Allura checked the algorithm Pidge sent her three times before entering it into the console the sentry had been guarding. The base on Sala's moon had proved a difficult target, and she didn't want to ruin her chance of getting the arming codes for the Naxzela bombs by mistyping a decimal point.
"Did you get them?" Pidge's whisper, transmitted through Allura's gauntlet, sounded like a tinny squeak.
"Not yet. Just a few more doboshes…"
She typed each digit carefully, not blinking so as not to miss the number's appearance on the screen. She couldn't blow this—not her first solo covert mission. For one thing, they desperately needed the codes to be able to disarm the bombs Zarkon's forces liked to bury just under the mantle of key strategic planets. For another, Lance would laugh at her. A lot.
An ominous thump sounded just outside the room she was huddled in, and she stopped typing, barely daring to breathe as she strained her senses for signs of detection. The sentry crumpled at her feet was only temporarily deactivated and, thanks to Pidge's foresight of providing something called a "piggyback" program, would report only a minor glitch in its monitoring of the console when it rebooted. But if anyone else found her, she'd be in trouble.
After a few ticks, she wiped her sweaty palms on her tunic and resumed typing. Whether or not someone was about to discover her, she needed the codes before she could escape to her ship.
Finally, she managed to access the mainframe and copy the files onto her gauntlet. But before she could send the transmission, alarms blared, the door slid open, and someone in a cobalt space suit flitted past the opening at near impossible speed with a canister of white-blue quintessence strapped to his or her back. A platoon of sentries followed the person past the opening. It appeared that Allura was not the only infiltrator at Zarkon's base.
Without any sort of plan beyond quintessence, Allura leaped up, bayard drawn, and sped after the bottle and its bearer.
Dispatching the sentries wasn't hard. One grazed her elbow with its laser, but it barely singed her suit. The crunch of metal, the hot smell of ozone, the adrenaline thrumming through her brain all felt like a second skin to her at this point. As if this had always been the real Allura, and the princess-diplomat had only been a dream.
She angled her body for a wall jump, firing her suit's thrusters just long enough to shoot her out of the way of a slicing blade. She rebounded, flipped, and used her momentum to slam feet first into the Galra guard. The guard went down with a grunt but wasn't completely out, so Allura punched him with her bayard.
The unmistakable swish of bay doors sounded ahead, and Allura jumped up to follow. If she didn't capture the quintessence now, the thief would get to whatever ship was closest and make a run for it. Allura could not let that happen. There was already too much rogue concentrated quintessence out in the universe. They couldn't afford for random thieves to be selling it on the black market now as well.
As Allura ghosted through the crack between the closing bay doors, she caught sight of the thief ahead. The alarms were still blaring, causing a headache to form right behind her left temple. Somehow they were louder in the ship hangar.
As he—most likely a he, she could tell now—rounded the nose of a Galra fighter, the hangar's outer doors slid open as well. Allura switched directions mid-stride, giving up on catching the thief by hand as he had too much of a head start. His fighter was already lifting off and angling toward the exit. Another few ticks, and she'd be in her own ship and could continue pursuit from the air. It wouldn't be as easy to catch him, especially since she wouldn't be flying Blue, but she had to—
Laser blasts heated the air around her just as she ducked behind her ship. So much for evading detection. Her only hope now was that the Galra commander in charge of the station didn't look too closely beyond the stolen quintessence to see what else had been taken.
She palmed open the hatch and slid inside the cramped vehicle she'd borrowed from the rebels. Now she regretted her choice of cover. She could have taken a Galra fighter instead, but it would have taken time to rework the codes and come up with a cover story that made sense. And she would have had to imitate a Galra, which…ugh. But she'd have had a fighter rather than a clunky transport ship to blast her way out of the hangar and chase down that thief.
Allura maneuvered the ship out of dock, wincing at every laser bolt hitting her unprotected hull. Once she had enough vertical space, she mashed the controls, trying to force the ship into evasive contortions that would have been as natural as breathing for Blue. The ship shuddered under repeated blasts as sentries ran to nearby Galra fighters.
Too many doboshes later, Allura's ship leapt through the hangar doors and out into space. She clipped the edge of the rocky overhang obscuring the base hangar doors, causing a slide that would partially block the entrance and hopefully delay the other fighters. She regretted the damage to the ship, but she was fairly sure Matt would forgive her.
But when she saw the thief's fighter coming straight for her, she shrieked and rolled the ship hard to the right. The fighter flew past her, though, seemingly uninterested as it blasted a hole in the mountain, taking the hangar—and most of the sentries—out completely. Then it spiraled into space toward the giant curved edifice of Sala, the planet the base was orbiting.
Why would he go to Sala? There was ground, snow, and atmosphere but not much else. The reason the Galra had chosen Sala's moon for its base was because Sala was such a remote and barren planet.
Then a plume of smoke began streaming from the aft engine, and it suddenly became clear why he'd chosen his trajectory. But before Allura could decide on a relative course of action, her cruiser took fire from the few sentries still on their six. Her lone gun pointed forward, so she couldn't do much about the threat behind her. She shifted as much power to her rear energy shield as she dared and dived after the thief's fighter. Danger or not, she couldn't let him get away with the quintessence.
Entering the planet's atmosphere was far from fun. The bulkheads grew uncomfortably warm and the cockpit glass grew foggy with condensation. Allura punched commands into the antiquated ship's interface. The Castle might be 10,000 decaphebes old, but it was immeasurably more advanced and elegant than anything the rebels had.
Finally, she pulled through reentry and straight into heavy weather. She slipped through cloud banks, trying to confuse her pursuers' instruments even as she worked desperately to stay on the thief's tail. She didn't want to go through all this effort just to lose him in the snow.
It occurred to her that she should probably contact the rest of the paladins to let them know her location and current situation, but before she could send the message, her shield gave out and she took a direct hit. Fire spread in the aft cabin, but she couldn't put it out and follow the thief's fighter at the same time. She hoped he'd land soon so she could, too. That is, if neither of them crashed in the meantime.
Allura couldn't roll her cruiser in the turbulence. It was bottom heavy and not built with aerodynamics in mind. So she settled for ducking behind rocky promontories and weaving between laser blasts as best she could.
Only three sentries had managed to track them this far. And as she curved around a boulder, the closest one clipped its wing on the rock, sending it skittering into a cliff face opposite. The resulting crash into the chasm below left only two sentries to evade.
Reluctantly, Allura set her cruiser to autopilot and scooped up the fire suppressor from a wall compartment. She hated taking her eyes off her prey, even for a few ticks, but the fire had spread too far. If she didn't get it under control, she soon wouldn't have a ship to chase him with.
As she quickly doused the fire, she noticed a large cargo net folded neatly against the wall. After a moment's thought, she yanked it from its moorings and hustled back to the controls.
Checking to see she still had the thief in her sights, she yanked open the cargo doors. A whirlpool of wind nearly pulled her from her seat. She wrestled the pilot straps around her shoulders and across her lap, securing herself to the seat. Then stretching her arms up, she draped the cargo net around the back of her chair like a giant blanket.
Gripping both sides of the net in one hand, she turned off autopilot and slowed her breakneck speed just enough to get the second sentry lines up behind her. She took another laser hit, but it was worth it. Just as the sentry positioned its fighter to strike again, Allura let go of the cargo net.
The net swept backward, through the open cargo doors, and smacked the port hull close enough to the intake manifold to get sucked into the engine. With a horrible grinding noise, the port engine choked and the fighter fell right out of the sky.
"One to go," Allura said, closing the cargo doors and accelerating. But even as Zarkon's sentry closed in from behind, for five awful ticks, she lost sight of the thief.
Frantically scanning for heat signatures, she finally picked up sign of him again, far closer to the ground than he'd been moments before. His fighter must be pretty badly damaged. There was no indication of civilization that she'd noticed in the fifteen doboshes they'd been dodging rocks.
She angled down after him, ignoring the fighter behind her for the moment. She fought the controls, which were starting to lock up in the unfamiliar atmosphere. The thief's fighter faltered and fell, tumbling along the ground, end over end, until it slid to rest at the base of a mountain.
Before Allura could pull out of the dive, she lost control completely and skidded into the snow as well, coming to rest finally almost on top of the thief's fighter. The sentry banked hard to the right and came back around for another pass, detecting an easy victory.
Having just strapped herself in, Allura now scrambled to get out. She wrestled her way through a hole in the bulkhead and drew out her bayard. She'd only have one shot at this, and she'd never used her power this way before. She hadn't used her power at all in the months since Naxzela. She had no idea if it would even work. But she had to try something or the sentry, if it hadn't already, would relay their position to Zarkon's base.
Allura snapped her bayard into a whip. From the deep well in her mind, she drew on the power her father never told her she had, imagining it extending through her arm and into her bayard. Then she cracked the whip at the sentry's fighter when it passed. She felt more than saw the ripple of power, her power, slice diagonally through the ship, from just below the starboard wing to just above the port wing. A jagged cut halved the fighter, causing it to topple drunkenly into the same chasm that had claimed the first.
She watched its trajectory for half a tick before being wrenched around by her arm to face another attacker, probably the thief. She raised her whip, energy sparking along it with her rage.
"There's no time," her attacker said, pushing her into the shallow furrow made by their crashing ships.
She knew that voice, finally recognized that suit. The thief was—
Light registered first. Impossible light. Painful enough for her instincts to kick in. She moved between him and the explosion, instinctively throwing up her shield to block the impact. Her gauntlet took the brunt of the burn as the sheer force of the detonation pushed them both into the crater.
Snow vaporized around them, the rock turned ashy underneath where it didn't outright harden into black obsidian. If it weren't for the special ore powering her shield, both herself and her prisoner would have vaporized with the snow.
The intense pressure continued for several doboshes. Far longer than any normal explosion would have lasted. She felt her lungs struggling against the pressure to draw in oxygen. Felt her prisoner beneath her struggling with the same simple task. She was starting to lose consciousness. If the blast didn't end soon, they would both be dead.
And as soon as she though that, the pressure disappeared, causing her ears to pop painfully at the change in air pressure. She lay still, gaping like an aquatic animal for breath. She wanted to move, to gain advantage over her prisoner before he turned the tables, as Shiro often said. But he was just as stunned as she from the blast, breathing as hard, and not seeming inclined to move out from beneath her yet.
Her arms shaking, she finally managed to push herself up to a sitting position. Only then did she realize that her shield had disappeared, and her gauntlet—the same gauntlet holding the deactivation codes she'd stolen from the moon base—was scorched and completely dead.
"What in the name of Altea was that?" she gasped. "Why did it explode like that? What happened?"
"Raw quintessence fueled the blast," Prince Lotor said, his voice ragged as he coughed. "The canister cracked in the impact. I barely escaped before the fire in the ship's hold reached the container."
Allura cursed. At least no quintessence would end up in the black market. She had accomplished something. Though, since Prince Lotor was the thief, it likely hadn't been destined for the black market anyway.
"Not the sort of language I would have expected from you, Princess."
"How about this for language?" She growled at him, standing. "I, Princess Allura, Paladin of the Blue Lion, and leader of the Voltron Alliance, hereby place you, Prince of Galra, under arrest for crimes against the free peoples of the universe."
Prince Lotor raised his eyebrows at her. Then he pushed himself to his feet and stepped outside the crater they'd been lying in. Only when he moved away from her did she realize how bitterly cold it had become again in the aftermath of the explosion. New snow was already filling in the crater.
"Where do you think you're going? I've placed you under arrest."
"I am leaving the area before this little adventure attarcts unwanted visitors, but by all means, feel free to stay."
"I command you to stop!"
"Or you'll what, Princess—shame me to death?"
Allura gripped her bayard, intending to convert it into a whip again to bind the man if necessary, but the bayard remained dark and unresponsive. It must have been damaged in the blast as her gauntlet had been.
Prince Lotor resumed walking.
Allura followed. "We should stay near the wreckage so our teams can find us. We can reach them through my…" She trailed off, remembering that her gauntlet had been torched. She mentally chastised herself for not sending a transmission to Coran and the paladins when she'd thought of it earlier.
"What about you?" Allura asked. "Do your comms not work?"
"The explosion emitted an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to disable all my equipment. Even if our ships were intact, they'd be useless."
"They'd give us shelter at least. And a point of reference for rescuers. No one will ever find us if we wander off into the wilderness."
"If there is a port with a transmitter, they might."
"You know the location of a port?" Allura said, hope rising.
"I know where a port once was. I haven't visited Sala in a thousand years. The port may still be there or it may not. But the odds for survival are marginally better if I head in that direction."
"You mean, if we head in that direction."
"'We' isn't really in my vocabulary, Princess."
Allura had no doubt that was true.
"Nevertheless," she said, "odds of survival double if we stay together."
Prince Lotor started to respond but then stopped, as if thinking better of it. Then with a nod of acknowledgement, he turned west and started walking.
"How far is it?"
"Three days by foot, give or take, so we'd better get started."
"You said we."
"Apparently, your regrettable habits are already rubbing off on me."
"You are not that lucky," she said.