Ship IX Crash Site A
March, 2957
Dawn
Ship IX had left the dockyards of Luna with a crew of 103,921 personnel, a vast majority of those in the Imperial Army on their way to the frontier to fight the vicious T'Ghal. It had been assumed by those who built her that she was just as space-worthy as the Eight Ships that had come before her, that she was a wonder of technology built in the darkest times of Mankind and that she would continue to serve admirably, able to ship massive amounts of personnel and supplies from the very center of the Empire to the borders of that Empire in a matter of moments, her FTL technology having been perfected. She was shaped like a massive disk, enabling her to disembark her gargantuan crew by designating the ship into several Holds.
They would not know that, just as they watched her Shift into Slipstream, that it would be the last time anyone ever saw Ship IX again.
Hold C had survived re-entry into atmosphere while the other Holds had vented and become death traps. Unfortunately, Hold C was not meant to land. She had come down like the proverbial brick, skipping like a stone several times before gouging a mile-long furrow into the ground before coming to a grinding halt as she smashed into a hill which was mostly made of granite. The G-Straps designed to keep the thousand souls of Hold C survive any possible G's exerted on them as they left the Slipstream and Shifted outside of Tartarus, the Imperial staging point for all military operations against the T'Ghal, were not designed to keep them alive in cases of crashing. Ship IX had been built to never enter atmosphere and had been built to survive cosmic dangers such as asteroids and radiation.
Those G-Straps failed, some snapping and flinging their occupants around the Hold to be slammed against other people or against the Bulkhead, their bodies turned to pulp. Some disappeared as the Hold fractured as it skipped across the surface of the planet, not having the time to scream. Likewise, some were brutally dismembered as pieces of the Bulkhead folded and snapped, removing arms, legs, and torsos in fountains of blood and gore.
By the time the Hold came to rest against the Hill, of the thousand souls aboard Hold C, very few were alive...