Fragment

{A bit of something that fits neither here nor there}

Alarms shrieked at deafening volumes, and the cockpit was periodically bathed in red light. For the first time, Tania wished her droid had come with her, just so she could have someone to yell to. She didn’t dare take her attention off the controls even long enough to silence the alarms.

“An easy run,” she grumbled to herself. “Phah!”

The ship that the New Republic had loaned her for the mission shuddered again as it absorbed yet another round of laser fire. Tania shunted the last available energy to the rear shields and struggled to keep the ship on course. There were four squints close on her tail, a Victory-class Star Destroyer hanging a little farther back, and the uninhabited planet was filling her viewport a lot faster than Tania would have preferred.

The ship jerked hard, tossing Tania sideways like a doll and smashing her forehead against the corner of the weapons panel. She sat up, shaking her head to clear her vision, making blood spatter the viewport. The ship was no longer responding to Tania’s commands. A concussion missile had broadsided the starboard flank. Tania’s stomach knotted in fear as she made one last futile effort to control the ship, then abandoned the cockpit.

Trying to keep her balance was no easy task as she made her way through the corridors to the aft of the ship. At her current rate of descent, she calculated that she had just under three minutes before her ship plowed into the ground. Tania intended to make good use of that time.

Tucked in a corner was a lever that, when pulled, would release a beacon that would transmit a distress signal back to the New Republic. To her pursuers, it would only look as if a portion of her hull had sheared off. She pulled it, knowing that help could not come in time. Then she turned her attention to the few datacards that held her mission parameters and objectives. These she crushed beneath the heel of her boot and kicked the pieces to scatter them, ensuring they would never be read. Finally, she took her ID chit from her wallet and snapped it. The New Republic would draw the correct conclusion from the distress signal, and she didn’t want to let the Imps know any more than they did.

Proximity alarms wailed throughout the ship as the surface of the planet loomed closer. Tania glanced out a viewport and felt sick at the sight of the ground rushing towards her, unchecked. A squint bobbed into view, then vanished. Tania slid down the wall to the ground, drawing her knees to her chin, and clasped her hands behind her head. She leaned forward and braced herself for the impact.

When the ship hit planetside, the sound of crumpling metal was deafening. Tania was thrown across the small room and slammed into a wall. She sank to the ground, motionless, as the ship tilted, then slowly keeled over on its side.

* * *

“Sir, no one’s coming out of that.” The young flight officer sounded skeptical and a little sympathetic.

What had once been a spaceship was now a mangled mass of twisted bulkhead. The cockpit had been flattened to a fraction of its normal width between the body of the ship and the unforgiving ground, and flames were licking around the engines. It was a miracle that it hadn’t exploded. The NR rescue team had responded to the distress signal as swiftly as they could, but it was painfully obvious that they were too late.

The captain of the team set his jaw. “She was doing us a favor, flight officer. We’re not leaving without her.”

Inexperience reared its head as the young man said, “But, sir, there’s no way she could have survived that crash. We’re wasting time.”

“We’re taking her with us, soldier.” The captain’s face was grim, and his voice even more so. “She deserves a proper burial.”

Startled, the flight officer saluted. “Yes, sir!”

The captain watched as his team picked through the wreckage, extinguishing the flames, sifting the metal carefully. A cry went up when one of the soldiers found Tania’s body. The captain joined him, two medics with a stretcher close at his heels. Though he had mentally prepared himself, he still shuddered at the sight.

Tania lay sprawled over and under portions of the hull, her left arm dangling at a distinctly unnatural angle. Her face was covered with blood, and the skin on one side of her jaw hung in ribbons, exposing the mandible. Her legs were trapped beneath a sheet of metal, and two of the men were already attempting to shift it, under the senior medic’s instructions. Beneath the dirt and blood, her face was pale, and there were no signs of life. The captain bowed his head in respect.

The two men maneuvered the metal off her legs, and Tania’s eyes fluttered open and shut so briefly that the captain wondered if he had imagined it. Immediately, the area was a buzz of activity. The medics crouched beside her, taking her vital signs and calling for more equipment. Men came running from all areas of the crash sight, trying to offer assistance. The captain reached out and touched Tania’s forehead gently, then straightened, a sigh of relief slipping between his lips. He had borne his share of dead comrades back home, and, although she would have a long, hard road to complete recovery, it was good to know that he was escorting home a survivor once again.

Writer's Block

As I set my pen to paper, all that leaks through the ink is that my mind is as blank as the page, and that, if I have nothing to contribute, my energies would be better spent elsewhere. The descriptions do not lie flat, mere words on paper, because there are none there. I would rather write the basest prose, in an elementary style, humble and unassuming, than allow the blank pages to fill my notebook. But, alas, even the simplest thought refuses to find its way to my pen.

My hand hovers above the paper, posed to print a word, any word, and then my attention is caught by something in the environment—someone entering the room, someone speaking, a shifting shadow, anything at all—and my pen abandons words for crude, repetitive drawings of stickmen and geometric figures that build on each other and eventually conquer the page that I had strictly set apart for writing.

One by one, the pages fill up with senseless doodles, sometimes interspersed with fragments of sentences, words or pairs of words that caught my attention as someone else uttered them, but their life ends once they have been penned. They do not stay vibrant, do not attract other words to themselves, do not build into sentences and paragraphs and eventually become stories, short-lived or no. They die and are buried in stacks of notebooks, unmourned because they contributed nothing to the creative process. But perhaps they should be remembered a little more fondly, because those words that flop onto the paper, stagnant and lifeless, are the most inspired words that I have written in weeks.

Pathetic, really, when you think about it.