The wing of blasters cruised low, until the fractured, glassy surface of the plains suddenly fell away, descending into the depths beneath them with a suddenness that stirred Wreck's stomach.
He found himself looking away from the view, looking at the distant, shattered horizon and tried to concentrate on the numbers spewed up on the inside of his goggles. In training, they'd meant something valuable, readings for targets and the efficiency of the collectors. Right now, with the cold, black surface far below, it just showed how far his blaster had to fall if something happened suddenly. Having the plug pulled on your sim session was bad enough. Actually having a team have to burn their tanks just to get out into this wilderness and save your butt would be orders of magnitude more embarrassing.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Calliope's slightly distorted voice, glazed but not dripping with sarcasm, emerged into the cockpit, cutting through the cosmic background buzz of the scanners. With a few deep breaths, he finally slid the useless headphones off - They wouldn't find anything out here - and pushed up his goggles, staring down at the landscape below.
In the canyon, jagged crystalline shapes loomed, lit only by the sunlight that entered their jagged spires and bounced haphazardly down towards their shadowed bases. Nothing moved. Nothing even glinted, just a white to black gradient into the depths, punctuated by the occasional flash of reflected light, or the sinuous paths that looped through the shadows.
"Stasis." The voice was Magpie's, from the rear of the formation. Even his voice, Wreck thought, sounded jaded. No sarcasm, and no reverence either, just the plan fact. Wrecks shivered a bit; The flight's senior pilot reminded him of the landscape below, the color drained out of him on his previous sorties. He was right, though. Stasis. There wasn't any other word for it.
It had stopped everything. Motion. Sound. vibration. Color. They'd all been arrested, seized, and condensed.
