The Remorseless screamed. The superstructure was stretching as gravity tore it down and the drive thrusters tried to lift it up. Death Otter had to divert every erg of power into the defensive forcefields and run it with the hastily-cobbled software she'd coded that caused it to hug the hull plating, offering it additional structural support. Virtually useless for combat in that configuration, but it was probably the only thing that kept the ship from just shearing in half.
Meanwhile, there was the little problem of balancing the thrusters. Sabrick's inhumanly fast action managed to snatch stalemate from the jaws of certain death, however. He seemed to fly across Engineering, paying no heed to how gravity was pulling the wrong direction, and hauled his slightly-too-large bulk through the cramped space of the maintenance tube. The warning lights were already going off when he got there. With no time to lose, he simply punched through the glass cover directly, ignoring the pinpricks of glass in his knuckles as he grabbed the metal of the relay coupling just as the magnets that held them together buzzed and cut off. Immediately springs tensed and tried to yank the two edges of the relay apart, mechanically cutting the engine's power feed out; a last ditch emergency effort to stave off catastrophic damage. Normally, doing what Sabrick was doing would be an incredibly bad idea, and it was FOR CERTAIN that the Remorseless' warranty was NOT going to be honored..but though it took all of his strength, working through a very awkwardly small window, he was able to keep the power to the third engine engaged. Less than a second later he could just barely smell the acrid tinge of coolant flooding the beleaguered engine. In time to stop it from melting down, but it wouldn't have been in time to stop it from shutting down.
There was another looming problem though, and this wasn't one that could be solved with brute force. Death Otter's mind was something that was quite possibly unique in the Three Galaxies. A prodigy in digital code and computers from a young age with a psionic affinity for connecting to them, who received highly experimental nanotechnology that merged her brain and nervous system with an artificially intelligent quantum computer. A blending of biology, paranormal ability, and the very bleeding edge of technology. But even she had her limits, and this operation was exceeding them. There was just too MUCH. Hundreds of systems, all in constant crisis, all needing energy to be shuffled and reshuffled, all needing to be directed and redirected. The ship's own AI was useless; they were light-years away from any scenario it had been trained to cope with. Breaking every rule ever written. To have gotten this far without burning up or breaking up or hitting the planet or skipping off the atmosphere was nothing short of a miracle, but trying to do all that PLUS carefully directing the ship to a very specific spot on the planet's surface while also slowing their descent to hover at that spot... That was going to take more than just a miracle.
And that's when Grazzt stepped in.
As a newly hatched dragon, he didn't bring knowledge to the table. He brought something altogether vastly more useful. Through his mind, through his borrowed perceptions, he lent Death Otter his
instincts. Automatic processing that didn't require conscious thought. Suddenly complicated calculations to determine thrust ratios to arrest a lateral spin and adjust trajectory weren't things that Death Otter had to devote neural clock-cycles to figure out...she just knew how to do it. As if she'd been born knowing. Those clock cycles could then be used instead to keep the structural forcefield reinforced at critical areas, or any of another dozen things that would have doomed the ship if they didn't get handled.
Those on the ground were, as a result, treated to an impossible sight. From above there was a sound like thunder, a sound like an explosion. A shockwave rippled through the air up high, pushing aside the thin high altitude clouds into a vast ring. Through the center of that ring was a lance of fire. The cometary re-entry of the Remorseless. For a terrifying minute it got bigger and bigger, always seeming as if something must be coming off...but somehow nothing ever did. As it got closer they could hear the roar of it, feel the heat baking off of it even from the ground. It slowed as it came down, and the flaming halo of re-entry faded, replaced by the plume of bluer, fainter light that radiated out from the drive structures. Reactionless thrusters, they nevertheless released considerable waste energy in the form of heat, light and less friendly radiation.
Fortunately for the ground team, Death Otter's aim...augmented by Grazzt's draconic intuition...was true. She didn't descend miles away, too far to pull this off, and she didn't come down right on top of them, frying them into piles of Biblical ashes. Rather, the Remorseless descended from on high with almost stately grace, despite being manifestly unsuited for this environment. The enormous 'wings' of the stealth systems, connected to the ship's body via struts, the engine pods poking out in awkwardly unstreamlined angles...the Remorseless shouldn't BE here. Seeing it was surreal, like seeing three whales strapped to one another hovering in midair.
Death Otter's voice crackled over the comms then, audibly strained. "We
cannot stay here...<
static>...get it open!"