Lance waited until he was sure most people were asleep before he dared sneak out of his room. He grabbed the thumbdrive off his desk that he'd wiped earlier. He hoped it had enough space for Pidge's program. He might only have one shot at this, so it needed to go as smoothly as possible.

He was careful. Lance listened at each door before opening it. He'd peek his head around corners before tiptoeing down the hall.

It was quiet. No one was out of their rooms at this hour. Lance mused that the only person he probably would have run into, on a normal day, would have been Keith. That perpetual insomniac was always on the training deck or working on some other project.

He made it to the main computer without incident, though.

As the computer ran his search for Project Kuron he poked around the control room. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, maybe some sort of trap or something, that Lotor or Shiro had set up. There was nothing, though.

The entire thing made the hair on Lance's arms stand on end. Shiro was smart enough to figure out that Lance wanted to search something on the main computer. It wouldn't make sense for Shiro to make it easy for him to access whatever information, unless it was a trap…

Maybe Shiro didn't know that Lance had overheard the project codename, so he wasn't worried about Lance finding out about Project Kuron.

Or maybe, said the voice in Lance's head, Shiro and Lotor really are trustworthy, and you're the one that's acting strange.

A series of beeps from the computer drove the thought from his head. The screen lit up with the message: "Search Completed: 1 Match Found"

The computer pointed to a small base, only a few clicks away from where the castle was now. That was lucky. He wouldn't need to figure out how to get Allura to power a wormhole jump. The regular ships in the castle only had enough magical energy stored for a single jump, so his options would have been getting stranded and waiting until morning for the team to rescue him or having to wait until the castle eventually passed close enough to the base to be able to do an operation.

This trip, though, he could do tonight.

He plugged his drive into the computer and made a search for the Vega Protocol Pidge had mentioned. It only took a few minutes to find and download.

Lance raced back to his room as carefully as he could to change into his paladin armor. He didn't have a plan yet for how to get into the base and extract the data. It would have to wait until he was there and could see what sort of security they had.

He grabbed whatever he thought he might need, which in the end ended up not being much. It was a stealth operation, which to be fair was not Lance's strong suit. Even if Keith was a hothead, he was better at these sort of things. And Pidge, with all of their cloaking devices and technology, was the master at stealth.

They would have been the dream team, for a mission like this. As it was, Lance would have to make do with just himself.

He ran to the hangar. The lions stared down at him expectantly. "Sorry, Red, but I need something stealthier." He patted the lion's metal apologetically.

He chose a ship that was light and fast. It only had small guns loaded at the front, which wouldn't do much damage if the Galra attacked. Hopefully Lance wouldn't need any firepower, though, and the guns wouldn't matter.

He packed up the few things he had brought and looked around at the lions. It was odd thinking he was going into deep space by himself. This was probably the most dangerous thing he'd ever done in his life, and he was including flirting with Allura on that list.

He saluted the lions before stepping into his craft. Let's do this…


The base was smaller than Lance had expected. There were no Galra ships coming in and out of the station. For all intents and purposes it looked abandoned.

Lance watched, intently, trying to figure out if there was anyone inside the base at all. He drummed his fingertips on the top of the dashboard, nervously, trying to come up with all of the possibilities.

Possibility one: the base really was abandoned and it would be easy for him to go in and extract the information he needed about project Kuron.

Possibility two: the base only looked like it was abandoned as a cover, so that it would be easily ignored by the nonchalant space traveller. Going inside would likely mean running into Galra and dying.

Possibility three: the whole thing was a trap.

Now that he was here, in front of the base, he was unsure. Was risking his life worth getting some information? He wasn't even sure if the base would have anything useful. There was no way to tell, until he was inside, if the information even existed inside their computer.

But going back to the castle without any information would mean that he would have no leads. He would have to follow Lotor and Shiro around until they let something else slip. He found it unlikely that they would be that reckless a second time.

If there really was something going on...if there was something wrong with Shiro, or if he wasn't really Shiro anymore and was plotting something out with Lotor...if there was no way to know what they were planning it could mean Voltron getting taken by the Galra. It could mean the end of the universe. It could mean the end of his friend's lives.

Surely dying was worth that.

Lance let out the breath he was holding. He frowned and closed his eyes for a second, concentrating on his thoughts. He would just have to try.

He flew the ship closer to the base with the cloaking engaged. He turned most of the engine power down, so that the ship was almost as silent as the grave. Lance wanted to coast the ship as much as possible, so that docking would be an almost unnoticeable affair.

"Easy." He breathed out, like he was coaxing a feral animal into taking a piece of food from his hand. "Easy, now."

He felt the ship bump against the base's hull. It was slightly harder than he'd intended, but it still shouldn't have been noticeable if there were any Galra aboard.

Keith would have done it perfectly, the back of his mind said. Lance shook his head to clear the thought.

His hands moved freely around the controls. The whir of the docking connector was the only sound in the tiny spacecraft. Once he knew everything was secured, Lance grabbed his bayard, making sure it was secured tightly to his hip, and hopped out of the ship into the unknown of the base.

The lights were off. Lance's suit had the ability to glow with light, so it was never a problem if he ended up in a dark cave on some planet or something. If there were Galra around, though, the suit would alert them to his presence right away.

He mused on the possibility of trying to find the main computer in absolute darkness. The probability of success was just about nonexistent. Lance took a deep breath before pushing a button and the lights on his suit came to life.

Nothing happened. Either the Galra were not on the base at all, or they weren't anywhere closeby. He could see the hall in front of him went on for a long way. Guess I have to start walking.

Lance walked around the base, poking his head into rooms as he saw them. He didn't see any Galra anywhere around, which was fortunate. He had been fighting in enough Galra bases, that he had a decent sense of the layout of a base this size.

It wasn't long before Lance found what he had been looking for. The main computer was set up in front of a large glass wall with stars twinkling at him from the other side. On either side of the computer were what looked like comm systems and right in the middle of the room was the main control panel for the base.

It wasn't a very complicated setup.

Lance booted the computer up. He half expected an alert system to start blaring, but nothing happened except for a line of Galra script greeting him 'Hello' on the screen. He found the port to plug his thumbdrive and waited expectantly.

The computer hummed to life, slowly for a second, and then quickly started buzzing. Images flashed up on the screen, quickly, and then disappeared. It was too fast to be able to read more than a word of any text before it was gone. The flash drive appeared to be doing its work.

Lance waited patiently as images continued to flash up on the screen. That's when he heard it.

There was a loud click that came from under the computer, from where the wiring to the ship would have been.

Normally Lance would have ignored it as nothing. His usual relaxed attitude didn't exist on this mission though. A part of him already feared it was a trap, and he didn't want to that to prove to be true. He was going to make it out of there alive, and get back to his friends with new evidence.

Suddenly more nervous than before, he made quick work of prying the panel off from where the noise had come from. Inside was a mess of wires. Lance pushed them aside, careful not to accidentally detach anything, and what he saw made his heart drop into his stomach.

It was a bomb, definitely a bomb. There was a small interface with a countdown clock connecting to a circular device. It was wired back into the base's main systems. Lance had never seen a Galra bomb before, but he was absolutely positive it looked like that.

He stumbled away from the computer, falling backwards onto his butt. This was not good. He didn't know how powerful the bomb would be, but it was definitely powerful enough to blast a hole through the glass wall behind the computer, and probably powerful enough to kill him if he were inside the room when it went off. If the wiring was any indication, there were likely more devices aboard the base, possibly enough to set off blasts regardless of where he was.

He had to get out of there, and fast.

Lance glanced at his thumbdrive, wondering if it had the information he needed on it already. Then an image flashed up on screen, and for the second time in a few minutes, Lance's heart plummeted into his stomach.

The image had been on screen for less than a second, but it was more than enough time for Lance to recognize Shiro. Words scrolled across the screen, detailing the image that had showed up before.

Lance glanced down at the countdown timer. He couldn't read Galra well enough to understand everything, but he could understand that the speed of the numbers meant that he had less than a minute to get off of the base.

He silently prayed to Pidge's program to hurry up and collect the information. He watched what was popping up on the screen, trying to gauge when he could pull the plug. More Galra words flashed on the screen. He caught the words "clone" and "Voltron".

Forty seconds left.

There was no more time, it had to be enough. He wrenched the thumbdrive from the computer and took off down the hall.

Thirty seconds left.

He could see where his ship was docked far down the hall. The base's door was closed, and would take a few seconds to open.

Twenty seconds left.

Lance swung his bayard around and took a shot at the control panel. The laser blast hit, electricity whirred, and the door began to open.

Ten seco-

A blast shook the space station. It threw Lance off balance, into one of the hallway's walls. His bayard was flung from his grip, taking the thumbdrive with it.

It was over. Lance had been wrong about the amount of time it would take for the bomb to go off, it would cause his death, and now the information he had needed was gone too.

"No!" He yelled through his gritted teeth, scrambling back to his feet. He could hear more bombs going off behind him, as he dashed to his ship.

He flung himself through the doors, slamming his fist into the button to close the docking connector.

A wormhole jump! It was his only option, it might get him away from the ship in time.

The dashboard lit up, he didn't wait for the lights to fully engage before he was pressing buttons. "Please...please…"

He didn't care where, anywhere away from here would work. The wormhole lit up outside the spacecraft.

He pushed the steering forward, right as a final blast rocked the craft hard enough to fling Lance away from the controls.

Lance heard a crack as his head slammed against something in the back of the ship. He felt sharp pain. His vision went white, and then black.

Nothing.


A/N: Whew, for a second there I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish this chapter tonight.

Suprise Me: You're totally right, all the bad things happen when Keith is not around!

Happy space travels!