Your lungs burn as they remember how to breathe, each inhalation a knife of recycled air that tastes of metal and fear. The cryptosleep casket's emergency revival sequence floods your bloodstream with stimulants, forcing consciousness through the fog of centuries-long slumber. Red lights strobe through the frost-covered glass above as klaxons wail their funeral song - the ship is dying.
The casket hisses open and you tumble out, muscles cramping from the rapid thaw. Around you, the colony ship Stellar Hope shudders like a wounded beast. Explosions cascade through distant bulkheads. Other caskets line the walls - thousands of them.
Illuminated evacuation signs guide you to the escape pods as the ship lists violently. Your bare feet slap against cold metal grating, past viewports showing the marble of an unknown world spinning below. You throw yourself into the nearest pod just as another explosion tears through the cryptosleep bay behind you.
The pod's launch is violence incarnate - g-forces crushing you into the seat as you plummet through atmosphere. The heat shield screams. Your vision tunnels. Then impact.
You wake to birdsong and the smell of pine needles. The pod's door has blown off, revealing a vista of forested hills stretching to the horizon under an alien sun. Smoke rises from your pod's crumpled hull, embedded in a furrow of disturbed earth. In the distance, more smoke columns mark where other pieces of the Stellar Hope found their graves.
Your survival pack sits intact in its compartment: basic clothes, a simple pistol, some packaged meals, medicine, and a few silver coins. Everything else you owned is now burning debris scattered across this nameless rimworld.
