Betting On His Demon by Kelex Page B

ship seemed to shudder around them.  With no time wasted on redressing, Kaden rushed over to his seat and flipped the switch back to give him control of the ship.
    “Get dressed!” Davidson snapped.  “I need to open the door for the crew.”
    Kaden looked over the panel, his fingers instinctively hitting the buttons he needed.  He’d been at the top of his class at flight school and received two commendations before he’d ever graduated with honors.  If anything, Kaden could save them from a more serious crash, but it looked inevitable that they were hitting the ground.  “We’ve lost power to the distortion engines.  Impulse wasn’t enough to keep us out of the magnetic pull of a planet we were passing.  Either I get dressed or I save the crew of this ship with a soft crash.”
    “Crash?” Davidson asked from over Kaden’s shoulder, shock lowering his normally confident tone of bravado.  “Why didn’t the sensors come on and alert us we’d been pulled?”
    “Apparently, I hit something to silence the alarms when you pushed me on the control panel,” Kaden snapped.  He didn’t have time to answer Davidson’s questions. 
    The bridge door slid open, and the captain rushed in.  The ship’s computer system would’ve alerted the captain first.  Captain O’Conner paused for a fraction of a second, his eyes widening as he took in Kaden’s nakedness, but seemed to ignore it as he checked the sensors over Kaden’s shoulder.  “What the hell is happening to my ship?”
    “We’ve lost the distortion engines, sir.  I’m trying to reroute all the power I can to the impulse engines to avoid the planet’s pull,” Kaden said, his fingers flying over the controls.  The ship shuddered again and began to descend into the planet’s atmosphere.  The shipboard alarm went off, the ear-splitting sound making it harder for Kaden to concentrate on what he was doing.
    The captain raced over to the secondary controls and began diverting more power to the engines, helping Kaden gain a little more control.  Davidson started instructing the crew members as they arrived on deck.  Kaden ignored most of it, focusing on the controls before him.  The captain’s actions helped give him the power he needed as the ship ripped through the atmosphere, but the closer they got to the planet’s surface, the more speed they seemed to gain.  Kaden worked the thrusters to try to level them out some, so the impact was not so much to cause loss of life.
    Seconds drifted by like hours, chaos erupting around Kaden.  He muted it all, focusing on his control panel.  The ship began to violently shake around him, quaking under the massive strain of being propelled toward the planet’s surface.  The counteracting thrusters tried to stop the descent, but only made the ship shake more.  Kaden was finally able to level them off some and slow the plunge, but the ground was still coming at a rate faster than Kaden liked.  He started looking for a soft place to land.  Opting for an open desert ahead, he hoped the loose surface would help absorb some of the impact.
    The ship crashed into the surface of planet and began to skid along the sand.  The impact’s energy forced the ship to slide another few thousand feet until it finally came to a rest, battered and beaten, but reasonably in one piece.  Kaden let out a long, shaky breath and his hands began to shake.  He lifted them up, staring at them in shock.  Thankfully, they hadn’t done that while he’d been working to save the ship.
    “Computer, are there any fatalities?  Any seriously injured?” the captain asked.
    An electronic voice came across the sound system.  “No, captain, there are no fatalities nor serious injuries to any crew on board.”
    The captain visibly sagged as he rested one hand on the controls before Kaden.  “Ensign, I would advise you to put your clothes on and meet me in my office, immediately.  Lieutenant, inventory the damage and send out