>>6301744Your thoughts were soon interrupted by the internal lights of the APC going red, and you instinctively found a handlebar to hold onto, and lost your IHO stick. Shit. Before you could react, the pilot shouted into the comms:
“BRACE!”
The pilot performed a rolling manoeuvre, spinning the APC to dive straight towards the wall. As the central pillar that had been to your right quickly took its place above and behind you, the rest of the fleet reacted and executed the same move. The artificial gravity within the hovercraft kept your feet in one place but was weak enough for you to feel the momentum of the vehicle to rapidly change and your smoke to fall to the back of the cart. Fuck. Your internal swearing didn’t last long, as the sensors indicated a large object, with what seemed to be its own gravitational field, falling towards your previous location terrifyingly fast.
Quickly moving hundreds of meters away, your pilot had already removed you from the main collision course with the falling object but unfortunately the warped gravity surrounding it had already been fighting against your own grav plates. As the object came into view in the rear cameras, you realised that it had been one of the skyscrapers growing out of the ceiling, now detached and in a freefall. The field surrounding it was dragging numerous smaller panels and debris with it to who knows where, and your engine was giving the fight of its life to escape and not sink with the detached building.
The APC shook violently. The reactor working its best was still not enough to escape the full field. You were being dragged a few kilometres, but at least you were far enough away from any of the other debris that had been falling. After one last struggle take you to the depths, the falling building’s field finally failed in keeping you in its grasp. You rapidly sped towards the wall, not being able to slow down at first due to calibration errors, Lusil managed to pull the APC up from the wall after creating some sparks between it and the frontal grav plates.
The rest of the fleet followed suit, more or less following the same route. The skyscraper now above you were still falling down, completely blocking out the original route to the Fornax deposit. After a brief period of damage reports and roll calls, you were happy to hear that besides some tankers who hit their head, the condition of both the vehicles and the personnel were nominal.
