A blur of movement was the only warning Alejandro had, but that and long habit were all he needed to duck out of the way as a Tirmant pinwheeled past at eye level. Straightening, he glanced over his shoulder and laughed as he saw the small alien, a speedy puffball with three wings, bounce off the side of a H'ress's head and flutter off down another corridor. Shaking his head in amusement, the Human continued his wandering along the halls of the ship.

While the dream he'd had the night before had been a welcome change from the endless rounds of nightmares, and had resulted in he and Kurogane reliving happier memories together for hours in the dim night-cycle lighting of their private bedroom in the Castle, it had put Alejandro in a restlessly nostalgic mood that set him to wandering around the Long Wind alone while Kurogane joined in on the strategy discussions with Shiro and Allura. As he walked, he trailed his fingers along the wall, feeling the bumps where wall plates met, the different textures of metals, plastics, and forcefields. All around him the ship bustled with life and energy, a floating city of thousands all going about their daily tasks.

The Long Wind he'd lived on for over two cycles had been like this, once. So many of the faces here were ones he knew, had fought alongside for years although they didn't know him now. He knew who flew each fighter ship in the hangar, by name, species, and combat style and skills. He knew who the medics were, the strategists, the repair crews. He knew the cooks and teachers, the artists and the children. He knew their names and faces, what they liked and who they loved and how they lived.

He also knew how they died. He'd mourned them all, after all, as the war went on and fighters went to battle but didn't come back and ships were lost and their people with them, until the last despairing handfuls of faces vanished into burning explosions and cold vacuum and a wave of blazing crimson.

Cracked walls and damaged lighting started to overlay themselves in his vision. Alejandro stopped and pressed his forehead to the smooth wall, trying to concentrate on the sensation to ground himself as his breath shuddered in his lungs. That was then, this is now, he reminded himself. Things were going to turn out differently. He wasn't going to lose any more family. Not again.

Before his thoughts could spiral too far a light touch on his shoulder startled him, his head jerking sideways until he met the concerned gaze of Malrento. "Breathe, child." The old Altean murmured softly, taking an exaggerated breath in demonstration. Alejandro nodded and closed his eyes for a moment, focusing on forcing air into his aching lungs. The comforting hand on his shoulder helped, and shortly his vision cleared. The blue paladin gave Malrento a grateful, albeit shaky smile, receiving a proud one in return. "Better. Is everything alright?"

"Yeah." The word came out hoarsely, and Alejandro had to swallow hard and try again. "Yeah. Just thinking too much." He glanced down the corridor again, but all he could see was the ship as it was now, full of life and energy, rather than the weary despair that had permeated every corner of the Long Wind as the losing battles they faced wore them down. "It got away from me."

Malrento hummed thoughtfully and patted his shoulder. "Perhaps I can assist with a distraction. A tour of the ship?"

Alejandro chuckled and shook his head. "I lived here for two cycles in my own timeline, Malrento, but thank you. Although…" An idea occurred to him and he brightened. "If you're not busy, I'd be interested in learning more about quintessence. I never really got the chance before, we were spending so much time in battle." He looked at the Altean hopefully.

It was the older alien's turn to laugh softly. "I would be delighted, Paladin. Come, let us find somewhere comfortable to sit and talk." Turning away, the Altean set an easy pace deeper into the ship and Alejandro followed alongside. "Before we begin, however, I must warn you that I can only teach you what I know, and that is far from everything." Malrento's tone was apologetic as he spoke. "Much knowledge was lost with the destruction of Altea, especially when it came to the uses of quintessence. What I do know has been painstakingly relearned over the last ten thousand cycles by the handful of amvel nayeta born into each generation and passed down to those that came after them."

The blue paladin held up a hand to stop him before he could continue. "Okay, quick question. What exactly is an amvel nayeta? The Castle of Lions doesn't translate the term. I know Allura said she had the abilities of one."

Malrento nodded in confirmation. "Among Alteans, there are three classes of ability when it comes to quintessence. Amvel solta, amvel malamya, and amvel nayeta. An amvel solta can sense quintessence, but cannot manipulate it in any way. Your Coran is an amvel solta, I believe." Alejandro hummed in agreement, listening carefully. "The second group, amvel malamya, have a limited ability to manipulate their own quintessence. It allows them to operate equipment such as your Castle of Lions or to commune with a Balmera, and if they are strong enough, to operate a teleduv. Avenol is an amvel malamya."

"The final class, amvel nayeta, is much rarer than the other two. In addition to the abilities of an amvel malamya, an amvel nayeta can manipulate the ambient quintessence around them, giving them much greater resources. They can also use it in a wider variety of ways, including shields and attacks composed of pure quintessence."

"So like what Allura can do." Alejandro frowned. "And the Druids."

"Exactly. All of the Empire's Druids are amvel nayeta."

The paladin stared at his feet as he walked, thinking hard. Something about that didn't seem to add up quite right. "That doesn't make sense, though. You said they were rarer than the other groups. How could there be so many in the Empire? You'd think we'd see the other classes as well, at least some amvel malamya if nothing else since they can operate a teleduv."

Malrento sighed, turning off the main hallway into a small lounge. "Let me rephrase. They were rarer on Altea. Perhaps one in fifty or one hundred thousand, I believe? I don't know the exact numbers, and not every amvel nayeta chose to go into the guild to be trained by the others. That, however, is in the natural gene pool. In the case of them Empire, however, they started with a gene pool consisting entirely of amvel nayeta."

"Allowing for a much higher birth rate of others, I'm guessing." Alejandro scowled thoughtfully as he flopped onto one of the couches. "How did they manage that, though?"

"When Zarkon turned against Altea, it naturally caused a rift between the paladins. According to the stories, the Druids are descended from the amvel nayeta guild members who followed their leader to Zarkon's side." Malrento explained, seating himself across from Alejandro and regarding him seriously.

The paladin blinked and sat up. Some of the Alteans had sided with Zarkon? "Their leader?"

"Princess Acalli. Younger sister to King Alfor, head of the amvel nayeta guild, and the original Blue Paladin of Voltron."

Alejandro felt a sharp chill in his gut. Zarkon was not the only paladin to turn on his teammates? And his predecessor, the Blue Paladin, had taken the side of the Galra Empire? "I thought blue paladins were supposed to be all about loyalty and trust because of their quintessence?"

The Altean shook his head sadly, holding up a hand. "As I told you when I began training the others, the aspects can take surprising forms in a person, and the personality traits are the most unpredictable of all. If I had to make a guess, I suspect her loyalty and trust centered around Zarkon himself, rather than her fellow paladins as a whole."

Grimacing, Alejandro settled back down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. "I guess that makes sense. I mean, Black's trait is love and will, and like Hunk pointed out, you'd never guess that Zarkon had a loving bone in his body, but Coran says that the old paladins definitely used the aspects even if he hasn't been able to find out what any of them were." Turning his head to the side, he looked over at the old Altean. "And I'm guessing you don't know either."

"Unfortunately not." Malrento agreed apologetically. "As I said, the skillset of an amvel nayeta is something we have had to relearn over the generations. While we do know the characteristics of the aspects, since that knowledge has long been used in other fields and so was not lost with the destruction of Altea, we do not know what abilities they grant. There simply hasn't been an amvel nayeta with single-colour quintessence born into the Icebringers in the ten thousand cycles since, and an Altean must be both in order to make use of them."

"Guess that makes sense." The paladin muttered. It was frustrating, not knowing what to expect as they unlocked the aspects. Lance's Heart aspect had especially come as a shock, since it meant a sixth aspect that had been accessed before the paladins were even aware the aspects existed. What if there were others that they'd used before without even realizing it? "Is there anything else you can tell me about them, while we're on the subject?"

A helpless shrug. "Only that I believe the aspects will take the same form for your team as they did for your predecessors." He held up a hand to forestall Alejandro's obvious question. "No, I don't have any real proof. As I said, the precise form of the aspects has been lost, and since those forms differ for Paladins from the form they take for amvel nayeta, we may never have had them in the first place as they apply here. However, we do believe certain abilities of races such as the Olkari or the Balmerans are derived from the aspects due to those species' natural affinities for certain colours of quintessence, yellow for Balmerans and green for the Olkari. As such, it would make sense for the aspects to manifest themselves in the same set of abilities for any non-paladin with the necessary abilities, and therefore in the same ways for any two paladins with the same colour of quintessence."

Alejandro mulled that over, following Malrento's train of thought. It made sense, certainly. And the aspects indicated common ways of thinking and acting between individuals with the same single-colour quintessence, so it followed that they would gain the same abilities from it. The bit about certain races having abilities derived from the aspects was unexpected. Before he could open his mouth to ask what abilities, though, the door to the lounge whirred open and Pidge burst in and pounced on him. "There you are! I need to talk to you!"

The older Human jumped, flailing at being grabbed unexpectedly. "Ka'shohhl, Pidge! Don't scare me like that!" He demanded, grabbing his chest dramatically. "Gonna give me a heart attack, you will!"

He received a dismissive hand wave for his efforts, making him pout. "You're fine. I need to talk to you, though." She fixed him with a narrow-eyed stare that was achingly familiar and made him drop all pretense of joking around. That was the look she always got when she got wind of a puzzle or challenge that she was determined to figure out come Hell, high water, or Lotor himself.

"Fire away, H-Pidge." He straightened up, turning on the couch to face the green paladin properly. Not for the first time he wondered what was holding her back from unlocking the aspect of courage and curiosity. What the final trigger had been that had unlocked it for Holt. They'd never quite been able to determine in the aftermath what the key had been, only that she'd managed it at a critical moment that had saved Kurogane's life. "What do you need?"

She plopped onto the couch next to him and crossed her legs, pushing her glasses up with two fingers and regarding him seriously. "Have you experienced anything...weird, since you guys came back in time? You or Kurogane?"

"...Weird how?"

"Any weird. Things that are different than they were before you came back. Things that aren't different and should be. Literally anything that seems odd or wrong or out of place."

Alejandro frowned, crossing his arms thoughtfully. Had he? The last few weeks since their arrival had been a chaotic whirlwind of activity, from their efforts to reduce the mobility of the Empire's fleets by reducing the number of Druids they had available to watching the younger versions of themselves and their teammates begin to unlock their aspects. And in the midst of it all the two of them had been struggling to find their place in this time, where they weren't longtime members of the pack, where the rest of the group were still young and mostly unbroken and not haunted by the memories that plagued their sleep, and where neither of them were paladins anymore, his lingering connection to Blue notwithstanding.

Wait. His connection to Blue.

"...There is one thing." He said slowly, noting the gleam in Pidge's eyes as she leaned closer. "Blue. When I first got here, I could sense her presence, but not actually reach her." The former paladin did his best to keep his voice level and not betray the sharp pain of the memory. It had been as though there was a wall between them. "But by the next morning I could feel her again fully, as though I was still bonded to her. I can hear her, and she can hear me." He frowned, concerned. "It's not interfering with Lance's bond, is it?"

There was a surprised blink, then a sharp shake of Pidge's head, messy ginger hair flying everywhere. "No, not that I know of. I'm sure he would have said something. Can Kurogane feel Red, too?"

It was Alejandro's turn to shake his head, not bothering to hide his sadness. "No. Not at all. The only good news is that he's already used to it, since we lost Red months ago in our timeline."

Pidge hummed thoughtfully staring down at the couch consideringly. "And nothing else weird that you can think of? Just that you're still connected to Blue in this time?"

"Not that I'm aware of, no."

There was a prolonged silence, the green paladin obviously deep in concentration while Alejandro and Malrento exchanged amused glances over her head. The Human couldn't help but mouth the Altean word for "green" at the older man with an expressive eye roll, who chuckled and shook his head. Eventually the Altean glanced up at a timepiece on the wall and rose to his feet, touching Pidge on the shoulder to bring her out of her trance. "I believe it is time for dinner." He informed her at her annoyed look. "Come. Your thoughts will move faster for food in your belly."

00000000

Ryou was not, by nature, an aggressive person. Archaeology was not a profession that loaned itself well to short tempers or impatience, and his easy-going personality had stood him in good stead for years. But now, sitting in front of Colleen's laptop in a ranch house in northern Arizona, he found himself for the first time drawing on Takashi's old mantra of 'patience yields focus' as he watched a recording of three Garrison soldiers, including Iverson himself, all wearing quarantine suits, restraining his adopted brother to a medical table in the middle of a crashed alien spacecraft a full year after Takashi had been declared dead at the far edge of the solar system. He watched as they pointedly ignored his frantic warnings about an impending alien invasion (What the hell had happened to him out there that he was rambling and delirious like this?) in favour of trying to sedate him, and took a deep breath through his nose as he fought back the urge to get in his truck and head back to the Garrison and take it apart brick by brick.

"I haven't watched all of it." Colleen said over his shoulder, her arms folded and her face showing a burning fury that he was completely in agreement with. "As soon as I realized it was Takashi in there, I called you in to watch with me."

He gave a small nod, gaze focused on his brother's face, now slack with unconsciousness as the sedative took effect, then drifting down his body that was so jarringly different to how he had last seen it, from the scarred face and shock of white hair to the mechanical arm that looked more advanced than anything Earth currently produced. "Isn't that the bodysuit that was on the couch at Keith's shack?"

"I think-" The Holt matriarch cut off as the camera image shook in concert with the distant sound of explosions. A moment later a lone figure burst in, taking the soldiers by surprise and toppling all three to the floor with a brutal efficiency that left Ryou with a sense of smug satisfaction given what they'd been doing moments before. Colleen sucked in a sharp breath as the newcomer tugged down the bandanna covering his face to peer down at the unconscious form on the table. "Keith!" The shock on the young man's face was obvious, whatever he'd expected to find in that ship, Takashi wasn't it. But he had to give him credit, he recovered quickly, cutting the restraints and slinging the older man's arm over his shoulder.

"Not just him, either. Look!" Ryou's finger traced the screen as three other figures moved into view. One moved to take Takashi's other side and the archaeologist got a clear view of the new arrival's face, one of the four that had been staring down at him from Colleen's conspiracy board since the day he'd arrived at Keith's shack. Alonza 'Lance' McClain-Martinez. The other two had their backs to the camera, but there was no mistaking the Holt hair on the smaller figure, meaning the last member of the group had to have been Hunk Garrett, the final missing cadet.

"Keith wasn't expecting them." Colleen observed as rapid words were exchanged, the former top student apparently not even recognizing his self-proclaimed rival. "Or Takashi." As they watched, the group quickly left the camera's field of view, Keith and Lance carrying the supposedly-dead pilot between them. The remainder of the footage was a silent view of the interior of the strange craft until late-arriving reinforcements turned the camera off without a word.

Staring at the now-black screen, Ryou's mind reeled as he tried to process the implications of the events they had just watched. Takashi was alive. A full year after his brother had supposedly plowed the Persephone into the surface of one of Pluto's moons and caused the deaths of all three crew members, he had come crashing back to Earth in a ship of unmistakably alien design, visibly changed but unquestionably alive. His eyes burned and he buried his face in his hands as a choked laugh slipped past his lips. "He's alive. Takashi's alive. I know you said...but I didn't...How?" He drew in a shaky breath, lifting his head after a moment to look up at his oddly-silent companion.

Colleen was still staring at the screen, expressionless. But her hand was white-knuckled and shaking where it gripped the back of his chair. "Liars." She whispered. The older woman took a step back, hugging her arms to herself as she turned away and paced over to the conspiracy board on the far wall. A scream of frustration tore itself from her throat and she abruptly slammed her fist into the wall, denting it with the force of the blow and making Ryou jump. "Fucking liars! Where are they, goddammit?!"

Ryou stared after her for a moment before it sank in. Samuel and Matthew. If Takashi had survived whatever had caused the mission to go silent, then there was a good chance that they had as well. Colleen had spent over two years trying to come to terms with the deaths of her husband and son, he knew, had accepted the fact that the mission had vanished on the fringes of the system and there was no coming back from it even if she insisted that pilot error made no sense. And now here she was faced with the fact that one of the three lost crew was still alive, had made it home a full year later before vanishing again, and the other two were nowhere to be seen. Schrodinger's astronauts. It had to be agony, to be given hope that they might have survived but no proof that they had or any clue as to where they were.

He pushed himself to his feet and quickly crossed the room to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "We'll find them." He promised softly, wishing desperately there was more he could do. "We know there's a chance now, and we'll keep looking until we find them one way or another." He glanced over his shoulder at the laptop and frowned. "If Takashi was still alive a year later, they definitely didn't crash, and there's no way the Garrison didn't know that. So what did happen, and why did they lie?" It didn't make any sense. What could have happened so far from Earth that the Garrison had felt the need to falsely report the deaths of the crew? What were they hiding?

Colleen nodded silently, re-crossing her arms as she visibly fought to get her emotions under control. "The files." She said finally, voice cracking slightly. "There must be something in the files." Twisting out from under his hand, she strode back across the room and dropped into the chair he'd vacated, pulling the laptop toward her. Ryou followed, leaning on the back of the chair to watch as she started pulling up the data she'd stolen from the Garrison servers and cracked the encryption on. The video footage from the night Katie and her classmates had disappeared had apparently been the first thing she's opened, and she left it alone as she opened other windows overtop.

"They didn't leave in that ship, wherever it came from. So where did they go?" She questioned aloud as she scanned the documents. "Three ATVs wrecked and several officers injured in pursuit of the subject, that'll be Takashi, after he was abducted, wow, Mitch, what a fucking word choice, you asshole, by four individuals, later identified as cadets Gunderson, Garrett, and McClain-Martinez and ex-cadet Kogane, on a hoverbike. Last seen on a west by southwest heading into the desert after driving off a cliff to shake them." She shook her head in silent admiration of the daring maneuver. "West by southwest is the approximate direction to Keith's shack, isn't it?"

"Mhm. They must have gone to ground there, which is why the bodysuit, hoverbike, and pin were there." Ryou couldn't help but admire the way Colleen had redirected her anguish into determination and drive so quickly. But then, that was how she'd kept moving forward over the last two years, especially after Katie vanished, by subsuming her grief into fury. "The real question is, where did they go after that?"

The older woman hummed, scanning over files and discarding them. A transmission from the Luna domes about the descending ship that had obviously contained Takashi. The incident report for Keith beating up Iverson and his helpers. A message from Mars base that the alien vessel appeared to be leaving the system at speed since shortly after the blue lion vessel vanished into the unidentified energy source.

"...Hang on, what was that last one?" He couldn't possibly have read all that right.

Colleen obviously felt the same way, having stopped midway through switching to the next file. "'Approximately 2.5 hours after the blue lion vessel vanished from our sensors, the hostile alien vessel was observed altering course. New trajectory is directly away from Sol on the ecliptic. It seems to be leaving the system, thank god.' Blue lion? Hostile aliens? What?"

Ryou turned and stared at the conspiracy board, a thought niggling at the back of his mind just out of reach. Dozens of photos and notes stared back at him tauntingly. "Blue lion…" Dark eyes landed on the pictures of the blue lion carved into the caves near the Garrison, with the star patterns hanging overhead. He traced the black thread connecting the star chart to the post-it with the translated date, which had red thread connecting it to the pictures of Katie, Hunk, Lance, and Keith. Frowning, he picked up the spool on the table and pinned another strand to the date, running it across the board to the picture of his brother to represent his brief reappearance that night and securing the other end. Stepping back, he reached for the stack of post-its and froze. His gaze locked onto the date with five threads leading away toward pictures of missing people.

Five threads. Five people. The date.

"Colleen."

She didn't look up, fingers dancing over the keyboard as she sifted through the other files. "Just a minute...there's an observation log here, tracking the hostile vessel-how do they know that's what it is?-dammit, if only I'd grabbed more than 4 days of material-"

"Colleen! Now, please!" He snapped, eyes still locked on the board.

"Dammit, what?!" Colleen huffed, eyes flashing as she turned in her chair to see what he was looking at.

Without a word, Ryou gestured to the conspiracy board. He ran his fingers along the thread connecting Katie to the date. "One." Then Lance. "Two." Hunk. "Three." Keith. "Four." Takashi. "Five." Then he grabbed the photo of the sixth drawing from the series they'd found in the lower cave and passed it to her, the one with the same stars and the five figures approaching the blue lion. "Five."

For a moment she floundered, staring speechlessly at him. Her gaze flickered rapidly between the picture in her hands and the red threads on the conspiracy board. Then her head snapped around to the file she'd just opened, bold black words spread across the screen.

Incident Record:

What appeared to be a mechanical craft in the shape of a blue lion (Possible connection to Site AG-2053-59) was sighted several miles West of the Arizona Garrison mid-afternoon. The vessel maneuvered through the air for a few minutes, observed by Commander Mitch Iverson and Corporal Evan Wilcox. Before footage could be taken the craft launched out of atmosphere at speeds greatly exceeding all known Human technology. Later analysis of radar scans from Luna and Mars bases tracked the vehicle to the edge of the system near Pluto under in-system FTL. The Theseus and Pirithous satellites over Kerberos captured imagery of the vessel entering what appears to be a 'portal' composed of an unknown form of energy undetectable to our scans, which vanished moments afterward.

Attached:

Theseus-2067-11-29-1152366 through 1152389

Pirithous-2067-11-29-1153612 through 1153682

Additional note:

While passing the orbit of Uranus the 'blue lion' passed within a few miles of an inbound K-vessel (See: Tracking record M146-2067-11-K-beta). K-Vessel attempted pursuit before the smaller vessel vanished. Mars station has since reported the K-vessel continuing on a course out of the system (See: Transcript M146-AG-2067-11-K-beta).

The first of the attached images sat below the text, showing a clear profile of a robotic blue lion, lit from in front by the glowing blue light of a portal exactly like the ones depicted in the cave drawings. Ryou could make out the familiar surface of Pluto in one corner of the image, slightly blurred as the satellite's camera tracked the ship. Immediately he turned back to the board, to the seventh cave drawing in line beside the gap where he'd pulled down the sixth. The carving might as well have been a caricature of the photo on the computer screen.

"Space." He whispered as the world seemed to tilt on its axis. "They went to space, in the blue lion they found in the cave." He let out a hoarse laugh, his eyes flicking wildly between the computer and the board as he slumped into the spare chair. "No wonder I couldn't find anything that the blue lion image was supposed to represent. It was literally a blue lion." He laughed again, tinged with hysteria, and dragged his hands down his face. It was too much. Weeks of sleepless nights and now in the span of less than ten minutes a mere archaeological mystery had suddenly upgraded itself to something with the potential to make every historian on the planet scream bloody murder and every 'aliens built the pyramids' whack-job cry vindication. "A giant robot lion that's been hiding under a mountain for ten thousand years. No wonder I couldn't make sense of the writing, it's not even from Earth! Not to mention the chemical composition of the dyes! Aliens! FTL, a spaceship shaped like a lion, unknown energies, ten thousand year old carvings...I can't think of anything else that makes sense, can you? Colleen?"

Colleen was frozen, staring at the screen. "Aliens." She breathed. "Goddamn motherfucking aliens." She had a wild look in her eye like she was looking at something he couldn't see, the famous Holt family intellect slotting pieces together more rapidly than Ryou's ever could. "That's it. That's the missing piece."

Before he could even open his mouth, she threw herself at the wall beside the board and swept it clear, knocking photo frames to the floor with a clatter. She didn't even bother with the post-its, simply grabbing a marker and writing directly onto the paint, 'aliens' in jagged black scrawl. "What happened to the Kerberos mission that would cause it to lose contact and the crew to disappear without them dying?" The names Sam, Matt, and Takashi hit the wall, a line labelled 'abducted' connecting them to the central point. "The Garrison covered it up, probably to prevent mass panic. They covered up Takashi's return, same reason. Can't blow their cover." Katie, Lance, Hunk, and Keith's names joined the writing on the wall, a line saying 'rescued from Gar' connecting them to Takashi, with a connecting line dragging off toward 'Blue Lion'. "Do they know that's where they went?" Colleen didn't wait for an answer, adding an arrow toward the word 'space' beside the 'blue lion' before drawing another line to connect 'blue lion' to the original 'aliens'.

Capping the marker, she stepped back to stare at her handiwork as Ryou joined her.

"Aliens are real, and they've been here. They hid the blue lion ship ten thousand years ago and made the carvings in the cave. Two years ago aliens abducted the Kerberos crew, and the Garrison covered it up with a story about pilot error. One year ago Takashi somehow makes it back to Earth. The Garrison tries to make him disappear-they must have been on alert all night, if they translated those star patterns they knew something was going to happen-but before they could Keith, Lance, Katie, and Hunk rescued him. They went to Keith's shack, and then to the blue lion's cave. They took the blue lion and went into space, all five of them. And that's where they are now."

It made sense. The pieces all fit together. Ryou stared at the marked-up walls, the pictures of alien script and alien ships. He remembered the scar on his brother's face and the strange mechanical arm, his frantic warnings that the Garrison's soldiers had firmly ignored. Somewhere out there, he'd suffered, and now he was back within reach of the beings that had done that to him. So was Keith, the boy Takashi had all but adopted as a little brother, and Katie, Colleen's teenage daughter, as well as Sam, and Matt, and Lance, and Hunk. Seven Humans, four of them still children and two others barely adults themselves, amongst who-knew-how-many alien races that had every chance of wanting to hurt them.

He looked back over his shoulder at the frozen image of the blue lion hurtling toward a glowing portal on the edge of the Sol system, a thrill of terror coursing through him. "So what do we do now?"

000000000

"You wished to see me, my Prince?"

Lotor looked up from his data tablet and gave a pleased smiled at the sight of the head Druid. "Ah, Haggar. Yes." Straightening in his throne, he set the tablet aside. "I wished to discuss that little problem you informed me of a few rotations ago, the one regarding the paladins of Voltron."

Haggar nodded, eyeing him expectantly.

"How soon can Project Scaultrite be deployed for testing?"

He tried not to laugh at the startled expression on her face. It was so rare that anyone managed to take her by surprise these days, and he couldn't help but savour it. Once he had his amusement under control, and the witch had regained her composure, he spoke again. "Well?"

She frowned, obviously thinking over the state of the project. "At current rate of construction since we accelerated it, the prototype could be deployed within the period. If we accelerate the project further, perhaps as little as a deca-rotation, but transferring the necessary manpower to the project will make it extremely difficult to continue to keep it secret from our enemies."

"Ah, yes, those pesky little spies." Lotor hummed thoughtfully. The one that Haggar had ferreted out had proven most useful given the right motivation. While she was undoubtedly giving up the names of her comrades and locations of bases in order from least critically placed to most, it was already enough to give them some idea of the spread of the infiltration and inhibit their access to useful information. "...Accelerate the project anyway, and keep a close watch on Lieutenant Kovirak. The fact that there's been no action taken against Project Scaultrite so far suggests to me that she was the only one in a position to report anything useful about it anyway, and a deca-rotation isn't enough time for them to get people into place before we deploy it."

Haggar smiled approvingly and nodded. "And I assume you have a target in mind for the field testing of the weapon?"

His own smile was razor sharp, his heart buzzing with anticipation as he briefly glanced over at the files on the screen of his tablet. Grainy security camera images of the Paladins of Voltron stared back at him. "Absolutely."