59% done! Huzzah!
Close up, the shuttle didn’t look nearly as ‘mostly intact;’ in fact, I didn’t expect it would ever fly again. We’ve come a long way in the last century, but most of our equipment still looks like a child’s imitation when compared to Amalgamation tech. I can’t crash a hauler, except under extremely specific circumstances involving the sudden loss of the contragrav units. The best I could do would be to kind of damage the bottom of the hull, and tear up the landing zone. Here, we were just lucky that Burcu had been flying solo. I made a note to check later just why she had been flying solo, although I guess it was probably because of the dark Terran god Security.
On the marginally bright side, Amalgamation fire suppressant goo is amazingly good at crawling over burning-hot metal and plastic, and taking all that heat away: the last of it was oozing back into its vats as I popped the explosive bolts on the emergency access hatch. Inside it smelled vile, naturally, but I had nose filters for that. At least there weren’t any sparks. Sparks meant live wires, and live wires were bad.
I’d like to say that Burcu died quick and clean, but neither would be true; her body was crunched together in the front of the cockpit, her flesh mottled with bruises where it hadn’t been gashed horribly. Her face was mercifully obscured by her hair and helmet, but I could see teeth and fragments of bone scattered on the floor. And blood, of course. Or, rather, the shadows of blood on the walls, where the gore had boiled away under the fierce heat of the crash.