Chapter Text
The planet looked a lot like Earth. The sky was familiar shade of blue, and while the trees had a sort of… exotic quality about them, they definitely looked like trees--green and everything.
Pidge was kind of glad. Not that she didn’t think all the planets they visited were cool-- it was just nice to see something, well, expected for once. But she knew better than to, say, go swimming in the little pond beneath them without scanning it first. Probably ridiculously acidic or something.
She carefully lowered Green into the water, her paws resting almost silently a few feet below the surface. The planet was nearly completely covered by forest, and the small pool was the only break in the trees that would fit Green for miles around. The tops of the alien trees would provide cover for the Lion, but Pidge didn’t remove her cloaking yet.
Instead, Pidge removed an oblong machine from where she stowed it in the console. She turned it awkwardly, as it was almost as long as her arm, to reveal a control panel. She pushed a memorized series of buttons, and the machine hummed to life with a faint teal glow.
“Okay, Coran,” she said into the Lion's comms, “biosensor on.”
“Copy that,” quipped Coran, “Commence biosensor positioning.”
Lance leaned around the pilot’s chair and looked dangerously close to poking at the sensor, but Pidge smacked his hand away.
“Ow!” He yelled indignantly, “I didn’t do anything!”
“You'd probably manage to reset the calibrations just by looking at it too long,” she snapped, handing the machine off to Keith. Lance glared at Pidge as Keith, resolutely ignoring them, made his way to the cargo hold.
Keith's voice came through the helmet comms. “Okay, ready.”
Pidge scanned the treeline, then opened the cargo hold door. From Green’s cameras, she watched as the biosensor plopped into the pond. She quickly closed the door again.
“It’s down, Coran,” she said.
“Great! I’ll begin the scan.”
Pidge kept her hands on the controls, ready to steer Green up and away at a moment’s notice. Keith re-joined them in the cockpit.
Now they just had to wait for Coran to finish. Pidge hated waiting-- especially when they were already pretty sure they were in the clear-- and had to resist the urge to drop her forehead on the console. Lance, though, had already leaned against the pilot’s chair in apparent boredom.
They were investigating an abandoned Galra base, situated on this Earth-like planet, on the very edge of the Empire’s influence. They were hoping to learn more about how Galra communications and tech had changed in the past ten thousand years (even if this particular site had been out of commission for a few centuries), hack into any remaining systems, figure out why this particular base had been abandoned… anything, really, that they could use to piece together the Blades’ incomplete intel. It was a long shot, they all knew, but they theoretically would have plenty of time to do it without the constant threat of being blown up by the enemy.
They still had approached cautiously, though. Allura and Hunk had stayed in their Lions above the planet to provide aerial cover, while Shiro and Coran waited in the Castle on the other side of the solar system--the side closest to the heart of the Empire-- acting as early warning if the Galra detected their presence and decided to attack. Their long-range scanners found no activity at the base, but Shiro had insisted they use something with finer resolution. Pidge thought it was overkill, but Keith had agreed.
Hence, they were using cloaking and employing the biosensor. It would have been nice to just drop the sensor from a safe distance in the air, but it didn’t come with any practical way to add cloaking. It would have been hard for any remaining Galra to miss their sensor-turned-meteorite streaking through the air.
Just as Keith started to pace and Lance dramatically slumped further down the chair, Coran’s voice trilled back into the cockpit.
“Aaaaaaaaannnd…. Finished! Good news! There seems to be lots and lots of dense plant life down there--”
“No kidding?” Lance asked sarcastically, peering from his nearly reclined position out at the dense ring of trees.
“--but no animal forms of life bigger than what you Earthlings would call a chipmunk!” (Pidge had given Coran access to the massive amount of reference material stored on her Garrison-issued tablet, and he had been zealously working his new-found wealth of knowledge into everyday conversation.) “And even those are few and far from your landing site. The Galra base is, indeed, empty.”
Pidge exhaled and released the controls, and Keith next to her seemed to relax some. Lance, however, jumped up happily.
“Alright! Let’s do some breaking and entering!” he exclaimed with a broad smile.
The faces of Allura and Hunk from the Blue and Yellow Lions appeared on Green’s screens.
“We’ll see you in two vargas,” said Allura.
Their helmet coms wouldn’t be able to reach the others orbiting above very reliably, so the team had agreed on a time limit by which they had to come back to Green and check in through her stronger communication systems.
“See you on the other side,” said Hunk brightly, giving a small wave.
“Roger that,” Pidge said, smiling back. The connection terminated and she swiveled the pilot’s chair to look at Keith.
Keith shifted on his feet a little, looking somewhat awkward under her and Lance’s attention.
“Um, okay. Let’s go,” he said in a voice Pidge could tell he hoped sounded authoritative.
“Okay!” she said, in a voice she hoped sounded supportive. God, she was bad at this.
If Lance was hoping for something, he didn’t show it. As Green lowered her head toward the shore, he--with what appeared to be sincere enthusiasm--strutted confidently towards the exit. Pidge turned off the cloaking, and followed her fellow Paladins out.
The three of them stood on the shore while Pidge pulled up a map of the planet from her armor. The base looked like it was about a mile away. Luckily, Keith seemed to be much more relaxed now there was something to do and led the way in the indicated direction. Pidge sent a mental “bye” to Green, who squeezed back gently, and fell in line behind Lance.
This mile was going to be a pain in the ass, Pidge soon realized. Dense underbrush encroached nearly right up to the edge of the pond, and she quickly found herself waist-deep in deceptively sturdy foliage as they progressed. She tried not to slow down, but she had to look down at her feet the entire time to prevent them from catching on roots or saplings and flopping her over. Lance didn’t seem to be doing much better, despite his substantially longer legs. He was leaning every which way to swing his feet over the taller obstacles and scowling at the plants like they’d each done him a personal wrong.
Keith, however, was remaining infuriatingly upright and progressively leaving them in his metaphorical dust. Pidge was getting ready to yell at him to slow the hell down when Lance toppled over with a sharp yelp--landing face-first in a particularly thorny-looking bush.
“Agh! I hate this planet!” he yelled into the offending shrubbery.
“I think it hates you, too,” said Pidge, sidestepping Lance and making her way safely around him and whatever had tripped him.
Lance awkwardly pushed himself back to his feet, huffing. “Shouldn’t you be clearing the way for us with your sword or something, Keith?” he demanded, arms akimbo.
Keith, who had finally paused, looked exasperated. “I’m not your weed whacker .”
“Not a weed whacker,” sassed Lance, imitating his tone, “--more like a bush whacker.”
Lance’s face brightened as they started moving again--still embarrassingly slowly-- Lance now in rear. “Or maybe like a ‘trail-blazer’-- that sounds cool right? You’d be like one of those explorers in those old-timey movies machete-ing their way through the jungle. Tell me that doesn’t sound cool!”
“It doesn’t sound cool,” said Keith, flatly.
“Oh come on -- even you must’ve seen one of those movies. There’s always a hero trying to find a lost civilization or some treasure or something, and what are we if not really cool--”
But Keith cut him off. “Quiet ,” he growled.
Pidge, who had been watching her feet, looked up just in time to keep from smacking her helmet into Keith’s jetpack. Keith had stopped.
“What? All I’m saying is it would be--”
“Quiet,” repeated Keith.
Lance shut up.
Pidge looked up through Keith's visor, at his face. His eyes were darting around, looking for movement. All she could hear was the breeze in the trees.
“What?” she whispered. But he didn’t answer. She huffed in frustration, scanning the forest, too.
Wait… was the breeze getting louder? Like, a lot louder?
The sound of blasters shattered the air.
Keith yelled something that was probably profanity. He jumped into a defensive stance and activated his shield almost immediately. Behind Pidge, Lance yelled something that was definitely profanity.
Pidge scrambled to activate her own shield.
Too late.
Pain erupted in her calf. It felt like her leg had fallen asleep--and then been set on fire. The pain threatened to swamp her awareness and everything around her.
Fuck.
She realized she was screaming. With a massive effort, she made herself choke it back. She was grasping her leg against her chest--although she didn’t remember doing that-- and she had at some point ended up in the dirt among the roots. Something was trying to heave her back up.
She looked up. Lance had grabbed her under her arm and was trying to manage his own blaster with one hand. Keith was deflecting shots away from them with both his shield and sword and was yelling something over his shoulder.
And there was something moving-- moving quickly . It was coming closer, cutting them off, surrounding them. Pidge tried to understand what she was seeing.
Trees ?
She tried desperately to activate her shield, to reach for her bayard-- anything -- but she couldn’t make her hands pry away from where her leg felt like it was melting from the inside-out. She didn’t seem to be able to do much at all.
A word plowed to the front of her progressively fogging mind: stunned .
The pain was growing. And climbing. To her knee, her thigh, her hip. She was screaming again.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
A new burst of pain blossomed in her shoulder, and she knew no more.