5 If there is a later.

3,000 AD

"Korede, I need more thrust!" Captain Altair shouted desperately into the ship's intercom while trying to stay upright. His ship was being torn to pieces and his crew would be taken along for the ride.

"She doesn't have anything left Captain!" His engineer hollered back. Korede was the best engineer around. Altair knew that if this generational talent couldn't get his ship under control, no one could. "The reactors are down and we've got massive structural failures in the hull."

Fear is a mind-killer.

His mentor, the legendary Admiral Nimitz had always told him this. Be an effective Captain you must calm your mind and look at every problem from a thousand miles above. Altair thought about this as he sensed his own tensions. He decided to do one of the breathing techniques he learned from his alien mother. Closing his eyes, he took three quick breaths that pushed him into a floating awareness of the world around him.

"Just give me something to hit," Fyodor said. He was the ship's munitions officer. He had a tendency to appear like he was smiling even when he wasn't due to an explosive accident in the past. To make others feel calm around him, he had developed an acerbic wit which he used to ridicule himself for the amusement of others. But now aboard the ironically named Lady Luck, there was nothing he found funny today. Altair gazed into the brute's eyes, observed the way his shoulders tensed and listened for the inflexions in his voice. Those invisible markers betrayed the crippling fear that had set upon him. He didn't want to die in a crash or be suspended in space.

Altair didn't dare look around the cockpit. He didn't have to. He could feel the icy stares like daggers being thrown from all around him. His ship was crippled and out of control and he was not well-liked among the crew of the Lady Luck. For one thing, he was a human Captain among the red-skinned pure-blooded Avari crewmen. Altair usually sailed with a mostly human crew from Earth, the third planet from a single yellow dwarf main star in the Sol system. The Avari, a technologically superior race with psychic abilities had found them but instead of enslaving them, sought to use them differently. Humans were skilled in trading, commerce, administration and industry which the Avari needed but found beneath them as they sought to expand their influence across the universe. Altair's ancestors ran planets, banks and factories, and ran them well. Before long, they earned the right to breed with the Avari and mingle their bloodlines.

One of the perks of having Avari blood coursing through your blood is that you gain an affinity for life energy that only an advanced race could possess. It would take millions of years for humans to develop those same psychic abilities. The Avari could channel this energy to react at superhuman speeds, speak to each other telepathically and get glimpses into the future in the form of intuition and dreams. These abilities combined with his families business acumen meant they were a new species of humans with a greater capacity to rule.

Altair looked up through the forward viewport. The large blue orb they were hurtling towards had disappeared and in its place were light, smoke and debris raining towards him. The last two he knew was coming from the guts of his own ship losing the battle against the alien atmosphere. Whatever planet this was and whatever beings inhabited it, they had the Lady Luck firmly in their grip now. The uncontrolled descent seemed to wake eons that left Altair too much time to contemplate his death. Whether through the fall, a subsequent explosion or at the hands of one of the murderous stares pointed at him.

The sad part is that his crew had clamoured to be part of this mission. The ship was fully loaded with Corvite, a valuable rare mineral used to build sensitive stealth technology, from Primus Antares and asked to deliver it to Dromund Na'as to be made into usable stealth modules past a Union patrol of enemy cruisers. Altair was one of the best Captains around and had a spotless record to prove it but even this desperate mission proved too much for even him to handle.

He was intercepted by three enemy ships that immediately opened fire in order to test his ship's defences. He tried to sacrifice a few fighter squadron fighters in order to buy time to jump to hyperspace but it was all for nought. He managed to destroy one of the ships but it crashed into him sending the Lady Luck helplessly into the clutches of a wormhole.

Altair had never experienced a wormhole before. The scientists thought that it was capable of sending whatever entered it through space and time but he couldn't be sure because no one who had ever entered one lived to tell the tale. The journey through the wormhole itself only took a fraction of a second but it tested the limits of the ship's alloy superstructure. Maybe if the Lady Luck wasn't damaged, they all might have survived the journey but Altair would never know. All he heard was a loud bang as the hull broke, the shield's failed and the antimatter torpedoes they carried exploded leaving a gaping hole in the hull where the armoury had been but somehow he was still alive.

The lady luck shuddered as Altair desperately tried to decelerate. Lev joined Altair in his fight to bring the ship under control. Lev was the oldest navigator in the Confederate fleet and well past his prime but he was as loyal as a dog and Altair needed a friend amidst a sea of serpents.

"Why aren't you dead?" Hugo the first officer and a sworn enemy of Altair said.

"We'll do this later," Altair replied.

"If there is a later," Hugo said snarkily.

Altair's thoughts flashed to his mentor, the venerable Admiral Nimitz. He had thought Altair everything he knew including the fact that having a good ship is good, having a good crew is better. Altair drank up all his window and then betrayed him to forge his own path elsewhere. Altair had asked to be assigned to another commission and his decision paid off. Within five years he had been given command of a newly christened Lady Luck.

A jolt to the hull of the ship brought Altair's attention back to the present. The ship had made it through the exosphere and all the way to the stratosphere without disintegrating but was gripped with violent shaking caused by friction with rain clouds. Knowing that this planet had water was somewhat comforting to Altair. Adding an oxygen-based atmosphere and fertile land to the mix would make him even less miserable.

"Everyone get down and hold on!" Altair screamed as the viewport slowly darkened.

The shipped crash into a large serpentine animal with horns, claws and leathery wings just like a dragon from childhood stories on earth.

"Captain, sensors indicate that the air has oxygen!" Lev shouted over the roar of the ship. That was welcome news. Altair thought to himself that they might just survive this ordeal.

"Land!" Hugo screamed. Everyone in the cockpit turned all at once. Altair could make out jagged peaks rising from the sea on one side and giving way to lush green plains on the other. The white-tipped peaks approached them at breakneck speed until they slammed into it with a loud bang but the Lady Luck was still on the move, clipping another rockface before spiralling downward toward a gravelly incline showering stones in all directions. The fall seemed to take forever as a barely conscious Altair saw his ship slide straight into the open mouth of an abyss before there was silence.

***