A hand tapped on my shoulder, and I raised one side of my headphones. The heavy noise of whirring machinery cutting into dense metal assaulted my ears with a grating nerve. “They need you up at Sector Five.” My colleague, who had been working with me and other teams to disassemble the mysterious ship that crash-landed hours ago, patted my shoulder. With a heavy sigh, I checked that I was still str...

‘This is clearly a loading/unloading zone mate. I don’t care how far you’ve travelled. This thing is bloody enormous you’ve blocked 5 bays! It’s going to take my lads all afternoon just to clear this snow to get the straps round it.

‘I mean, look at it. You shouldn’t even be bobbing around in that thing mate. Look at all those scratches. It’s a blimmin’ wreck! . You’ve clearly got no idea how to...

I cower behind a tree, staring as the red men destroy what had been my flying home for so many years. We had finally found the other species. So many centuries put towards finding this planet, only for them to welcome us with hatred and death.

Silent tears roll down my face. Events from last night replay constantly in my mind. My mentor, the pilot, shot as she walked down to greet the humans. Not...

I went inside the ship. It was huge and I mean huge. I’d never seen anything like it. There was halls and corridors and stairs. I went to the highest part of the ship and I saw the big window. There were dead people or animals or something everywhere, in the halls and the seats. I think they were aliens but I don’t think that anyone else would agree. They’d make up any excuse to not believe there ...

I stood in silence as soldiers voices shouted into my ear. I pulled out my earpiece and headed for the commander. He was breathing shallow. We were now 3,000 miles off course. I knelt down the the commander and started to see to his wouds. It looked like a head injury. I sighed and signaled for one of the soldiers to start and set up a base. We needed shelter and fast, the sun was just about to se...

_This is the second crash this week _I thought to myself as I shoveled up snow around the ship. This one was bigger than the last one, but they looked similar. As much as I would like to be amazed and intrigued by this scientific and historic marvel, I couldn’t shake the feeling of just wanting to change my cold, wet socks as I shoveled small pile after small pile of snow, digging up the alien spa...

Wonderful, just what I wanted to deal with today. Another wreckage of another spaceship piloted by another captain with more ego than common sense. Why would you even fly this close to the ground? Who are you trying to impress? What are you trying to prove? Do they even care that they just cost their superior’s superior’s superiors more money than I’ve ever seen? No of course not, they have anothe...

Landon and Correa slugged through the snow with their weapons ready. Carefully eyeing the ship. It was big, grey and looked like the mellinium falcon but it had crashed into the hillside when it slid, out of control during its landing….

So far no one had emerged from the ship.

A mike murmured to life: “Alpha, Team one here. I see nothing on the south side. Please report all positions.”

Landon ...

_Pan-Pan. Noun. An international radio distress signal, used to identify a state of urgency on board a craft._

**~~~**

You aren’t entirely sure how you woke up or even got here at the first place, yet you know three things. The first you know: it’s cold as hell here. Or, more accurately, cold as the Antarctic. You know you aren’t in Antarctica, or anywhere near that place, though. The temperatur...

Scrape. Crunch. Slam. Scrape. Crunch. Slam.

The noise was ceaseless, shaking Minerva from what had been a wonderful dream. A REALLY wonderful dream. She had been walking through a field of flowers, hues of yellow, purple, blue, and red as vivid as the paints she used to have in her artist’s box as a kid. The sun was beating down, caressing her skin with the lovely warmth that only comes from an e...