Keith pulls up abruptly in front of the shack, the desert quiet deafening after the roar of the bike's engine. Lance is talking before he hits the ground.
"Okay, just what was that? What exactly happened back there? Because I feel like we just landed in a whole lot of trouble and I'd really like to know why."
Pidge has had the entire ride to let the adrenaline wear off and stew over the disaster. She levels a glare at Keith. "We wouldn't be in trouble if someone hadn't taken unnecessary risks."
He stiffens and glowers back at her. "I'm not the one who went back after things had already gone bad."
"If I hadn't gone back, you'd be sitting in the city jail right now. If you'd gotten out of there when I told you instead of waiting around on the last measly six percent-"
"It would have been fine!"
"It would not have been fine!"
"I would have-"
"Guys! Guys!" Hunk eases himself off the bike, looking slightly queasy. "Can we, uh, save this for later?"
"Yeah, as fascinating and incriminating as this conversation is, we're still waiting on that explanation," Lance adds.
"And can we maybe go inside?" Hunk appends hopefully. "It's hot out here."
She and Keith stare each other down for a minute, the connection between them crackling and spiky, before Keith gives a tense jerk of his chin and marches towards the shack. "Fine."
"What is this place, anyways?" says Lance, eying the rickety porch steps.
"I live here," Keith responds shortly.
"Figures."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing!" says Hunk, planting himself firmly in front of Lance. "It's, uh, cozy."
Keith casts a withering look in his direction, but unlocks the door and pulls it open. They all crowd in, packed together awkwardly in the center of the room. With so many people in it, the shack's interior looks even more cramped and disheveled than normal. She can feel Keith's discomfort prickling up her spine, making her fingers want to twitch, and shoots him another glare. Good. He can be uncomfortable for a while after almost getting himself arrested. He scowls back and tugs at the too-short sleeves of the Garrison uniform he's still wearing.
"I'm going to change." He levels a pointed stare at Lance and Hunk. "Don't touch anything."
He ducks into the shack's tiny bathroom. The door closes with a decisive thump and they're all left standing in uncomfortable silence.
"Nice guy," mutters Lance.
"We did just kind of barge into his house," Hunk says.
After a moment, Pidge huffs and marches over to plunk herself down on the end of the futon. Lance and Hunk follow suit, with slightly more trepidation. It leaves them all staring across the room at the corkboard they've been using to triangulate the Knell.
Hunk eyes it curiously and starts to gesture towards it. "What's-"
"Thanks," she interjects before he can get any farther. "For helping us out back there."
He frowns, eyes darting between her and the board, but after a moment he looks away and lowers his hand. "Sure," he says. "You looked pretty upset, and, I mean, we're friends, right? I don't think you'd be involved in anything really bad. Although I, uh. I did have some second thoughts when the cops showed up."
Lance snorts. "I still can't believe you know how to pick locks."
Hunk groans. "I didn't think that was a skill I was ever going to have to use in real life."
There's a creaking thump as the bathroom door opens and Keith emerges, back in casual clothes. His presence in the connection is still prickly and tense, but he feels more settled. She catches his eye as he comes out. His jaw lifts a little into the air, but after a brief pause he comes around to lean up against the wall next to her end of the futon. There's another awkward little silence, and then Lance clears his throat. "So, yeah. About that explanation. What was that?" He gestures expansively. "How do you two even know each other? You-" he points at Pidge "-just transferred in, but he-" Keith tenses, shoulders bunching up under his jacket "-got kicked out sometime last year. How are you in cahoots?"
"Cahoots," she drawls.
"You know what I mean!"
There's an uncertain pause. She and Keith exchange a glance, neither of them sure where to begin. Finally, he shrugs his shoulders straight and gives a sharp nod her way. "Pidge built a radio receiver and was coming out here to test it."
Hunk tilts his head questioningly. "Like a hobby thing, or-"
"I was trying to listen in on the Garrison deep space data band," she cuts in bluntly. Keith raises an eyebrow at her and she shrugs.
Lance squints skeptically. "Not gonna lie, snooping on Garrison transmissions sounds super sketchy already, but go on."
Hunk shrugs. "I mean, they're out there for anybody with the right equipment to pick up. It's not like they can stop people from listening in if they want to."
"I guess. But I don't get how that leads up to all of us almost getting arrested."
"I'm getting there," she says, and takes a breath. "We found the Kerberos mission's black box signal."
Keith gives a choppy nod in her direction, arms crossed over his chest. "Pidge decoded it and-"
"-we both looked at the telemetry data. There's-"
"-nothing wrong with it," Keith finishes. "There was no crash."
There's a short silence. Hunk lets out a heavy breath. "Whoof. Okay, yeah. If that's true, that's pretty serious."
"If it's true." Lance raises his hands defensively as both Pidge and Keith turn to scowl at him. "Look, I'm not saying you're lying, but Kerberos is a long ways away. Maybe you picked up a different transmission. How do you know that's really what you were listening to?"
"The mission ID is in the message header," she says flatly. "It's definitely the Kerberos mission."
Hunk frowns thoughtfully. "Are you sure you're reading it right? Maybe it just doesn't look like a crash because the gravity and atmospheric conditions are different."
"No." Keith shakes his head. "I flew the sim for Kerberos. I know what it's supposed to look like."
"Wait, how'd you fly the sim for Kerberos? You were gone before that started showing up in lab." Lance interjects.
Keith flinches minutely before his shoulders go up and he slouches further into the wall. "It doesn't matter. Even if I hadn't flown it, you can tell what's going on from the log. No big inertial swings. Attitude's even for the whole descent. Sh- the pilot was making minor adjustments all the way up until landing. The engines shut off normally after touchdown. There's nothing wrong with it."
Lance makes a face like he's bitten into something sour and Hunk frowns. "If there was no crash, what happened, though?" he says. "Why would the Garrison say it was pilot error if it wasn't?"
Another weighty, uncertain pause while Hunk and Lance stare at them. "The receiver picked up something else too," she says finally.
"'Something else?'" Hunk blinks. "Like what?"
She feels Keith shift on his feet a little, both of them trying to figure out how to say it.
Lance saves them the trouble. "Wait," he says slowly, squinting. "Is this going to be about aliens?"
She and Keith exchange a glance.
"Are you kidding me? We all almost got arrested for aliens?"
"Look, just hear us out, okay?" she gets out. "It's not just a weird, glitchy signal or something, it's actual radio chatter, people talking to each other. It's definitely coming from out near Kerberos."
"There's not supposed to be anyone else out there," Keith adds. "And it sounds-"
"-all wrong for a legitimate mission. There's no way the Garrison doesn't know about it-"
"-so they have to be purposefully hiding it."
Lance stares at them, eyebrows raised, and after a moment, Hunk clears his throat. "Um. It's definitely true that there's not supposed to be anyone else out there," he advances cautiously.
Pidge scowls down at the table. "I think they're lying about what happened to the Kerberos mission because they don't want anyone to know about the aliens."
"Okay, fine," Lance says, frowning. "Let's say you're right. Let's say the Kerberos lander didn't crash, there's aliens out there, and there's some kind of conspiracy to hide all of that. That still doesn't explain what you were doing back there."
"It's not like the Garrison was going to tell us what was going on. How else were we supposed to find out?"
"So…" Hunk says. "You were what, trying to break into the Garrison's files?"
"It wasn't hard," she mutters. Keith snorts.
"Okay, but wait," Lance says incredulously. "You figured the Garrison was running some kind of actual, no-shit government cover-up, and you jumped straight to breaking and entering? Why wouldn't you just… I dunno, call a news outlet or something?"
Pidge blinks dumbly, a little taken aback. Keith feels similarly nonplussed. Lance stares at them a second and groans. "Okay, I'm starting to understand how you're friends."
"Did you find anything?" Hunk interrupts. He holds his hands up hastily. "Not that I'm, uh, condoning the breaking and entering part."
Her mouth snaps shut. "We got something. Everything on the Kerberos mission we could find on the server." She directs a pointed sideways look at Keith. "Though we could probably have lived without that last six percent."
He narrows his eyes back at her and his mental presence goes opaque and prickly. "Whatever. We got it."
"All right. Let's see it then," says Lance. She looks over to him and he gestures in the air. "What? Not saying I completely buy it, but…" he frowns and runs a hand through his hair. "I'll believe you found something." He snorts. "Besides, we almost got arrested for this. I want to see what you got."
She hesitates, a heavy, nauseous weight lodging itself under her ribs, feels Keith do the same. If they really did get the Kerberos files, then that drive is full of the last few months of her dad and Matt's lives. The last anyone saw of them before they were gone. Maybe finally an answer for what really happened to them. It feels like something that should be private, not a… a demonstration for other people. Keith's okay. Keith knows what it means. But to Lance and Hunk, the Kerberos mission is just an impersonal tragedy.
But she can't not know. She grabs her computer out of her bag and slips the drive in as soon as it boots. They all lean in to see.
She feels her pulse pick up as she scans the files. "No wonder it took so long to download," she mutters. "This is… a lot."
"You weren't kidding," says Hunk uneasily. "We are definitely not supposed to be looking at this."
A lot of it is uninteresting. There's a hefty collection of folders relating to program management and communications with other government agencies. Those might be worth investigating later if they really hit a dead end, but they're not what she's looking for. Her eye snags on a directory titled "Mission Logs", feels Keith's attention catch on it as well. Inside, she finds a long list of subdirectories labeled by date. The first is the day of mission launch. The very last is the day of the landing. Heart in her throat, she opens it up. It gives her a handful of specialized file types, a folder of high-resolution images, and a surprising number of raw text files.
Lance swoops further in and jabs a finger at the screen. "Is that what I think it is?"
She follows the line of his finger and swallows. It's a large file with a video extension, buried in a list of crew mission notes. Distantly, she can feel Keith's hands clenched so tight on his elbows that her own knuckles ache. She selects it before she can second-guess it.
The video player opens on a black screen, and for a moment she has the awful thought that the file is corrupted or encrypted somehow. But then there's a muffled snap of static and the screen lightens to a grey, indistinct blur. Slowly, it pulls out and resolves to a gloved hand against a dim background. The camera tilts, and a helmet comes into view. Behind it, there's the washed out glare of floodlights against a gritty surface, pale and shining in the half-dark.
"All set up, Takashi?"
She inhales sharply, feels something swell and burn at the base of her throat. The voice is faintly crackly at the edges with radio static, but that's her dad. There's a terrible, painful lurch through the connection. Keith makes a small, hurt noise and leans in closer. After a moment, his hand grips her shoulder, just shy of bruisingly tight. It lasts only a second before he draws back, but the pressure helps. She takes a breath, and then another.
"Oh wow," murmurs Lance, uncharacteristically quiet. "That's really them."
"It sure looks like it," says Hunk, almost whispering.
They watch in silence for the next few minutes, as if they're all a little afraid of breaking some spell. On the screen, her dad and Matt and Shiro coordinate on the best place to take a core sample. They're focused on what they're doing, but they're joking back and forth as they work. They sound excited. Happy. The leaden ball of dread in her stomach rolls its weight up under her breastbone, waiting.
Hunk's voice shakes her out of her daze. "So if they really made it to Kerberos, what happened?"
Lance frowns. "Got to be something in here that shows it. What's at the end of the video?"
Pidge hesitates and glances at the bottom corner of the screen. There's another four hours to go before the file ends. Part of her wants to just keep watching. But even if she were alone, she's not sure she could stand to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, waiting for whatever it is to happen. Keith's a tight, jagged knot in the back of her mind, caught up on the same snarl she is. She glances over to to him. There's a stinging flinch through the link when he catches her eye, but he gives her a short, jerky nod. She marshals her expression straight and begins to slowly drag the tracker through the footage.
The screen flickers grey and white as she speeds through. They watch as the crew gathers core samples and takes sonar images in doubletime and the shadows cast by the floodlights slowly lengthen as Kerberos tumbles over its axis. Sped up like this, in the anemic light of the floodlamps, it looks almost like an old black and white film.
Abruptly, the screen goes purple, and then white, the color shocking after the washed-out landscape. They all start.
"What-" Lance gets out.
"What was that?" asks Keith tensely.
"I don't know." The pulse at her throat is beating like a drum. She drags the tracker back until the scene clears.
At first, nothing much seems to have changed. The crew have acquired several core samples, laid out on a tray for transport, and are debating on whether to move to the ridge to their left or try a new spot on the crater floor. After about two minutes, they've decided on the ridge. Her dad bends to collapse the coring probe, and Shiro and Matt pull the tray towards him, their steps floating in Kerberos' low gravity.
A shadow creeps over them. It takes Pidge a moment to realize how wrong it is - there's no atmosphere on Kerberos, no clouds to cover the sun. Keith realizes it at the same time, and the link goes almost painfully taut, both of them holding their breath. On the screen, Shiro notices it first, dropping his end of the tray. He gapes up at the sky for a second and then calls to the others, voice frantic. Matt and her dad turn to respond, and there's a terrible moment where they're frozen, staring as it lumbers into the camera's view, a long grey hull eating up the whole sky.
"Holy shit," says Lance lowly.
Her fingers clench tight on the edge of her computer. Nausea coils up in her stomach. She doesn't want to watch them all get killed. But she has to know.
It happens very quickly. The view shakes with an impact that sends the core samples flying, loud enough that the video's sound clips and then cuts completely. There's a flash of violet light bright enough to saturate the camera, and she catches the crew's shadows silhouetted against it as they're inhaled into the ship, tiny against its bulk. For a handful of seconds, the screen is white and still. And then normal exposure begins to bleed sluggishly back in. The enormous vessel lifts ponderously, Kerberos' weak sunlight trickling across the ground. The camera remains staring blindly over the empty landing site and smashed core samples. Shakily, she hits the stop.
Hunk gulps. "That looked pretty real."
"It sure did, buddy." Lance's eyes are wide and his mouth is set in an unfamiliar grim line. His eyes dart over to her and Keith. "I take it all back. You were right about the aliens."
"Words I never thought I'd say, but yeah," Hunk adds, and shakes his head. "Oh man. Just what did we get ourselves into?"
Pidge fishes for words, but nothing comes up. Her brain is still stuck on her dad and Matt being lifted into that huge grey ship.
Keith's voice breaks the silence. "You don't have to." It comes out rough and abrupt. Her sense of him is all tangled up and knotted over itself. "Get into it, I mean."
Lance makes a high, uncomfortable laugh and gestures expansively at their little group clustered around the computer. "Think you're a little late there."
Keith shrugs, a sharp twitch of his shoulders. "Just say we talked you into helping us. Say you didn't know what we were doing and you never saw what we got."
"I'm not going to pretend I never saw that!"
"And we're not going to throw Pidge under the bus like that," Hunk states firmly.
Keith starts back like he's been stung. "I'm not-"
Her name shakes Pidge halfway out of her daze. "It probably doesn't matter." She feels off, weirdly distant. "They know I tried to break into that server before. They're going to put two and two together eventually."
"Wait, what?"
"What do you mean you tried to break in before?" Lance throws his hands up into the air. "Man, I just don't get it. I mean, yeah, obviously this is a huge deal," he gestures at the computer, "but what were you doing breaking in before? Why do you care that much in the first place?"
She sucks in a breath, but Keith beats her to the punch. "None of your business."
"Guys, come on, we can-"
"What do you mean, 'none of my business'? We're all involved in this-"
"Look, he's right," she says. Her voice comes out more steady than she expects. "You don't have to get involved in this." Lance opens his mouth and she barrels on before he can get anything out. "Just think about it." The shack suddenly feels suffocatingly close and tight and the tension through the link rubs against her thoughts like sandpaper. "I'm going outside for a bit."
She stuffs her computer into her bag and marches to the door. Keith follows without her needing to ask.
The heat and brightness of the air outside hits like a hammer. It shakes some of the stifled feeling out of her and she just stands there and breathes for a couple of seconds, Keith a tall shadow at her side. She eyes the shade of her usual spot on the porch longingly, but she can hear the murmur of Hunk and Lance's voices inside. Keith catches that train of thought and jerks his head over towards his bike, a suggestion of destination leaching through the connection. She nods and follows.
They creep around to the far side of the bike and sit side-by-side under the stabilizer, where the body casts a long shadow over the ground. It's a close, hidden space, warm with red reflections bouncing off the painted metal. There's a flavor to Keith's thoughts that makes it familiar. Safe.
"They took them," he bursts out once they're hidden out of sight. "Shiro and Matt and your dad. They got all the way to Kerberos, and somebody took them." His fists clench tight, nails biting into the material of his gloves. He feels too big for his skin, holding himself perilously still against a boiling internal pressure.
She takes an unsteady breath, her bag's strap biting into the palms of her hands. She feels weird and disconnected. Like she wants to cry, but it's all crumpled up, compressed into a hard little ball and locked up deep inside her chest. "They're alive, though. Or they were. They might still be out there somewhere."
His breath catches, and for an instant the connection goes bright and painful, but it crumbles back in on itself and he snorts bitterly. "For all the good it does us. We're stuck here."
She flinches back. Stuck. "Can't even go back to the Garrison. They're probably going to figure out who I am."
Keith frowns and darts a glance sideways at her. "You don't know that."
"They definitely saw me back there."
"That doesn't mean you did anything except help me get out."
"Iverson caught you leaving his office," she snaps. "They're going to realize his computer accessed that server. They don't have to be geniuses to figure out it's the same server I tried to get into." He's quiet to that, and she can't keep herself from muttering sullenly, "It wouldn't have been a problem if you'd gotten out of there when I told you."
He stiffens. "It made sense, okay? There were only a few percent left."
"A few percent was definitely not worth almost getting arrested."
"They knew!" he snaps. Something ugly ratchets its way through the connection, hollow and painful. "The Garrison knew this whole time what happened to Shiro and Matt and your dad! They fed us that bullshit story about pilot error and they dragged Shiro's name through the mud and they made a fucking sim run out of it! I wasn't going to leave it just because it was cutting it a little close!"
She is abruptly and incandescently furious. "We didn't spend all that time planning this just so you could risk your neck at the last second!"
"You're the one who went back afterwards! You were supposed to get out of there, not incriminate yourself!"
"Like hell. You think I was going to just leave you there to get your dumb ass hauled off to jail?"
"The whole point of me being the one to do it was to keep you clean! It doesn't matter if I get arrested! I've been arrested before! You-" he makes a frustrated rasp in the back of his throat and his hand cuts a sharp gesture though the air.
She sucks in a sharp breath and thwaps him upside the head with the overlong sleeve of her shirt. Keith lurches forward with an unidentifiable startled noise. "Yeah, it matters if you get arrested! We're-" What the hell are they, anyways? Co-conspirators? Partners in crime? Psychic penpals? "-friends, asshole! You don't get to put yourself at risk like that and act like it's not a big deal."
He stares at her for an instant, eyes wide and shocked, and then his brows draw down thunderously. "Oh yeah? And what about you? You're taking as many risks as I am."
"I was getting you out! I'm not just recklessly putting myself in harm's way like it doesn't even matter."
"Bullshit." He narrows his eyes at her. "You faked an identity and broke into the Garrison before I even knew you. You want to tell me that's not reckless? That there's no consequences if you get caught? I'm not stupid, Pidge."
She jerks back like she's been burned, mouth open to tell him he's full of shit. Before she can do it, there's a bang as the shack door clatters open.
"Hey! Bonnie and Clyde! Where'd you go?"
"Uh, Pidge? Keith? You out here? I think we have a problem."