"Ugh, this is so frustrating." Hunk slumped over his control panel with a hearty, full-body sigh, staring up at the readout floating above him with glazed eyes and maybe a little bit of drool coming from the corner of his mouth. "We've been looking for a way in for hours and nothing is turning up."

"We can't give up," Allura said, her eyes still fixed on her own readout, intent and focused.

"I never said anything about giving up," Hunk said, faintly offended. "I said this is frustrating. Which it is."

"The biggest problem is that new attack." Pidge stared up at her screen, glasses glinting white. The image of the largest Galra capital ship filled the space, spinning slowly in place. From their records of the battle, they knew that the new weapon was on that ship, but not precisely where it was located. They had all been studying and analyzing the available data ever since they'd gotten away and hidden behind the farthest moon.

"We knoowwww," Hunk groaned. "If it wasn't for that the three of us could just go in and start blasting, but that thing took out the blue lion with one hit while she was still connected to Voltron so we have no idea how powerful it really is and could...could it vaporize a lion if we caught it full-frontal...?" His lower lip wibbled a bit at the thought.

"I think we should go in anyway." Keith was pacing. Of course. He had given up on data analysis after the first hour or so. Now he was standing by the front observation window, staring out at the stars. They couldn't see the planet from this vantage point, not with the naked eye, but that didn't seem to be stopping Keith from trying. His fist kept clenching and unclenching at his side, over and over again, like a heartbeat. Hunk watched it for a moment, though the sight was not helpful at all. If anything, it just racked up the tension in his shoulders even further.

"You always think we should go in anyway," Pidge said absently, not even glancing away from her screen.

"Of course we should go in," Coran said, his voice strong. "But that doesn't mean we rush in without a plan."

"Yeah! My man," Hunk said in approval. Trust Coran to be the voice of reason. Keith narrowed his eyes and gave them both a dirty look. Hunk shrugged at him.

"Shiro and Lance will be able to hold out," Allura said. She was trying to be reassuring, but her voice was stressed so it came off as if she was scolding them all for not having more faith. "I'm sure they've gone to ground and dug in for an extended wait. We know from the activity on the scanners that the Galra are concentrating on the crash site, so the lions are keeping them busy. We have time to figure out a way around that new weapon before we are absolutely required to go in."

Hunk was forced to agree, though reluctantly. "Yeahhhh, but I mean... We don't know how bad Lance was hurt in the battle. He wasn't answering the comms, so maybe he just got knocked out, but then they went and crashed, so..."

"His vital signs were strong for as long as the castle was able to track them," Coran said in what was no doubt meant to be an assuring tone.

"But we don't know about after that." Hunk waved his hands as if he was trying to juggle a heavy weight between them. "I just..." He sighed as an image rose in his mind, Lance comatose on the floor with blast burns painted on his exposed skin, then floating in the cryo pod so unnaturally still and quiet and so unlike Lance that Hunk had sat by the pod for more than an hour, staring at him as if he could make him heal faster with his eyes. "I just hate not knowing, that's all. I really, really hate it."

"I know. I know." Allura's voice was closer now. She had gotten up from her console and moved over to put a hand on Hunk's shoulder. It felt really nice. He slumped a little, his eyes closing, and covered his face with his hands.

"I'm so worried," he said, his voice muffled and a little moist. "Lance and me have been friends for...for a really long time. I'm sorry I'm being a pain, but... I'm really worried about him."

"I know." Allura squeezed his shoulder. "We are all concerned for Shiro and Lance, but I think we can recognize that you have a right to be a little more upset than the rest of us." She looked around at the others as if daring them to disagree. No one did, though Keith clenched his jaw.

Pidge had finally turned away from screen to look at Hunk in concern. Now she lifted her chin, eyes shining with determination. "So you would feel better if we at least knew how they were doing, right?"

Hunk lowered his hands to peer at her. "Uh. Yeah. I guess."

"Then when why don't we drop a BLIP sensor down there, at least?" She looked at Allura and Coran, too. "We need more information. We don't know enough about what's going on down there on the planet or in the Galra fleet. The data from the battle isn't enough to analyze for a weakness or formulate a plan. So we gotta do more recon."

Allura tilted her head. "I'm not disagreeing with you, but the problem in the first place is that we can't get through the fleet to the planet. How would we get close enough to drop a sensor without falling in danger of that new weapon?"

"The green lion." Pidge turned back to her console and hit a button, making a readout of her lion appear. "I've been working on the cloaking device. I've got it up to about a minute and a half of useful runtime now. About ninety ticks," she clarified when Allura and Coran looked confused. "It won't be enough for me to pick up Shiro and Lance and fly out again, but I could drop a sensor and at least exchange information with them." Her mouth tightened. "I can let them know we're coming."

Coran stepped closer and bent over with his hand behind his back to study her readout. "Oh, I see what you've done there," he said thoughtfully. "Very clever, paladin. I'm impressed."

Pidge beamed, then looked back to Allura with a triumphant gleam in her eye. "See? Coran agrees with me."

Coran stepped back, waving his hands in front of him. "I didn't say I agreed. I said it was clever. I still think it's too risky to run in without a better plan than just 'Get close enough to drop a sensor.' The cloak looks stronger than it did before, but a minute and a half is still a very short amount of time to run any kind of recon mission from an outer moon all the way to a planet."

Keith moved forward now, too, his hands clenched in front of him. "Then we need more lions in the air. Hunk and I can do a hit-and-run to distract the main fleet while Pidge flies in low under the sensors. We'll be quick. In and out." He looked at Pidge, then at Hunk. "All three of us. We realize this isn't the main rescue mission, not yet. We just need to get more information."

"A mission like that will be very tight." Coran moved back over to the main console, which showed a current image of the planet and the Galra fleet blockading it. "The timing will have to be near perfect, or we risk losing another lion." He looked at the three remaining paladins in the room. "We want to get Shiro and Lance back with us, of course. But we solve nothing with a suicide mission."

"Then we'll get the timing perfect." Keith's lips pursed, and his eyes sparked. "We need to make sure our teammates are okay."

Everyone looked to Allura. She looked around at them, her eyes large and liquid with sympathy, but still reluctant. "I understand where you are all coming from," she said. "But I'm still not sure that the rewards outweigh the risks of this plan. I believe in Shiro's ability to take care of himself and Lance, even if Lance is injured. The Galra are focused on the lions, which gives the pilots relative free rein, at least for now. We risk exposing their position with this plan. And if the best reward we can expect is just to reassure ourselves of what we ought to already know..."

Hunk felt his hands clench into fists. He understood what Allura was saying. And maybe it was selfish to want to risk so much just to know for sure that Lance and Shiro were okay at the moment. But he still wanted to do it.

Suddenly, alarm lit up Pidge's eyes, and she put her hand to her ear, where she had stuck an earpiece to listen to the Galra traffic they could catch on their long-range sensors. Her shoulders shot up around her ears, and the others turned to look at her in mute surprise. She didn't look at them, staring off into the distance as she listened to the chatter in her ear. But Hunk could swear that she'd somehow gotten even paler than usual, and Pidge was, like, the palest person Hunk knew.

After a few minutes, Pidge looked up at them. Her face was grim and set, her shoulders still hunched and tense. "I think we just lost any choice we might have had."

Allura's hand tightened on Hunk's shoulder, and this time it wasn't because she was trying to reassure him.

"What do you mean?"

"Shiro and Lance aren't going to be able to lay low anymore. They need to run. And we have to warn them." Swiftly, she explained why.

Before she was done, Allura and Coran were already moving back to their consoles, talking to each other in high, tense voices. They were figuring out the timing on the fly, telling Hunk where to find a BLIP sensor to stow on the green lion, pointing out to Keith the best spots for a hit-and-run on the fleet, charting a course for the green lion to take during those precious ninety ticks of invisibility.

Hunk's heart bunched up in his throat. So the mission was a go, whether they wanted it to be or not. He was...glad? Yeah, glad.

And then he was out the door, running for the lions.

X

Despite his best intentions, Shiro had fallen into something like a daze about the time dawn started to lighten the edge of the sky. Maybe he could get along with any sleep at all for a while, but that didn't mean it felt good. He would have to check the survival gear and see if he could find the Altean equivalent to caffeine pills. Or something stronger.

Despite the fuzziness in his brain, though, the reaction of running at a high level of stress for more than half a day, part of him was almost hyper-focused on the sound of Lance's breathing behind him. It had gotten worse during the night, which shouldn't be a surprise, but still worried Shiro more than he could consciously acknowledge. Pneumonia was... It was really bad news. The raspiness in Lance's breath, the shortness of it, the way it sometimes paused for a split second as if his body was forgetting how exactly breathing was supposed to work... It all served to tighten the mucles between Shiro's shoulder blades and worsen his headache.

And he didn't know what to do about it. They didn't have a cryo pod or a hospital or an oxygen tent or an IV. They didn't have any antibiotics or antipyretics or Vick's Vaporub. He had water, awful-tasting ration bars, a foil blanket, and a tree Lance could lean against. That was it. He wasn't even sure that he could risk building a fire. And who knew what the local version of chicken noodle soup was, or if he'd be able to find or make it.

A crackle of static had him raising his head, straining to listen. He whipped his head around to stare at their gear. The helmet. Something was coming through the helmet. Pidge's voice, high and frantic. He couldn't make out the words, just the stress in the intonation.

Shiro scrambled for the helmet, knocking over a few things in his rush. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lance start awake at the noise, eyes struggling to open as his shoulders shifted under the foil blanket. Shiro couldn't spare more attention for him, too focused on the helmet in his hands. He popped it onto his head, his hands shaking.

"Pidge. Pidge! Are you there? Are you coming for us?"

"Shiro! I'm here, but I can't stay, I'm sorry, we don't have time..."

Now Shiro became aware of the noise in the sky outside. He crawled back over to the opening of the shelter and peered out, hoping for a glimpse of that beautiful green lion soaring through the sky. He couldn't see anything; she was too far away. But he heard it, the sound of engines roaring over the horizon, and that was almost as good.

"Listen, Shiro, I can't stay. The ship with that new weapon is orbiting right over this location, and my invisibility cloak won't last for very long. I'm just here to drop off a sensor and warn you. We'll come back for you later. As soon as we can, I promise. But not just yet."

Shiro's heart dropped into his stomach. His hands clenched on the edge of the root he was gripping, holding himself up as he stared out the sky. "I...I understand," he choked out, though he didn't. Not really. He wanted to go now. He wanted to get back to the ship, to his friends and his teammates and his home. To the cryo pod that could save Lance's life.

"But wait...warn me? Why did you come to warn me?"

"The Galra." Pidge's voice was somehow even more frantic. "The Galra are coming, Shiro, I'm sorry, we thought we had more time... We all thought they were only going to go after the lions and leave you alone. But we heard chatter on the comms... They've figured it out."

"What, Pidge? What did they figure out?"

"They figured out that they won't be able to get into the lions without the pilots. They've been trying for hours, and the black lion just keeps blasting them, keeping them back, and the blue lion is hidden under water. So to get the lions out, they're going to come after you and Lance. They're going to capture you and force you to let them into the lions. That's their plan, Shiro. You have to run."

"Wait, run? Run where? Pidge, can you tell me anything else?"

"Sorry..." Pidge's voice was breaking up, the static taking over. The noise in the sky was farther away, distant, almost gone. "Out...time... That's all...know. Run, Shiro! We'll...back... We'll come back!"

And that was it. That was the last clear thing Shiro heard. But it was more than enough.

Behind him, Lance was stirring, pushing weakly at the foil blanket with both hands. He managed to shove it down to his waist, then blinked at Shiro with sticky eyes, his breath harsh in his chest. "Was that...Pidge's voice...?"

Shiro nodded. He moved back over to him, already scooping up the armor he'd removed and putting it on as quickly as he could. He would need to get Lance back into his armor, too. Even broken, it would have to provide some sort of protection. Shiro's hands were steady because he forced them to be, but he could feel the shivering in his heart, in his throat.

Lance rubbed his eyes with a loose fist, still struggling to fully wake up. "What...what did Pidge say?"

"We have to run, buddy." Shiro finished his armor and reached for Lance's, starting with the boot. "We have to run right now."

Lance made a noise of disgust. "Typical. Just when I was getting cozy in our little tree fort."

Laughter stuttered out of Shiro's mouth, startled, unexpected, fleeing like small birds roused from their nest.

"Yeah," he said. "So typical."

Just another day in the life.