A biting wind snapped at the young lad’s face as he tore across Andoria’s arctic tundra. Snow violently crunched beneath his feet. Despite a growing tightness he felt in his chest, in his burning lungs, he had to keep going; he had to keep running. Even on such a clear night, the wind was harsh, blistering the youngster’s cheeks while his antennae twitched nervously beneath his feathered hood.

A thunderous roar split the heavens, causing the engineer to skid to a halt, snow piling at his feet on the icy ground. Gazing at the sky above, he watched in awe as the shooting star streaked through the atmosphere above him. Only it wasn’t a shooting star. No, this fireball was something else, something far more menacing. Screeching toward the planet’s surface at incredible speed, the Vaadwaur destroyer spun helplessly on its final descent, engulfed in ferocious flames as it smashed into the ground, exploding into the icy plate just a few hundred meters away. The shockwave reverberated through the ice shelf and knocked him from his feet, collapsing into the snow with his blue hands the only means of support for his fragile frame.

Left reeling from the sudden nature of the enemy’s final appearance, Sh’kek glared at the star-filled sky above. That’s when he saw it for the first time.

At first, he wondered whether his eyes betrayed him. He’d heard of the epic battle raging in the heavens, but now was the first time he saw it, even if he struggled to believe it. Explosions lit up the night sky as Starfleet vessels, fractured and scorched from their heroic defence of the system, traded blows with their Vaadwaur opponents. At the heart of the offensive, the battle-scarred Galaxy-class behemoth struggled against the Vaadwaur assault. Where her shields had failed and refused to flicker on impact, explosions lit up her ageing hull. She was surrounded and outgunned, haemorrhaging plasma whilst dishing out whatever hammer blows she could wield. Impossibly outnumbered, but impressively holding her ground, she refused to retreat.

“They’re still fighting…” he whispered, using his hands to push himself to a vertical base. Brushing snowflakes off the front of his jacket, the young man locked eyes on the burning wreck and sprinted forth once again.

Smoke stung the deep-set eyes of the hulking Xelliat as he barrelled along deck six, trying his best to shield himself from the increasing amounts of smoke filling the corridor. With environmental systems offline, there was no way to filter the noxious gas for now, so he had to brave it in his search for the cargo bay at the end of the hall. It was the presence of several other figures trying to open the door that finally gave him a way out of the cloud that threatened to engulf him and his lungs.

Straining against the metallic seal, three younger officers were trying their hardest to access the large storage bay in an attempt to free those personnel who had become trapped. But with many systems down across the deck, even the manual release mechanism seemed fried, hence the science chief’s timely arrival. His incredible strength made him the obvious choice to attempt to free the captives.

Brushing his colleagues aside, the brute latched on to the manual release levers and used all the upper body strength he could muster to pull the doors apart. It wasn’t easy, even for him, and his colleagues helped pry the doors apart until they had a gap large enough for the toxic clouds to add to the poor air quality in the corridor. Together, the three officers powered through, coughing horrendously as they made contact with several individuals huddled for safety.

Onsas dragged the group to their feet, pushing them towards the doors that had been propped open by a large piece of debris. Whilst others evacuated, he looked around the bay to assess where the damage had come from and could see a plasma manifold that had ruptured.

“Commander,” a rather green-looking Ensign called into the bay, “it’s time to go!”

“Get them out of here!” he bellowed over the hissing of gases, waving the waiting youngster away before smothering his mouth and nose to limit the consumption of gas.

A massive eruption mere seconds later ripped a shuttle craft-sized opening in the hull plating and threw the hulking Xelliat’s lifeless body against several cargo containers. The sudden pressure differential caused the bay doors to snap shut with such force that they crushed the debris that had once propped them open. Before his body even hit the floor, external force fields failed, and the pressures of space dragged his lifeless body into the heavens.

At first, the bridge crew failed to recognise the hull buckling on deck six beyond the trembling plates beneath their feet. Giarvar strained to hear a voice over the din, spinning in his chair to make eye contact with the tactical officer.

“Hull breaches on decks six to eight, sections seven through eleven,” the Bolian tactical officer tried again, louder this time, drawing the attention of others. Others who knew instantly what his words meant. Sadness gripped the bridge as the Bolian reported the failure of the emergency force fields and the further loss of life across the ship.

Devastated faces struggled to get back to work in the wake of their loss, but a sudden barrage on the port nacelle caused a chain reaction of explosions and shockwaves across the ship. Even inertial dampeners couldn’t hide the sudden shift in the ship’s trajectory, the main viewscreen showing the beautiful world of Andoria shifting into view and growing steadily larger.

“Propulsion systems offline,” Mitchell barked from the CONN.

“Rerouting systems to give you some thruster control,” T’Kir confirmed from Ops, but an eruption of sparks and console debris sent the Vulcan sprawling from his chair.

Giarvar surged forward to render assistance, but once he turned his grey-haired colleague over, the shard of metal protruding from his cranium made it clear that any attempt to resuscitate him would be futile. Another devastating loss, and across the ship, more losses became accounted for, and more would be lost by the time the battle was over.

“We’re going down,” Henry barked to anyone listening. “I can’t get any meaningful propulsion power. We’re going down, and we’re going down hard.”

Once back on his feet, Giarvar looked at Noli for inspiration, but the look on her face suggested that she had no suggestions either. Reaching for the commpanel on his chair, the Captain had one last hope.

“Computer,” he called out, drawing a gaze from the Bajoran. “Initiate saucer separation. T-minus five minutes and counting. Authorisation Kauhn, Beta-Four-Nine.”

Across the bridge, every eye not focused on keeping the ship somewhat afloat focused on the Trill at the heart of the command centre. Had they heard him correctly? Was this the last resort?

“Giarvar…” Noli whispered, stepping up to the Captain, her eyes trained on his war-torn face. She could see he was out of ideas, but an evacuation? Her concerns were soon proven to be unfounded.

“Saucer separation offline,” the computer responded, prompting an angry first smashing into the backrest of his chair. “Ejection systems fused.”

Engineering was in utter chaos when the call for saucer separation was intercepted, drawing Prida from her hunched position near the warp core to the pool table in the entrance way. There, she joined her colleagues. There wasn’t so much as a smile between the group of them, simply the realisation that the end was nigh. They had tried everything they could to try and return some form of propulsion power to the ship, to keep the crew in the fight, but this was just one bridge too far.

Or was it?

Prida, truly one of Starfleet’s famed miracle workers, had one final ace up her sleeve, and if she was ever going to play it, it had to be now. Her fingers danced across the pool table, slowly drawing in her colleagues as they started to make sense of her actions. It was ingenious, if it worked.

“Engineering to bridge,” she called out after tapping her commbadge.

“Go ahead, Commander,” came the voice of the frazzled commanding officer.

Prida spent the next few minutes explaining the intricacies of her plan. She would eject the warp core at the exact moment the Columbia entered the upper atmosphere, allowing some extra inertia for Henry to guide the ship onto a trajectory that would bring the ship in at an angle that would give her the best chances of survival. The absence of the core would mean any explosion would be less devastating to the planet or its people. Most of her crew would have the necessary time to evacuate, and for those who couldn’t, orders would be distributed to have them move as centrally as possible in the saucer section so that any impacts would affect them as minimally as possible. Naturally, she couldn’t guarantee everyone would survive, but a hell of a lot more would survive than if they had stayed helpless in orbit.

A final plunge into Andoria’s upper atmosphere, planned to (im)perfection and clearly only a last resort, was somehow the only way to keep the ship and crew safe from the raging battle above.

With the preparations for the controlled descent rapidly progressing, Giarvar settled into the command chair one final time. As the boatswain’s whistle rang out, he took a deep breath. He’d never imagined giving the order to evacuate a ship under his command, even with everything they’d been through in the past, but as the order to abandon ship left his lips, he felt a wave of relief encompass him. No matter what happened to him, his crewmates would live to tell their story.

All but essential personnel left the bridge; Linn had left with Vash to ensure as many of their personnel as possible had been evacuated. Nunez was gone. T’Kir’s body had been removed. All that remained were Giarvar, Henry at the Conn, and Noli, back where her adventure with this family had begun all those years ago. Long before Linn had transferred from Operations or her brother Or’uil had passed from traumas sustained in the service of the department, tactical had been her station, where she had cut her teeth and proven herself to be the leader she had become in the intervening months between then and now.

“We’re approaching the upper atmosphere,” Henry declared, hands gripping the sides of the console, the station vibrating furiously as the ship picked up speed and inertial dampeners failed.

“Warp core ejection in three… two… one…”

Prida’s voice, calm and composed as always, was bliss to Kauhn’s ears. To know someone believed in this folly was all that he needed to metaphorically grasp on to whilst the decompression from the core’s sudden ejection and lack of stabilising systems threatened to upend the entire ship. If it wasn’t for the quick thinking of Flyboy and the precise calculations of Prida and her team, the ship would have no doubt been destroyed, but now they had a fighting chance.

“Prida, time to go!” the Captain called into the comm, happy for the engineer to leave her post one final time. When there was no response forthcoming, his brows furrowed, and he glared across at Noli.

“Kauhn to Engineering. Prida respond…”

“Keep moving, keep moving!”

With a lifeless arm draped across her shoulder, Akaria Okan hurled commands at those rushing ahead of her towards the shuttlebay. Bloodied and limping, the Risian and her Orion counterpart Nikti had been the last to leave sickbay, carrying an unconscious colleague towards the evacuation shuttle that Linn had busily prepared for them. Even with the deck lurching beneath them, sparks raining from buckled conduits overhead and the fire suppression system hissing the last dregs of water in vain, they couldn’t give up hope. It was her responsibility to get the injured to safety, and as they made it through the bay doors, the shuttle ahead of them was their only hope. All others had evacuated, full to the brim with as many members of the crew as they could hold; now it was the medical team’s turn.

Together, with one final, agonising push, Akaria and her able assistant surged towards the shuttle and clambered up the ramp at the aft of the craft. Once aboard, Akaria left her patient in the capable hands of her deputy and a medical technician and made for the cockpit of the Type-11 shuttle. In stark contrast to the sombre mood backstage, the cockpit was loud and confusing. Linn and Ashrin Th’killen were conducting a rather frantic-looking pre-flight sequence in an attempt to get the shuttle off the ground, only the launch was going far from as planned. Consoles flickered furiously as hull integrity warnings flashed red across the forward display. But that was the least of their concerns, and as she slid into the chair behind the Bolian pilot, she could see the main source of his frustration; somehow, between the launch of the last craft and now, the shuttlebay doors had begun to close and had jammed partly open, certainly not open enough for the largest of the auxiliary craft to pass through.

“Come on, Lieutenant,” she tried to spur him on, “I had a great seat back there, but you told me to come down here with you. You’re not going to make me regret this, are you?” she smiled, trying to ease the man’s tensions and help him to think clearer.

“What if we reroute everything we have to the shields and smash through?” Nikti suggested, joining the three officers in the cockpit just in time to hear of their dilemma.

“Shields wouldn’t hold,” Linn shook his head, “they have a fraction of Columbia’s power.”

“Then let’s just blast our way out…”

Turning in their respective chairs, the three senior officers looked at the Andorian Ensign sitting in the co-pilot’s seat with a mixture of expressions. Once he realised they were looking at him, Ashrin turned and shrugged. “The ship is about to crash; damage to the bay doors will be the least of Prida’s concerns.”

Akaria glared at the young man, then at Nikti, and finally at Linn. “Kid has a point…”

“Fuck it,” Linn spun back in his chair and began dancing his fingers furiously across the controls. “Ashrin, stand by phasers. I’ll take the CONN. When I give you the nod, target the hinge plates on either side. The rest of the doors should buckle and fall away…”

Linn had finished a mere second before the shuttle rocked violently, apparently sliding on the deck plating as Columbia’s trajectory took a sudden shift. A massive explosion erupted behind them as the entire bulkhead at the back of the bay collapsed, threatening to cave the entire room in.

When delicate taps seemed useless, the Bolian smashed his fist into the display, causing the ship to gather sudden upward momentum, lifting them from the decking at last. But as the ship they once called home shifted position around them again, he was finding it hard to keep the shuttle angled in the direction Ashrin needed. Luckily, Linn had taught the young Andorian well. All he needed was one little glimmer of an opening, and he hammered the fire control. Two perfectly timed and angled beams of phased plasma energy erupted from the phaser arrays on the side of the craft and destroyed the shuttlebay doors as predicted.

Whilst Nikti leant forward and appreciatively gripped the young man’s shoulders in thanks, Linn was finally able to propel the ship into the early morning clouds above Andoria. Punching the throttle, the shuttle sped into the open air and away from the Galaxy, once so mighty but now engulfed in flames and smoke streaming from every opening across her battered hull. Watching with wide eyes and mouths agape, the shuttle command crew sat in silence.

High above the glacial plains of Andoria, from their vantage point just a small distance away from the free-falling starship, the team watched in horror as Columbia smashed into the frozen wasteland, carving a deep gouge in the tundra that even the worst search and rescue teams would be unable to miss. But with her momentum failing to slow as predicted, her port nacelle ripped clear of its pylon and caused the massive saucer to shift, the primary hull striking the edge of the arctic shelf. Before their very eyes, the ship plunged, bow-first, into the icy depths of Andoria’s largest ocean, causing a massive tidal surge in all directions.

And then, almost as quickly as it had started, all fell silent and still. Tears were numerous and in free fall as they observed the behemoth they once called home somehow stay afloat long enough for them to say their goodbyes, before a delayed roar pierced the cabin as ice and fire swirled together, engulfing the craft and dragging her, finally, to her resting place.