"Any luck?"
"Who do you think I am?" Pidge spares a moment to shoot him a withering look before she resumes swiping her way through the console. "I'm in, just need to find where they're hiding it and make the download."
Keith rolls his shoulders against the tension knotting at the back of his neck and shifts his weight, eyes on the door. "Just… hurry up. I've got a bad feeling." The air feels heavy and oppressive, like he's standing under the hum of a high voltage power line. It doesn't help that it's just him and Pidge on this one. There's a hodgepodge squadron of rebel fighters playing catch-me-if-you-can outside as a distraction, but the castle's holding down a siege at the other end of the galaxy. It should be a milk run, the kind of quick in-and-out he and Pidge are good at, but something feels wrong. It's completely irrational and he knows it, but it prickles the hair at the back of his neck.
Pidge casts him a sharp glance, but doesn't call him on it. "Going as fast as I can." Another tense minute rolls by and she straightens up with a triumphant snap of her fingers. "Got it."
He exhales sharply. "Great. Let's get out of here."
"Already on it. Dock straight ahead. Green's waiting to pick us up."
They're close enough that they don't bother with stealth. Exiting via Lion pickup isn't going to be subtle no matter what they do and his hindbrain is screaming that the sooner they leave, the better. They sprint the short hallway to the dock's side entrance. A pair of sentries bar the way, but they've met enough of those by now that they're quick work.
They skid into the dock at a dead run. A shimmering atmospheric barrier stretches out across its open mouth, bright with fire as several of the rebel ships streak past. A long line of berths stands ready in front of it, swarmed by crews of soldiers and technicians. Keith catches sight of a massive truck parked next to the vessels, and something twists in his stomach. The tank in its bed glows with quintessence, searingly bright and electric-feeling even at this distance.
A shout goes up as someone on the floor finally notices them.
"Come on!" Pidge yells. "She's coming in on the left!"
"Got it!" He breaks left half a pace ahead of her and they run for it. The first salvo of weapons fire screams past them as the Green Lion flickers into the visible spectrum just outside, gliding in through the barrier fast and smooth. A hoarse shout and a stutter of jagged movement from the front of the dock catches at his attention and his eyes flick to it automatically.
His eyes widen and his breath catches in his throat. One of the rebel ships spins towards the dock, debris and atmosphere venting from her engines, silent and terrible as a comet. The soldiers and dock workers scatter backwards and Keith is moving before he can think about it. He catches Pidge's hand from where she trails a little behind him and slings her forward towards her Lion with every ounce of weight he can muster behind it. He has barely enough time to register her outraged shout and glimpse the Green Lion lunge forward to catch her before the world explodes.
The downed fighter slams through the atmospheric barrier with a horrific shriek of metal and mismatched roar of jet exhaust. The ground crumples under him and he stumbles forward, the sheet metal of the floor rucking up like fabric under his boots. The engines ignite immediately and catastrophically in the dock's atmosphere as the ship, still under its own propulsion, smashes through berths and machinery like cardboard. A high, deafening whine fills the air as it skids into the quintessence tanker. He has time to see the truck launch into the air, almost slow motion, almost funny, before a blast of heat and pressure shoves him backwards. There's a tearing scream of material high above him and a heavy wall of metal slams into his side with enough force to knock him flat. Something crashes into the side of his head and things go dark.
Keith comes awake to a vicious pound at the side of his head and a confused blur of noise. He inhales sharply against a wave of nausea and chokes as his mouth fills with a heavy liquid tasting like metal and electricity. He coughs and tries to lurch upright, but his helmet thunks almost immediately into something overhead. He gags as much of the metal taste out of his lungs as he can, registers the sting of a scattering of small cuts across his lower face and a cold liquid sloshing through the lower part of his helmet. He brings up a shaky hand and finds his faceplate shattered, cracks spiderwebbing out from a sharp hole near his jaw. Everything smells thick with that metal stench, and for an instant he's sure it's blood, convinced that whatever cracked his helmet went clean through his head and he just hasn't woken up enough to feel it yet. But the smell is more ozone than iron, something in it that sparks at the back of his teeth like static, wrong for blood but familiar in a way he can't place.
At first, he can't make any sense of his surroundings. He's in a small, close space, lit faintly yellow. There's a jagged tangle of metal wreckage not a foot from his face, dripping a firefly glow like paint. When he looks down, he finds it puddling on the ground under him, bleeding gold out onto the floor.
That snaps something into place in his brain and the sudden, vivid image of the tanker flung into the air sears through the back of his eyes. His breath catches as the metal smell finally clicks home.
He's sitting in a small lake of quintessence, crumpled into what remains of the truck's bed, its massive tank leaking sluggishly next to him. The space directly in front of him and to his side is occupied by a dense thicket of metal scrap. The noise at the edge of his consciousness resolves to the heavy drone of engines and the scrape of metal punctuated by distant shouting, slightly distorted through the translator.
Ice goes through him. He's still on the galra cruiser, buried under whatever's left of the dock after the fighter's catastrophic explosion.
"Shit," he whispers.
He clenches his jaw in anticipation of pain and inches himself as upright as he can, feels a terrible relief when all his limbs respond. Everything feels bruised and strained and his stomach turns queasily with the furious pound of his head, but miraculously nothing seems broken and he has enough space to shift himself around. He's trapped in a tiny cavity under the mostly-overturned bed of the tanker. It's probably the only thing that saved him from being squashed into a fine red paste. With both his hands free, he unseals his helmet and lets the trapped quintessence drain out over his breastplate, trying not to think about how his mouth tastes of the stuff and his throat burns with it. A thin rod of metal clatters out into his hand. He blinks down at it for a moment, perplexed. When he flips it around, its diameter is a match for the hole in his faceplate. He touches his fingers gingerly to the long scrape he can feel skating along his jawbone to nick his earlobe, suddenly cold.
There's another shout from behind him and he snaps back into focus. He drags the helmet back over his head and takes stock of his surroundings.
The space directly in front of him and to his left is impassible, a solid wall of heavy, sharp-edged debris. But there's a narrow gap towards the front of the truck, barely visible in the dim yellow light. He squeezes himself past the shoulder of the wreckage and crawls toward it. It goes dark around him as soon as he enters, the weak glow of the quintessence blocked by his body, and he has to feel his way along. The gap proves to be a low tunnel under a crumpled sheet of metal that might once have been part of a wall or ceiling. It's so low his back scrapes along it in some places, so narrow that he has to hold his breath to squirm his shoulders past the sharp-edged ruins of beams and girders impinging on the path. Some old, deep horror in the back of his mind seizes on the idea that it'll collapse on him at any second, pinning him like a bug in a collection, wriggling and trapped in the dark.
It's almost too small for him to get through when his hand comes down on an open space a little ahead and to the side. His heartbeat quickens, and he inches forward to feel it out. It's a square metal enclosure, just big enough for him to crawl through comfortably, maybe originally some part of the ship's ventilation system. When he sticks his arm into it, he finds that it slopes slightly upwards, and when he strains his eyes into the darkness, he thinks he can make out a faint, bluish gleam ahead. He shimmies into it and begins to climb towards that glimmer of maybe-illusory light.
He keeps expecting expecting to find his way blocked, the duct crushed in from the outside. He meets a couple of points where the wall has been partially collapsed, but he's able to worm his way past them and a tenuous hope begins to take shape in him that it might run all the way to the top of the pile.
That spot of maybe-light grows clearer and brighter, until he's certain it's real, not just a trick of his eyes. Finally, he reaches it, a sharp triangle of blue light stark on the floor against the darkness. Past it, the duct elbows, its remaining length going nearly vertical. When he peers up into it, he spies a thin knife-edge of that blue light at the top and the breath punches out of him. He stops there for a few seconds, staring up at that slice of open space and waiting for the sick pound of his head to subside before wedging his shoulders into the opposite wall and hitching himself into a cramped chimney-climb.
Inch by inch, Keith makes his way upwards. His boots and armor thump and scrape along the metal walls, but it's lost in the distant noise of people and machinery. Slowly, the passage grows lighter, and as he gets closer, he can see that the sliver of light at the top is a gap where two sections of the duct have twisted and partially split. By now his shoulder and calf muscles are aching at the strain of the climb and his pulse is a hammer at the base of his throat, but if he can just make that light he'll be out.
At last, he does make it. He hisses out through his teeth as he finally gets a view of what's left of the dock. The whole back half of the room is caved in, buried in a mountain of debris. He can make out part of the fighter's skeleton still, its nose largely intact, its back half entirely gone. The edges of the wreckage swarm with soldiers, hauling the rubble away piece by slow piece. He thinks about being trapped somewhere at the bottom of it, entombed for hours or days, and just as quickly shoves the thought away.
He takes a breath and resettles his shoulders against the wall, squinting up at the section of duct above the split. It continues upward and sideways at a less steep angle than the section he's currently in. When he cranes his head to look in its direction through the gap, he can see it continues only a short span before disappearing into what's left of the wall.
He hesitates only a second before bracing his feet and hands and heaving his upper body into it. He scrabbles at the smooth interior, heart pounding as the ceramic of his armor skids on it, before he gains the leverage to brace his back. One foot at a time, he walks himself up until he's entirely in the upper section. He lets out a breath, looks down into the drop below him, filtered blue with the light leaking in from the outside. And then, as quickly as he's able, he spiders himself upwards.
His heart's in his throat the whole time, waiting to feel the duct bend and crumple under his weight or finally tear loose from the wall altogether. But miraculously, it holds out. Finally, he reaches another sharp bend where it must extend from the wall's interior. He heaves himself past it into a blessedly level passage and crawls singlemindedly forward, intent on putting as much distance as he can between himself and the ruin of the dock. When he comes to an intersection, he turns right and immediately feels more at ease with the line of sight behind him broken.
It's a little ways past that that Keith finally stops, head pounding and shoulders still shaking from the climb. He folds himself into a loose knot of limbs and turns sideways to sit with his back against the duct's wall and just breathes there in the dark. Now that the adrenaline is fading, the cuts on his face sting and his stomach rolls. The side of his head throbs in a dull, sick sort of pain, at war with the familiar tension ache at his temples, and he can feel the tenderness of bruises coming up all along his side. His throat and chest feel scratchy and raw, and everything smells and tastes like the metal-electric burn of quintessence.
He waits for his breath to even out a little before he keys on the comm in his helmet. "Pidge?" He's not sure how long he was out, but it can't be that long. She's going to be furious with him.
His blood goes cold as the comm stays silent, without even the hiss of an open line. He clicks it off and on. Tries Pidge again. The rebels. The other Lions. The castle. Every single line he tries to open is empty and quiet as space. A weight lodges in his stomach, and he taps at the sensors embedded on his vambrace, trying to bring up the armor's diagnostics. They're completely unresponsive, inert as a stone. He tries the armor's other functions, everything from the medical assist to navigation. It's all dead.
He stares down at the scuffed, unresponsive surface of the armor's interface and bites down on an icy swell of panic as the situation sinks in. He's trapped behind enemy lines, cut off with no way to call for help. He has no ship, no supplies, no backup. The castle and the Red Lion are on the other side of a galaxy. Pidge… he feels it like a kick in his chest and he sucks in a painful breath. The armor's offline. His tracker and vitals have got to be dark. She probably thinks he's dead. He's utterly alone, trapped in the vents like a rat.
He sits there for a while, sick and cold, before finally the rasp of his breath through his sore throat kicks him back into himself. "Come on, Kogane," he mutters. "Get it together." The words echo a little on the duct walls, distorted and tinny, and he shuts up again immediately. He takes a deep breath and then another, does his best to squash the panic down into something small and compact and ignorable. He's alive and mostly uninjured and not captured. He just needs to stay that way until he can get off the ship. Maybe he can get a message out on a comm somewhere or steal one of those little Empire fighters. With any luck, the ship's crew will assume he escaped with Pidge.
Or that he died in the blast.
But even if they don't… Keith frowns and thoughtfully slides his foot forward until it hits the opposite wall of the duct. His knee's still bent when it makes contact. Even if the ship's crew mounts a search for him, they might not think to look in the vents. Not for a while, at least. Shiro or Hunk wouldn't fit in here easily. None of the galra he's seen would fit at all. He'd learned pretty quickly as a kid that people wouldn't look for him in places they couldn't reach themselves. The whole ship has to be ventilated - if he stays in here, he might have his run of the place without anyone realizing it.
He breathes in and out again. Right. It's not much of a plan, but it's better than nothing. For now, he needs to put distance between himself and the dock. After that… he flexes his fingers, thinking. He needs to figure out where he is on the ship. Find somewhere to get food and water. Find his way to a hangar or communications. From there, he's going to have to play it by ear.
One final breath, and then he rolls back onto his hands and knees and starts off into the darkness.
Keith isn't sure how long he travels. The vents are totally lightless, monotonous and endless, only marginally better than his near-tomb under the wreckage. The only thing that keeps it from feeling like being buried again is the constant stir of air. The floor and walls are coated in a thin layer of dust and what has to be galra hair, and when he blindly feels at corners, sometimes his fingers brush up against a soft mat of growth like moss. The air carries a thick smell of heat and damp and machinery, and there's a constant low hum that rattles all through his bones, some combination of distant fans and the ship's engines reverberating through the ducts. When he comes to intersections, he picks directions randomly at first, eager to confuse his trail and distance himself from the ruined dock. Eventually, he doesn't bother and just continues straight when he comes to them, haunted by the idea of circling endlessly in the dark, unable to find his way out.
It's thoroughly miserable going. The adrenaline is long gone by now, and his head pounds furiously. He can feel his cheeks and the bridge of his nose flushed with it. All the bruises and small cuts are making themselves known, and the sharp metal taste of quintessence lingers at the back of his throat. His jaw muscles are sore with tension, and there's a building ache in the bones of his shins and forearms from crawling on hands and knees so long. The dead armor is heavy and awkward in the cramped space, the pauldrons scraping at corners and the greaves slipping on the condensation that beads up at seams on the floor. The sound of it echoes down the passages, only to be eaten up by the constant, rhythmic noise of the fans.
He's lost all sense of time and direction. By the time he gives in and resigns himself to a restless, cramped sleep wedged into a slimy-smelling corner, he feels bleary and slow and the headache has taken on some of the familiar, acute pain of dehydration. He doesn't feel hungry yet, just hollow and slightly queasy, but that's probably the hit to the head talking. He curls up into a ball in the least damp place he can find and tries to sleep. All the aches and pains are magnified by sitting still, and he has to keep stopping himself from working his jaw to try and relieve the soreness. He wishes, suddenly and overwhelmingly, that he could talk to Shiro. He curls himself tighter and presses his shoulders into the grimy surface of the duct, counts his breaths until he finally falls asleep.
When he wakes, everything feels worse. The vague ache in his shins and forearms has graduated to a persistent, gnawing pain concentrated at his joints. The headache drums viciously through his temples, and his mouth is sore and dry, his gums tender and tasting of metal and electricity. His eyelids feel sticky, and his eyes ache from trying to focus in the dark. With no other choice, he gets back on his hands and knees and continues on.
When he finally glimpses a faint fall of light up ahead, it's a relief so intense it feels almost like a physical blow to his chest. He creeps up on it slowly, doing his best to stifle the scrape of the armor along the walls. It's coming from a grate on the left hand side of the tee up ahead of him, thin stripes of violet crossing the duct's floor. It's the same dim blacklight that all the galra ships seem to run, but after so long in the dark it might as well be sunlight. When he looks further down the intersecting duct, he can see more grates at regular intervals, punching out bright patches into the shadows. For a few minutes, he lies there, the headache and pains retreating into the background while his eyes drink in the luminous spill of dust motes through the light.
He inches closer, keeping himself as quiet and out-of-sight as he can, and peers out. He's up high off the ground, looking down on a narrow hallway lined with doors. It seems empty at first, but then one of the doors further down slides open and a pair of galra exits. They're wearing Empire grey, but not the body armor he's used to seeing on soldiers. One of them carries what looks like a toolbox, shifting it in his grip while the other checks something off on a tablet.
"What's next?" asks the one with the toolbox.
The other soldier consults his tablet. "Agip-11."
"Pressure readings over there are always off."
A lackadaisical shrug. "Technical can figure it out if it's important."
"Technical's not going to think it's important until it bites them in the ass."
The soldier with the tablet casts a glance down the hall and makes a rattling chuff under his breath. "Tell the foreman if you care so much."
The other shakes his head, ears tilting back as he hefts the toolbox. "Yeah. Right."
"Come on, we're losing time."
They move off down the hall, passing directly underneath Keith's perch. He lets them get a few steps ahead, and then turns himself to follow. With any luck, they'll lead him towards more inhabited parts of the ship.
The ceramic of his greave skids on the smooth interior of the duct, and he catches himself on an elbow with a deafening bang.
His heart goes into his throat as the two galra startle and whip back towards the noise. He freezes, barely daring to breath, pulled back as far as he can from the grate while they stare up at the ceiling.
"What the hell was that?"
The one with the toolbox shifts his grip on it for a second before giving a dismissive flick of his fingers. "Probably just a maintenance bot losing its hold. Happens sometimes if you don't charge them enough to keep up the mag grip." His lip lifts. "Technical can figure it out if it's important."
His companion issues an irritated growl. "We've got eight more points to check. Let's go."
Keith doesn't relax until he hears the open and close of a door. When he does, he sinks back against the side of the duct with a quiet breath, the pulse still quick in his throat. He looks down at the smooth ceramic plates of the armor, sensors dead, grey and smudged from crawling through the grime of the ventilation system. "Goddamnit," he mutters.
He retreats reluctantly to the dark section of the vents, where he peels the armor off piece by piece. It's not doing him any good now, he tells himself. It's a liability more than anything. Noisy and hard to move around in in here, easy to spot. None of its systems work. Not even any good as passive vacuum protection, thanks to the cracked faceplate. If he gets caught, he's going to be dead whether he's wearing it or not.
Shoving the pieces into a black, musty section of duct still feels like a betrayal.
Finally, he's down to just the black undersuit. He considers the bayard, and after a moment, shoves it awkwardly down his collar to make an uncomfortable lump against his chest. He won't be able to get to it in a hurry, but it's the best he can do for now. He shivers a little, suddenly cold despite the headache-flush across his cheeks and nose. He gives the armor one last glance. In the shadows, it looks like nothing more than an indistinct pile of abandoned junk, slowly streaking under a drip overhead. He turns and heads back for the light, leaving it behind.