The Command lifepod had been one of the first to shoot away from the ruptured cruiser.  It was twice the size of normal lifepods, the extra space taken up by a half a meter of Comp-A armor (half a meter more than the normal pods) as well as a small storage area slung over the top of the escape vehicle.  It had a complex communications suite, as well as flares, weapons, food, medical aid, and temporary shelters.  It was designed to be a Command and Control Center: other lifepods could attach themselves to hardpoints on its hull.  Or, if forced to land, the CACC made an excellent shelter and had enough supplies to feed a hundred people for a week.<br/><br/>As it rocketed down and away from the cruiser ("down" being relative to the solar plane), a second explosion tore through the front half of the starship.  It looked to be a more conventional bomb then the one that had originally detonated: the munitions stores.  A variety of explosive ammunition detonated.  Bullets tore multiple levels of deck plating, shattering floors and embedding themselves into the inner hull.  Missiles and bombs, their fuel adding to their explosive, detonated simultaneously, their explosions overlapping and increasing the yield a hundredfold.  The explosion was mostly contained by the hull, but a column of gas and fire shot out of the ruptured, open end of the bow, where the vortex bomb had blown the ship in half.  This sudden force, acting like a primitive booster rocket, sent the bow shooting off into interplanatery space, leaving a swirl of blackened debris in its wake.<br/><br/>Three thousand kilometers distant, a primitive looking, oblong spacecraft turned in the void, satisified, and returned to its planet: Novus.<br/><br/>*   *   *<br/><br/>The CACC touched down just over nine hours later, leaving a kilometer long, twenty meter wide blackened scar in the heart of a jungle.  The trees to either side of furrow, despite being saturated with water, burned merrily under the midday suns.<br/><br/>Unlike the other, more fragile pods, the CACC was built to carry important cargo: officers.  It coasted into the atmosphere, it's hardened bottom shrugging off the intense heat of reentry.  From the broad cockpit, the pilot watched as an immense mountain range passed beneath them.  In a blink, it was replaced with a desert, and then a limitless ocean.  Thirty seconds later, the CACC passed over a rugged cliff marking the boundary of a new landmass.  The dominant hills went on for several hundred miles, eventually becomign covered with a lush jungle.<br/><br/>By now, the glowing bottom of the pod was brushing the tops of trees, setting the foliage alight as it left a turbulent wake of superheated air in its path.<br/><br/>"Here it is," the pilot said.<br/><br/>The CACC's nose dipped suddenly, plowing through the trees, splintering trunks meters wide like a metal bat smashing through sugarcane.  A jarring<em>THUD!</em>marked its contact with the ground, followed by brief weightlessness as the ship bounced.  The cockpit viewport was streaked with water and a greenish fluid.<br/><br/>Two more thuds and forty seconds of brain-gellifying shaking later, the CACC slid to a stop.<br/><br/>Right away, the ten or so officers clustered in the ovaloid troop bay unbuckled and stretched.  Jonn walked up to the cockpit, stepping around the protective bulkhead and entering the depressed area behind the pilot's chair.  The tall man was hunched slightly, not used to the full 1.1 G Novus had, over 50% stronger than what the norm was on<em>Wayward Traveler</em>.<br/><br/>Still, he was able to look over the pilot's shoulder and out the cockpit.  A scraper was wiping off the green gel that coated the thick space glass; through it, Jonn saw trees.  The ones directly in front of him were aflame, but he could see the ones beyond those.  They resembled their counterparts on Earth: tall, with green foliage and brown bark.  They were thicker, with at least twice the height-width ration of those on Earth, and their leaves had a fluffy, airy look to them, looking for allt he world like small puffs of green cotton candy.<br/><br/>He could see no animals.<br/><br/>Behind him, the Colonel and the COM officer stepped into the cockpit.  "Commander, where are the other pods?"<br/><br/>The pilot turned in her seat, shaking out her shoulder length hair as she removed her helmet.  Like most people, she hadn't had time to cut it before evacuating the ship.  "Sir, we're picking up 26 transmitters.  Most of them are still above the atmosphere, but two are just beginning reentry."<br/><br/>The Colonel looked grim, then clapped the pilot on the shoulder, which drooped from exhaustion.  "You did well, Commander."<br/><br/>Jonn had seen and heard enough.  Shuffling past the Colonel, saluting as he went, the Navigations Officer reentered the personnel area in time to see the GO officer cracking the airlock.  "It's safe," he was reassuring his crewmates.  "Don't worry, it's 100% breathable."<br/><br/>The door slid open, followed quickly by the exterior airlock portal.  The inside of the craft heated up, quickly becoming intolerable.  Beating their collars, the CACC crewmembers jumped clear of the pod, landing on the glassy and black furrow in the ground.  The soles of their Navy slippers hissed and bubbled on contact.  As lifepods struck burning streaks of fire into the sky, they all scrambled back into the airlock.<br/><br/>It was an hour before they could safely walk on the ground.  Tentatively, the ten officers and pilots - all of whom wore boots, bore short-barrelled rifles, and carried backpacks full of supplies from the storage area - took their first steps on Novus.<br/><br/>The first thing they noticed were the suns.  Novus, like the vast majority of planets, circled around a binary star system.  This pair happened to be two healthy, middle-aged stars, very similar to Sol.  They were very close together, locked in a tight, tidal orbit about each other.  Right now, the two suns were at eclipse: one blocked the other, giving the foremost star a halo of golden light.<br/><br/>The Colonel was at the head of the group.  Unlike everyone else, he seemed unaffected by the relatively heavy gravity.  "The other pods will be landing soon."  He looked up at the sky, his stony face bathed in sunlight.  He squinted, then sniffed the air.  "The--"<br/><br/>He was cut off with a cry of pain.  He covered his eyes, looking back down at the glassy dirt beneath him.  Unsurprisingly, everyone else looked up.<br/><br/>Ten thousand kilometers over their heads, the<em>Traveler</em>exploded.  This third detonation put the previous two to shame.  There had been no one around to shut off the engines, and so the nuclear reactors within began to overheat, their superconducting coils filled with too many ions and unable to dump the excess waste.  The process continued for nearly ten hours, the ballooning magnetic fields wreaking havoc on the electrical systems of the ship.  With the coolant pipes severed from the splitting of the ship, and the magnetic dampeners damaged in the ammunitions explosion, there was nothing to keep the heat of the reactor in check.  Slowly, critical junctions and devices fused shut under the terrific heat that rivaled the surface of a star.<br/><br/>Finally, the reactors could take no more.  As the very walls of the engine room began to slag and distort from the heat, the gate that controlled waste disposal burst.  An unfathomable number of ions, bunched together and superheated into plasma, burst free.  The jumbled atoms collided continually with each other, sparking reaction after reaction.  The result: a nuclear detonation.<br/><br/>The explosion was so bright that it outshone the two stars in the sky of Novus.  The Colonel had the misfortune of looking straight at it.<br/><br/>For twenty seconds, a bright nimbus of electric blue light rippled around a white-hot core.  It was large, four times the size of the suns and doubly bright.  Within minutes, heavy ions from the explosion would interact with the upper atmosphere of Novus, causing a breathtaking, hours-long aurora that would cover the sky from horizon to horizon.<br/><br/>Speaking of which, Jonn wondered where the immense cloud formation earlier had gone.  They had landed in the upper hemisphere, sure, but they had skimmed over the southern hemisphere to get here.  There had been clouds, but they had been far too sparse to be any sort of storm.  Had the massive hurricane dissipated already?<br/><br/>The Colonel had recovered by now, his cheeks glistening with moisture as his eyes watered.  He wiped at his face with the back of his sleeve, then pointed towards a series of smoke trails to the south.  "Come on, let's go."