Fugitive shitpost

THE FUGITIVE I

Black smoke filled her lungs as she gasped for breath. She choked and hacked, fluid finally escaping her airways. Her head was muddled, her reflexes slowed. She tried to move forward but stopped in agony. There was a sharp pang of pain at her side, a pain that nearly washed away the rest that gnawed at her everywhere else. She desperately looked around her in shock, finding herself trapped inside a cage of metal and glass, sprinkled with sand.

She tried to move and was able to dislodge her legs from the bars that bound them below her. She pulled them out from the torn metal and kicked them through heavily cracked and dented windows above her. The skies above matched her torn clothes, dark and all-consuming. She scraped and clawed her way out of the mess that she’d found herself in.

The wreckage of the ship leaving a trail of worked ground for nearly as far as she could see. Oils and chemicals leaked and spurted out of vents and valves. They stained the cool colored sand that had welled up inside the cockpit of what she now realized must have been a ship of some sort. She was able to climb onto the triangular bow of her ship, taking care to step softly into the gravel and dust below her. When she hit the ground she collapsed, legs failing her.

She felt uneasy. Her breaths still shallow and terse, the air on the cold, sandy land she’d crashed upon. She tried to make out the markings on the side of her ship from one of her broken windows, angled away from her.

Traecurd Xi, it read. The words, for some reason, made her feel proud, if but for a moment. If only she knew why.

She stood and leaned on what was a wing of the small fighter ship, looking at her red-skinned reflection in it’s glossy sheen. She tried to recall her name, what she had be doing before she crashed, any sense of time, but she couldn’t bring it forward. Blank spots dotted her mind, bits and pieces of information interspersed with empty pockets, blacked out memories struck through by what she assumed was the crash. Her musings were interrupted from noises crackling through the hole she broke out from.

She listened closely, to a voice constrained by its conduit,
punctuated with static:

…Khhh…Khhh…ive…lost…point…tracking…can’t…are…wheel…you…cas…cadi—

The noise shorted out, ending with a little fizzle. She turned from her side to her back on the wing, and closed her eyes. It was going to be a rough night.

**