss of steam and the crackle of dying electronics.

Somewhere far above, a satellite detected the crash site. And somewhere even farther, a very tired man in a very expensive suit looked at the alert on his screen and sighed deeply.