Chapter Text
Chapter One
“You know who I miss? Rover.” Lance and Pidge’s boots clicked on Galran metal: a crew-less battle ship, the sentries already killed by an earlier coalition sweep.
“Yeah, you loved that robot,” Lance said.
“Rover was so… helpful. And he sacrificed himself.”
“Yeah, he was a great invention.”
“I didn’t invent Rover, I just sort of… enabled him.”
“Well, good job enabling. Now what are we looking for again?”
Pidge shot Lance a look. “We are looking for the main terminal so we can access it and get the ship’s records.”
“Right. I meant like, what does the terminal look like?”
“Just find the control room, Lance, and I’ll take it from there.”
“Great,” Lance said. “Because I don’t know what’s going on.”
Pidge noticed a downed sentry sparking. It moved its left leg. “Lance…”
“Pidge, I know you think I’m dumb—“
“Lance—“
“Just hear me out, Pidge. I got your back, okay? I may be ‘the dumb one’ but—“
“Lance! Get back!”
They ducked behind a ridge in the wall. With a whir and a spark, the downed sentry rewired its split halves and sat up. Then it stood. And began to march.
“Ohhhh, this is bad,” Lance said.
Pidge gulped. “Copy that.” They pressed their bodies against the wall as the sentry passed them, then they ducked around the ridge to escape—and ran right into the vision of three more sentries in formation, chest plates pocketed with blaster holes.
“Oh, quiznak,” Pidge said.
The sentries raised their guns. Lance cocked the red bayard and started shooting the right two sentries. He disabled their weapons…temporarily. Pidge ran in and slashed the left sentry in half. It fell down but immediately began to rewire and reweld its innards and armor.
“Pidge, run!”
Pidge ran, Lance jogging backwards to cover her. Blaster shots cut through armor, destroyed it… and it welded together again.
“Lance, the terminal is up ahead!”
“Great.” Lance temporarily downed the last sentry and they jogged around a corner to the terminal room as the sentry began to spark to half-life again.
Pidge started hacking into the door. “I did not expect this mission to become a Galran version of The Walking Dead.”
“The walking what?” Lance aimed his gun at the end of the hall.
“Walking Dead. It’s an old cult zombie TV series.”
“Ah. When I watch retro stuff I stick to dolphin documentaries.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Hunter becomes the hunted. Nature is brutal.”
“I’m in.” The doors opened and Pidge rushed to the terminal. Lance walked backward, bayard muzzle still trained on the end of the hallway.
Pidge used her wrist-tech to hack the terminal, downloading intel. There was a bang from far down the hallway.
“Are you almost done?” Lance asked.
“Nearly.”
“Okay.” He opened a comm link to the Black Lion.
“No! I gotta find out about this resurrection tech. We need to know how to counteract its source code.”
“Gotta know it to kill it, I guess,” Lance said. He saw sparks around the corner and then a zombified sentry stilted into view. “Or re-kill it.” He fired, and the zombie sentry clattered to the floor, but didn’t stop moving.
The ship powered down and went pitch black. Then the halls began to pulse red, and an alarm sounded.
“That’s not good,” Pidge said.
Lance’s pulse ticked up into his jaw. “Yeah, something’s telling me you might have tripped the auto-destruct.” He re-opened the comm link. “Keith, we need an extraction. Like, yesterday. This thing’s gonna blow.”
There was the sound of tearing metal and rushing air and the red lion pushed its jaws into the terminal room.
“Oh, hi Red,” Lance said. “Funny seeing you here.”
“Yeah,” Pidge said. “Great timing.”
They climbed into Red’s cockpit. Lance sat in the pilot’s chair and flew them out. “Ix-nay on the extraction, Keith. Red got us.”
“Lance, I do not thing now is the right time for pig-latin.”
“Relax, Pidge, its just another code.”
She smiled.
They’d just made it clear of the blast radius when the ship exploded. Lance rounded Red to look at the aftermath. No sign of reassembly.
“I wonder if the terminal was like the brain telling things to reconstruct… and self-destruct,” Pidge said.
“Do you think it… knew what we were doing?” Lance asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Lance tightened his grip on Red’s throttles. “Let’s get back to the castle.”