I shuffled into the escape pod behind a group of men that looked like Imams. The silent widow strapped herself in next to me, and after buckling in I hugged my sports bag for comfort. As I looked around at my fellow survivors, it was the small details that I noticed the most: the varying hues on the older of the Muslim's men's beards, the pigtails on the young woman next to them, and that the two twins seemed utterly identical. There was also a fair-haired man with crazy-neat fingernails on the hands that gripped his pack. Who has time for that?
If it had been a smooth flight I think I wouldn't have screamed. But I couldn't help it. And the nausea just kept coming back, like the perpetual ill feeling I would get in long car rides as a kid. The lurches felt like a roller coaster from hell, and I kept waiting to drop. But this was space, so I suppose the worst that could have happened was to drift for eternity... I had squeaked when the pod detached from the ship, and the light wobbling -- which felt like another problem just waiting to happen -- rose the bile in my stomach. I forced it down. The widow reached out and squeezed my hand. She wouldn't look at me, and she didn't speak, but something about her hand made me feel better while we wobbled through space towards the planet's atmosphere.
There was a loud popping noise, and then the drop began. That was when I cried out the loudest: the first drop. It felt like we were going to hurtle down into hell. I had felt safer on the doomed ship. Suddenly this was all so much more real. There was a reddish glow coming from the below the windows, as if something were on fire. For a moment I wasn't sure if we were going to land or just plummet to our deaths. I think I had screamed again. It's hard to remember what all happened. The memory is a blur, and I hate thinking of it.
Then the engines roared, shifting into a higher gear or something to fight the gravity that seemed eager to swallow us up. Instead of falling, we adjusted course. Finally, instead of red panic lighting, the pod shifted to a normal blue-white LED. We looked about at each other, unsure what to do or say next. Gradually, the ground below came into view in the round windows of the pod. There was a sort of brownish green of grasses and turf, then we could make out strange twisting trees and flashes of color that must have been flowers or something here and there. It was nice enough, maybe a bit "jungle"-y.
There was another pop as the engines shifted in some way again, causing us to rise up a little then settle downward onto an open clearing. The door depressurized and popped open.
