Kovirak took a deep breath to steady herself, tightening her grip on the data chip clenched in her fist, before stepping down the ramp and out of the Red Lion's mouth.
The tension in the room was so thick you could have cut it into bricks and used it to stop an ion cannon. Senior Blades, tacticians, weapons masters, mission planners, and information coordinators lined the edges of a wide open space around the Lion, and even though their masks concealed their features she could feel their anger, the weight of their gaze. Kolivan stood in the center and his unmasked expression was one of grim fury, his fur bristling, as he drew himself up to his full height at the sight of her. Around her, the others from the Castle of Lions shifted uncomfortably, unsure of how to proceed in this delicate situation.
However, it wasn't their job to do anything. It was hers.
She straightened, head held high, and stepped between the paladins, moving ahead of the group. She took several steady paces forward and stopped in the middle of the empty space, dropping to one knee and crossing her fist over her chest in a full-body salute to her leader. "Blade Leader Kolivan."
It was impossible to miss the snarl that rattled between Kolivan's teeth. "Traitor Kovirak. What do you have to say for yourself?" He hissed.
Kovirak remained kneeling, maintaining her gesture of respect. The fury of her fellow Blades seemed to press down on her, almost as heavy as the weight of guilt in her chest. There were gaps in those ranks along the walls. "I am sorry, from the depths of my very soul. Haggar had discovered me for a spy, and she forced me to choose between the lives of my fellow Blades and the life of my only child."
She could hear the sharp intakes of breath from some of them. She had never told anyone about the child she had birthed and been forced to leave behind, and in doing so now she threw the situation into an entirely new light. While sacrificing her comrades to save her own skin would have been entirely unforgivable and worthy of death, a cub was another matter. A mother's love was not something to be trifled with. Only Kolivan did not seem rattled by the revelation, but then, no doubt Allura had mentioned that in her message a decarotation ago. She wished she'd thought to ask exactly what the Princess had told the Blade Leader. "A child." He repeated, eyes narrowing. If anything, his fury only seemed to grow, his ears flat against his skull and his teeth openly bared.
"Yes. My child." She repeated. A thick silence invited elaboration. "Some twenty-five cycles ago, in my covert position, I was sent on an extended scouting mission along the borders of the Empire, in the Xelantyn sector. Part of the effort to identify places where the Voltron Lions may have been hidden." She couldn't help but feel her lips quirk at the irony. She had unknowingly spent years living just miles from the hiding place of the Blue Lion, in perhaps the last place on the planet she would have expected the water Lion to be. "My ship was damaged and I was forced to make an emergency crash landing on one of my assigned planets. I ended up befriending one of the local beings, one thing led to another, and by the time I was forced to leave...I was leaving behind my chosen mate and a three-year-old kit."
"You left your child. Was that wise?" The question came from one of the tacticians, a disapproving hiss to her words that Kovirak couldn't blame her for. "Especially considering where it led."
She nodded respectfully to the tactician. "My son could pass for a local. I believed he would grow up safe and most likely untouched by the war since there was nothing to interest the Empire on that planet." Another irony. She'd been wrong on both counts.
Kolivan's frown only deepened, his lip curling derisively. "And yet Haggar discovered him." There was a stinging accusation in his tone.
Closing her eyes, she nodded again. "Yes. I don't know how. I swear on the Stone I don't. But even if I had killed myself rather than reveal the information she demanded of me, she would still have gone and killed him in retribution. She promised that and I had no reason to doubt her words." Lifting her head, she looked Kolivan right in the eye, letting her guilt and certainty show in her face and trying to hide the way her heart raced in trepidation. "I am sorry. I never wanted this to happen. But I will never regret protecting my child."
Whispers broke out around the room. Opinions seemed mixed on how to handle her actions. Yes, she had betrayed the Blades. Yes, she had cost many lives. But at the same time, a mother's instinct to protect her cub was undeniable and unquenchable. History was filled with the bloody proof.
Finally Kolivan held up a hand for silence. He had been glaring steadily at her, arms folded tightly across his chest. As the others fell silent, he spoke again, tone as cold as the vacuum of space itself. "One hundred and seventy-six."
The bottom seemed to fall out of her stomach.
"One hundred and seventy-six." He repeated. "That is how many of your fellow Blades of Marmora have died to save your cub. At least, that is how many have failed to report in since the emergency signal was broadcast, or have since died of their injuries." His expression was tight with rage. "One hundred and seventy-six, some with cubs of their own who will never see their parents again. For one child. And you do not regret it."
Kovirak felt sick. To put a number, a specific quantity, on how many of her brothers and sisters had been killed by her actions, somehow made it a thousand times worse. But at the same time, she could not lie. She regretted the deaths. She did not regret her son's safety. Nothing would change that. But at the same time, unless she could force the other Blades to see the value of Keith's life, she would almost certainly be executed and be unable to keep her promise to never abandon him again. It was fortunate that fate and the machinations of their very founder had given her a way to do just that.
Her voice cracked as she spoke. "No." She swallowed hard, raised her voice, and tried again. "No, I won't regret it, and neither should you, or they, or anyone here. Those one hundred and seventy-six lives," Kovirak had to raise her voice even louder to be heard over the angry mutterings that filled the hall. "Protected the child who grew up to be the Red Paladin of Voltron, Keith Kogane."
A ringing silence fell after that declaration. Masks turned, gazes shifting to the teen in red and white armor standing at the back of the room with his teammates. She could see the realization on Kolivan's face, the shock cracking through the anger as the pieces fell into place with that revelation. The moment they made the connection between her story and the first time Keith had come to the base, ignorant of his origins and with a Blade in his hands.
The data chip's sharp edges dug into her palm as her first tightened. "And before you tell me, Blade Leader Kolivan," she continued, those familiar eyes snapping from her son back to her as she pressed her opening, "that the Red Lion could have chosen another Paladin, I will tell you something that all our intelligence gathering in the Empire never could have found. Keith was chosen to be the Red Paladin long before he ever met his Lion. Long before he and his teammates ever encountered the Blue Lion. He, and they, were chosen ten thousand years ago by Marmora herself and by the other paladins who survived Zarkon's treachery." She swallowed hard once more, forcing her hand to uncurl as she held up the chip toward her Leader with fingers that trembled from the delicacy of the situation despite her best efforts to keep them still. "We may have lost too many lives, and no longer be able to work by the covert means we once did, but the Blades of Marmora have fulfilled the true ultimate purpose for which they were created. The secret purpose that Marmora hid away and took with her to her grave."
"...And what purpose it that?" Kolivan's voice was hoarse with disbelief and frustration. Who could blame him? His world was being pulled out from under him once again.
She offered him a ghost of a sad smile, lofting the chip higher. "To birth the Red Paladin of Voltron, which I did. And to return the Black Paladin to his fellows one year after his capture, which Ulaz did. Everything else has been secondary to those two tasks. This chip contains a translation of a message left by Blue Paladin Fiorin in the cave of the Blue Lion, revealing exactly what he and his comrades did ten thousand cycles ago." She let out a slow breath, the strain of the situation heavy on her shoulders. "I don't like it either. But it appears we've already done our duty, Kolivan."
The disbelief in his eyes was painful, and her heart ached in sympathy. She remembered her own shock, just a couple vargas earlier, as she stared at a carved stone wall and reeled from the way everything she had known had been upended. To learn that everything she had known, everything she had dedicated a large portion of her life to, was built on a lie, had stolen her breath from her lungs and set her fur on end. Every life lost in a Druid torture chamber, every Blade who died in battle on a mission, all the hard work and sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of Blades across ten thousand cycles, had been...unimportant. Pointless. Just part of the path to what really mattered. Anger had churned in her gut, then. They had been lied to and they had been used.
But lied to for a purpose, she'd realized, the memory of the message playing over and over in head on the journey back to the Castleship. To guide the course of fate to a future where the universe might have a chance to end the tyranny of the Empire once and for all. If Fiorin's search of the future hadn't turned out to have badly misjudged the moment of victory, they might now stand on the cusp of triumph with the first tyrant dead and two others still to be destroyed. It had, and they didn't, but she'd realized the truth of the matter was the same. Their planned role was over. Now the Blades would have to craft their own destiny.
00000000
Kolivan reeled.
This was not going how he had thought it would. He had come to this meeting expecting to punish the traitor for the deaths of his Blades, to get retribution and justice for the dead against the one who had stolen the lives of his warriors, his kin, for her own selfish end. And instead he found himself being told that her actions were preordained, planned out for her by the founder herself when the war was still barely begun.
He wanted to refute her claims. Call her a liar. But he could see the truth of them in the sorrowful faces of the Paladins, in the way not one of them stepped forward to denounce her statements. The discomfort in the Red Paladin's face alone spoke volumes. So agonizing as it was, he was forced to accept her words as truth.
With a shaky nod, he gestured for the Blade closest to him to retrieve the proffered data chip. Silence reigned in the chamber as he inserted the chip into a data tablet. A moment later a video clip began to play, Coran's voice clearly audible to the entire room as he read off a message carved in stone above pictographs of Voltron and the Lions and the war. Kolivan could feel his hands shake and he closed his eyes as in a few brief sentences, Fiorin's letter to his successors explained everything he and the others had done. Kolivan and his Blades had been tools of their efforts to end the war, mere footstones in a vast game of Kelt's War. And in the end it had all been for nothing anyway.
"Not for nothing, Kolivan." He jerked at the words, his eyes snapping open once more to glare at Kovirak, who was gazing up at him with understanding and sympathy. Had his thoughts shown on his face that plainly, his mask of composure shattered once and for all under too many blows?
"The Blades played their part. And while Zarkon may still live and the Empire may still rule for now, the efforts of Fiorin and Marmora, Torlast and Alfor, have given us something that we did not have before." She gestured to the group standing behind her. "For the first time in ten thousand cycles, Voltron stands against injustice and cruelty. They gave us a universe where Zarkon did not succeed in capturing a Lion that he was not meant to capture. Yes, that timeline ended in disaster originally, Lions destroyed and Paladins dead," She turned and looked over her shoulder at Alejandro and Kurogane, who stiffened visibly before she turned back to Kolivan, "but they gave us paladins strong enough to survive, to find their way back and use their knowledge against him once more. They would not exist now without the Blades. Kurogane and Alejandro might not be here without the Blades, who fought alongside them and taught them what they could. Because the Blades existed, and did as they were meant to do, we stand a fighting chance against the Empire. And I firmly believe the Blades will continue to play their part in helping to bring it down. We simply have to choose how."
There was certainty in her words, and strength. She'd obviously been thinking hard about this since the discovery of the message. And despite his fury at the deaths, his outrage at her betrayal, his hurt at being used by the one whose legacy united them, the diplomat in him could not help but recognize truth when he heard it. Her actions were a part of a greater plan that no one had known until today they'd even been part of, just as Ulaz's had been, just as his own were, and just as Marmora's had been ten thousand cycles ago.
He studied her for a long moment. She still knelt, still saluted, because her leader had not yet given her permission to rise. Further back, he could see the anxiety in Keith's face as he looked from his mother to his leader, waiting for him to pass judgement. The fear in his eyes, the anxiety of a cub for a parent in danger, was what decided him despite the fury and helplessness still churning in his gut. He had seen that look too many times in the eyes of kits whose parents had gone away on missions and never come back home, in mates and siblings whose loved ones were overdue to check in. He'd seen it too many times in the last decarotation. Well, he could not take back the losses those kits and families had suffered, who would hurt regardless of why those they loved had died, but he could choose not to wound another for the sake of bloody vengeance. There were enough cubs orphaned as it was. But that did not leave him totally without options for retribution.
"You are correct." He growled slowly, standing straighter as he surveyed the room. "The Blades of Marmora will continue to fight. We will continue their efforts to end the Empire once and for all, however they may contribute to that effort." He gave a small, sharp nod to a startled Allura. He could feel his Blades watching intently. The air seemed to vibrate as he found new strength, new determination, and his people responded to it as he channelled the sheer weight of his anger into it. "But you will not be part of it. Kovirak," He saw her flinch, her sharp inhalation, the moment that both Keith and Shiro started to surge forward before the older held himself back and blocked the younger with his arm, the sudden stiffness of Kurogane whose eyes betrayed that he cared more for her fate than he would admit. "Consider yourself exiled from the Blades of Marmora. You are no longer kin here."
Kolivan ignored her strangled gasp and turned away, refusing to acknowledge her existence any further and looking instead to Allura. "Princess. We have much to discuss. How can the Blades be of service to Voltron going forward?"
0000000000
"So infiltration and data collection is still available as a course of action, but you no longer have access to most of the security codes." Shiro was saying, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the large table everyone was now gathered around."
One of the tacticians nodded, her expression grim. "Yes. We will also need to comb through and cross-check a lot of the more recently-acquired data for accuracy. It's entirely possible that compromised agents were being fed false information."
"Fair enough." Matt sighed, making notes on his data tablet. "We may be better off collecting entirely new intelligence for each target we select going forward."
"That would be wise. Between our infiltrations, and your scouts," she nodded to Shiiar'keh politely. "We should have sufficient information to work with to develop plans of attack." She sighed, shaking her head. "I wish we had more we could offer than numbers and peering through vents to map defenses." Her tone was more than a little bitter.
Shiro simply shook his head, giving her a warm smile. "Your infiltration skills fill a large hole in our information gathering ability and ground tactics, and your combat skills are also more than valuable."
The H'ress leader nodded in agreement with that. "If you can spare the warriors, I would greatly appreciate if they could pass on their skills to some of our stronger Hunters, as well as augmenting our forces as needed. I've heard about your people's exploits assisting Voltron. Going up against four Druids and Haggar herself with only one untrained amvel nayeta to assist you is no mean feat."
Pidge tuned out of the ongoing conversation around her, turning back to her laptop. After the whole mess with Kovirak-despite now knowing the exact death toll her betrayal had led to, she couldn't really argue with Kolivan's decision when she got a look at the sheer relief on Keith's face, and she wouldn't wish losing family on anyone-the topic had shifted rapidly. The Blades had been introduced to the group from the Long Wind, consisting of Shiiar'keh, Gra'shehn, Malrento, and two others she didn't know, one a Balmeran who seemed to be the expert on the pack ships' weapons capabilities and one who looked like the same species as Nyma who had immediately offered the ship's medical services to assist the Blades through the crisis, before moving to a large conference room to discuss what the plan would be going forward. As they were settling in, Allura had requested access to the Blades' oldest records, in the hopes of discovering information that Marmora may have left behind that would be useful to them, in light of the implications of Fiorin's message.
Kolivan had granted them those permissions, but there'd been doubt on his face as he warned, "Most of Marmora's personal records were sealed by her before her death. Generations of our best cryptographers have tried and failed to break her code."
Allura, though, had simply smiled and given a respectful nod. "I am sure they have, and I am sure they had skills beyond compare. But perhaps another green paladin can succeed where they failed."
Pidge had been flattered by the confidence, and maybe a little smug. Computers were her specialty, after all, and while the rest of the group settled in for a long meeting, she found herself waiting impatiently while a Blade technician rigged up a way for her laptop to talk to the local database. Green was purring excitedly in the back of her head, and Pidge could feel an undercurrent of fondness for the young Galra who had been her paladin so long ago. The Lion was as eager to know what the files might say as she was.
The laptop chirped an alert at her and she straightened in her seat. Access obtained. Time to get to work. Cracking her knuckles, she glanced over her notes on file designations and the access codes that would allow her into that part of the database, and started typing. Pidge grinned to herself. She'd be interrupting the meeting with some revelations of her own before she knew it.
Six hours later, optimism had given way to frustration. Whatever this encryption was, it was like nothing she'd ever seen before. Miles above anything the Galra Empire was using, let along Earth. She'd tried everything from simple substitution cyphers to decryption techniques she'd used in Trepan Kev. And all she was getting was gibberish. It was infuriating!
"I think we should stop there for the day. Give your tacticians time to look over the Icebringers' data, and we can pick it up in the morning." The scrape of chairs accompanied Shiro's comment. "We'll head back to the Castleship for the night and return early in your day-cycle tomorrow."
"Very well. Hopefully we shall have some more detailed plan of attack by then." Kolivan agreed.
Pidge's chair shifted slightly as Matt leaned on the back of it. "Any luck?" He asked quietly, peering over her shoulder at the screen.
"Not yet." She grumbled, reluctant to admit that the files were winning at the moment. "But I've downloaded the relevant files to local storage so I can keep working on them on the Castle."
Matt chuckled, shaking his head. "I suppose telling you not to stay up all night working on it is a bit pointless, huh?"
"Just a bit."
He snorted, but didn't argue. "Alright. Come on, I think we're heading back now." He pulled her chair back for her as she gathered up an armload of electronics.
Even with her laptop closed, she continued to turn the problem over in her head as they made their way through the corridors of the base and back to the Red Lion in the hangar, and even as they made the short flight through the narrow passageway to the Castle. The files couldn't be meant to never be accessed by anyone, or why not just delete them? They must be meant to be opened eventually. But by who? The risk of disrupting the desired path of events was gone now, so they must be accessible now somehow.
Thankfully, no one bothered her for the rest of the evening. They all knew how she got when she was fixated on a problem, and she appreciated the understanding. She ate and drank mechanically with one hand, typing away with the other, and relied on Green's gentle presence in her head to keep her mounting frustration at bay. She wasn't used to being thwarted by anything technological. Around the Altean equivalent of three o'clock in the morning, though, even that wasn't enough anymore. Pidge let out a frustrated shout, hurling an empty plastic cup at the wall and startling one of the garbage puffs into frightened squeaks.
Green nudged her mind immediately, a feeling of dappled sunlight and cool breezes through the leaves as she tried to calm her paladin. Pidge grimaced and scrubbed at her eyes. "Sorry girl. I'm okay. Really." She felt her Lion's doubt at that statement and sighed. "I'm just...frustrated, I guess. This encryption looks like it should be so simple and yet nothing I do is working."
A pause, and then a gentle tug. Green wanted her to take a break and come sit with her, and Pidge had to admit that might be a good idea. More coaxing nudges, almost a mental pout, and she gave a small laugh. "Okay, okay. I'm coming."
The hallways were dim and empty at this hour, her bare feet not making much sound as she padded down to Green's hangar with her laptop under her arm. The Lion rumbled a cheerful greeting as she flicked on the light that made Pidge grin in response. Soon she was settled down on Green's front paw, the Lion stretched out comfortably with her tail flicking idly as she watched her paladin pull up the files again. "They're just so weird," Pidge explained as she sat back and looked at the files again, strings of numbers and symbols that had so far resisted her best efforts at divining their secrets. "I mean, at first glance these almost look like plain-text files that contain the data for another file. But I tried assembling them that way and it's not a known file-type. None of the programs I have will recognize it." Green rumbled consolingly and Pidge sighed, leaning her head against the side of the massive metal head. "Thanks. Well, back to the drawing board…" She pulled her headphones on and shook out sore wrists before bending over her task once more.
She worked in silence for a while with no success before she realized Green was nudging her mind again with obvious excitement. "Huh? You got something?" She pushed her headphones back and looked up at the glowing golden eyes.
An eager affirmative, then a prod at her memories. During the battle, Green had found a new scanner in her systems suddenly that hadn't been there before. It was the one she had used to pick apart the Weblum's Breath to find their way to disable it. Pidge inhaled sharply. She'd forgotten about that with everything else going on.
"Right. That was an aspect, wasn't it?" She grinned, looking over at her partner. "Alright, it's definitely worth a shot. Open up!"
Green barely waited for her to hook up the laptop to her main console before data started flashing across both screens so fast Pidge couldn't even read it. Sitting back in her chair, she made herself comfortable and watched in awe and more than a little bit of jealousy as Green used the engineering scanner to pick apart the programs and files a million times faster than Pidge could by hand.
Just as abruptly as it had started, the blurring scroll of data stopped. 'Analysis complete' flashed across the main screen. Inhaling sharply, Pidge leaned forward, her heart pounding in excitement. Had it worked?
The laptop displayed several new windows. In each, information written in plain Galran, with an English translation automatically generated by her computer beside it. Even the filenames had been changed. 'Choreography' said one. 'Useful(?) Information' said another. A third read 'Zarkon is a vrolmek and here's why'.
Pidge grinned in delight. "Green, you're amazing!"
Green sent back a pulse of pride and excitement mirroring Pidge's own. Weariness and frustration vanished as she started looking over the files, eager to see what information Marmora had hidden away.
'Choreography' seemed at first glance to be a scheduler of some kind, a list of things to do and people to talk to. But a little further down she encountered snatches of dialogue written in. Notations like 'no matter how much it hurts, do not fire on the warship in the first twenty ticks'. With a sickening jolt she realized what this was. This was the list of everything Marmora had to do or not do in order to craft the future she needed. Her choreography in the plan. The file was huge. Fiorin hadn't been exaggerating when he described her as being fate's puppet.
Putting that file aside, Pidge continued to sort through the files. 'Useful(?) Information' looked promising, but it was a big file so she reluctantly put it aside for later. Near the bottom of the stack of windows, a file header caught her eye and she froze.
'For Pidge', it read.
In that moment, she abruptly understood exactly why the others were so rattled by the revelation in the cave. Everything that had happened to all of them had gone from a fluke, chance, bad luck, to something that someone had done to them. Ten thousand years ago, the previous paladins had known exactly who they were and chosen them all for this, chosen them to endure everything they had. Fiorin had never called any of them by name in his message, and somehow that meant it never quite sank in for her. But Marmora knew exactly who she was.
Her hands shook as she selected the file, bringing it to the forefront and opening it wide enough to read.
Pidge,
I know that Fiorin is leaving a message to all of you, but I wanted to leave one for you personally. I know we'll never meet, but we still have a connection through Green and through this awful, awful war.
I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.
We took so much from you. Your family. Your childhood. Your freedom. I know you're just fifteen when you first reach Arus. Just a kid, by your standards and mine. I know how desperately you want to find your father and brother. I wish I knew whether you will.
Fiorin says you're like Ilexam, if Ilexam was as much of a wild card as I am. I like that. It means Green will be able to have a little bit of us in you. Please take good care of her for me. I know she hates being alone.
I don't know when you'll find these files, or how long it will take you to access them-I designed them to only be translated by Green's engineering scanner, so until you have the Learning aspect, you won't be able to read them. But now that you have, I've enclosed everything I could think of that might help if you're still fighting. The other files contain information about Zarkon, Acalli, and the Lions. There are also ones about those they killed. If it's not asking too much, please remember them for me. It's the only memorial they have.
I'm so sorry things turned out this way. I'd like to think that in another life we could have been friends.
Stay safe and good luck, Pidge.
Marmora
Pidge stared at the screen for a long moment after reaching the end of the message. Short and to the point. Yeah, that sounded a lot like the Marmora Allura and Coran had described. Her eyes lingered on the last line. Reading this, Marmora's personality showed through, and she couldn't help agreeing with that thought. Too bad it could never happen.
Slowly, she say back in her chair, glancing up at the main screen. "Yeah. I'm sorry too, Marmora." She said softly. Heaving a sigh, she closed her laptop and disconnected it from the main console. "I think I'll go over the rest of this in the morning. I should probably get some sleep, right Green?" The lion rumbled an agreement, but Pidge could feel the note of sadness in their bond. She patted the console sympathetically. "You know I'm never more than a thought away. You're not alone anymore."
The tinge of sadness eased a little, Green's presence curling up comfortably in the back of her mind as she headed down the ramp with her laptop in hand. Tomorrow was going to be another hectic day. For now, though, she'd found the knowledge she was after, and more.