Final Exam

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The ship seemed to hang motionless above the great, green planet. The harsh, unfiltered light of the planet’s mother star glinted on the silvery hull, highlighting the ragged edge of a huge hole in the stern of the vessel.

The occupants of the spaceship stood anxiously by their posts. Even the youngest novice among them knew that the ship had seen its last flight; it was finished. The engines were gone, vanished in the crackling horror of an atomic fire. The holocaust had begun accidentally in the fuel center. In a few milliseconds the screaming flames had torn through the main bulkheads, following the fuel lines to the stern exhaust ports, destroying everything in their path. In a flash of hellish fire it was all over. Only the isolated control deck, where the few survivors now stood, remained intact.

It was only a matter of hours till the magnetic claws of the planet would pull the ship down, faster and faster, until the friction against the atmosphere would turn it into a molten, pitted mass—unrecognizable save as its component elements.

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