Chapter 6: Paladins phone home

Hunk glanced over all the papers spread around them in the hotel room. Matt's bag was open in a corner of the room, empty and long forgotten, and all the books and papers were lying on every available surface. Pidge's laptop was displaying many windows and tabs, and half of the screen was covered by never ending lines of code, flashy green lights sparkling on a dark background. Lying flat on the floor, a pillow under her chest, the girl was typing fast on another laptop. Her glasses were reflecting the screen and Hunk noticed she was digging into the source code of another website, doodling scribbles on a sheet of paper beside the keyboard, a map laid out on the bare floor. Many pins were planted on the map with as many annotations, and it reminded the yellow paladin of Keith's shack in the middle of the desert.

"So, if I sum it up, all we have to do is to find a big functional ship and fly away from the government in less than a few hours? No sweat, man, it's almost too easy for us!" Lance bragged, a big grin painted on his face.

"But this time, we're talking about the army and the human government," Hunk pointed out, twisting his fingers worriedly. It was a thing to fight evil aliens, but to defy their own kind and steal a top secret object from the government in one of the most guarded area on Earth was something totally different.

"We've defeated Zarkon and kicked Lotor's ass, it'll be nothing for us!" the blue paladin repeated, a slight frown drawing on his forehead as his friends kept contradicting him. "They're just… you know, humans."

"You had your bayards and shields to protect yourselves. Tomorrow they'll be the only ones with weapons, we don't even know what technologies they have! They may even possess advanced alien technologies, as far as we know. We'll have to be discrete and swift-"

"As a coursing river, we got it!" Lance cut Matt with a wink, which still managed to make Pidge's brother smile. "But I feel like we should get some rest before we think about our real plan."

"Actually, it's already all planned," the girl intervened, closing her two laptops firmly with assurance and addressing a big shit-eating grin to the blue paladin. "I've got all the information I needed. I mean, Area 51's network is even less secured than the Garrison's, so it wasn't hard," she added with a proud smirk. "But I agree, we should get some sleep, we won't have time tomorrow… we'll be in space."

At these words, the four of them looked at each other, smiling even though the idea of flying a UFO that had crashed down on Earth wasn't the most reassuring idea ever. It was strange to think that at the same hour on the day after they'd be back in space. Their brief stay on Earth felt like holidays, but all of them knew that going back to the place they had left only a few weeks ago could turn out to be even more dangerous than defeating the Galra empire. Plenty of things could go wrong from the moment they'd step out of the hotel.

Lance laid down on his back, his arms crossed behind his head and staring at the ceiling above him, his face serious. On that night, he was feeling more human than ever.

Keith opened his eyes abruptly and let out a weary sigh, too tired to be irritated anymore. He hadn't been able to sleep, afraid that his nightmares would come back even more intensively. His back was aching due to the hard floor he had been lying on for hours without finding sleep and his whole body was so stiff that he could feel pain in every one of his muscles.

His gaze met the ceiling which reflected the shape of a pink satellite floating in the night sky, unreachable. Beside the boy, Kaltenecker was asleep and her body radiated a sweet warmth that would normally have helped the boy get to sleep.

Keith glanced at his phone and eventually sat up straight on the floor. He put his hand on the handle of his knife where the Blade of Marmora symbol was emitting a white glow. His training with the Blade might had been truly tough, and he might had nearly got killed at least ten times, but the only thought that he was the only one left made his stomach burn. He missed Kolivan. The Galra had been like a paternal figure to Keith, even though he had never gone easy on him, and losing Kolivan had made the boy feel abandoned again. He had lost every people he had loved in his life: his mom, his dad, and now… now he had lost Red and his friends weren't with him anymore. Even Shiro felt out of reach, now that his thoughts were focused on the Princess of Altea.

Keith let out another sigh and ran his hand over his face, leaning against Kaltenecker's side. He would have loved to go training or just to go out for a walk, but they were on a totally unknown planet. Even if he still had his bayard and his knife, he didn't want to leave the others alone, especially with Coran being injured.

A bluish light coming from Shiro's phone lit up the room, but the black paladin didn't seem to notice, already asleep. Keith looked at his friend and back at the phone. The room was so small that he could read the messages as they appeared on the screen from where he was. They were from Matt.

Matt_ Hang on, we're acting tomorrow. If you don't hear from us in two days from now, it'll be because we're either in big troubles, or dead, or lost somewhere in space, or dead in space... I'm joking, don't worry, everything should go according to our plan.

Matt_ Oh, and don't do anything I wouldn't do! ;)

Matt_ grheosljqd

Matt_ Sorry, Pidge stole my phone. Again.

Keith cracked a smile, but the odd twist in his stomach still refused to leave.

A timid knock on the door was enough to wake the paladins up in a start. Pidge automatically grabbed her glasses and Matt jumped on his feet by instinct. He rushed to the door and stayed in front of it, back to his friends and ready to welcome whoever was there, his staff in his hand. Behind him, Lance fell from his bed with a loud noise, trapped by the bedsheets and blinded by his night mask. Meanwhile, Hunk was still sound asleep, nice and warm.

The door handle lowered slowly and soon the door opened, revealing light brown curls and a pointy nose.

"Um, m-my apologies, but the little miss asked me to wake you up. It's already past seven o'clock, so I thought that you may like to have breakfast…" Rohan hesitated, ready to flee if they exhibited any sign of aggressivity towards him.

Matt sighed heavily and sat down on his sister's bed, looking exhausted. A nervous laugh took him and earned him weird looks from the poor employee. The latter glanced at Pidge, who yawned and waved her hand as if she weren't only wearing large pajamas.

Rohan cleared his throat and quickly looked away, his cheeks turning a slight shade of pink that Matt noticed immediately. This detail had the terrible effect of making him laugh even louder, so loud that it woke Hunk up more efficiently than the Castle of Lions' alarm.

"I'm just… gonna leave it here…" Rohan declared, his voice shaking and a bit cold because of the uneasiness state he was in. He pulled the room service cart inside the bedroom and turned to leave. He was going to step out when his eyes caught a glimpse of the mess on the floor, and he couldn't help but let out a helpless scream. There were loads of papers and electronic wires, some of them glowing and flashing weirdly, and Rohan couldn't help but explore the possibility of the four people in front of him being dangerous terrorists. He raised his look to meet the other four's, terrified, and they stared back at him with a frown.

"What's the matter?" Pidge asked him, her voice still heavy with sleep.

Rohan startled. "Nothing. Please keep this place safe, I haven't been hired anywhere else," he begged hurriedly in a tiny high voice.

"What are you talking about?" the girl growled - she was definitely not a morning person. She met his scared gaze and followed his look as he glanced at the electronic mess on the floor. Suddenly, something clicked in her mind. "Wait, we're not making a bomb or anything. We're a university team, we're building a robot for a contest in L.A.!" she improvised while Hunk and Lance eyed her with respect. "There's the motor over there, and the flashing lights will be put behind the eyes and in the mouth -we're making a small lion robot, actually. There, you can see the Arduino card near my computer, so that we can program it to roar and walk and jump, and I think we'll also need suspensions because it could crash badly, but-"

"Woah, Pidge, stop! You don't even know him, he could be part of another team, he could steal our ideas!" Matt yelled suddenly, grabbing papers covered with intricate patterns and putting them on his heart like he would have done with a baby.

"Now he's gonna steal our lion idea!" Hunk complained loudly, pretending the tears in his eyes were of worry and not just him still being sleepy.

With this safer explanation, Rohan's tension progressively disappeared and his body relaxed noticeably. He nodded and leant against the wall behind him, as solid as slime.

"So, you guys are just nerds?" he asked, evading the robotic subject as he didn't know a single thing about it.

Pidge cringed and pulled her blanket back on herself, reacting as if she had just been slapped. She looked away, her eyebrows drawn together and her jaw tensed. Matt discreetly took her hand into his and squeezed it like he used to do when they were kids and his sister was sad.

"Yeah, nothing to fear, buddy," Lance affirmed with a reassuring smile to the employee. He casually grabbed a cup of coffee, put it to his lips and cringed at the bitterness.

"Has everybody understood the plan?" Matt asked his friends, looking alternately at each one of them.

They were standing at the very edge of Area 51, at the only place that could be hacked for a few seconds without the government noticing. There were mainly sand dunes around them, dotted with spiky bushes that popped here and there out of the ground. A few meters away from them, a barbed wire fence was the only thing betraying the limit of the military area, but they knew that drones were on patrol around them, unnoticeable, or nearly.

"Pidge neutralizes the patrollers. Then, we split into two teams - Pidge and Hunk, and you and me -, we break into the base, we seek for a not-too-destroyed-and-big-enough spaceship in the hangars and we tell the other team when we find one thanks to the wireless LED-equipped bracelets Pidge has built. Aaaand we're careful and we try to avoid any contact with the guys working there." Lance recited seriously, a slight smile drawing on his lips at the end of his speech.

"Basically."

"What if we're found? What if some of us get caught?" Hunk raised.

"We try not to hurt people from the military base too much," Pidge suggested with a shrug. "And we use the button I've fixed on our shoes, it'll lit up the other team's bracelets red and send them our location in real time. Easy."

When Hunk listened to the Holts, he had the feeling that nothing could go wrong. To be honest, he didn't know whether it was a reassuring feeling, because with a plan so big and so well-thought, if something failed they would be in serious troubles.

He watched as Pidge took the scrambler out of her pocket. It was only the beginning.

Fortunately for them, the hangars were all next to each other. Some of them were big enough to store two big planes, and some others were only the size of a small bedroom.

Matt and Lance chose the small one on their right while the other team chose the biggest hangar they could find.

"The path is clear," Lance told Matt through the walkie talkie Pidge had given them. She had modified it so that the signal couldn't be intercepted, and they could choose to talk either to their teammate or to the other team.

"Roger. Try to find a weapon you could use, just in case. I'm coming your way," the former member of the rebellion replied, looking around him and paying attention to every sound. Hopefully, Pidge had managed to deceive the cameras. Otherwise, they'll have company very soon.

The hangar was full of shelves and tubes and looked like a cabinet of curiosity. There were things that Lance guessed were weapons and others for which he couldn't figure out their utility. There were even aliens in jars. He wasn't certain they were all dead, however: he was convinced that he could feel their eyes on him…

"What was that?!" Matt whispered hurriedly, startling the sharpshooter who attempted to hit him with his elbow.

Lance grabbed him by his collar, angry, but Matt just pointed his finger at a glowing thing hidden behind the shelves.

"It... it's a pool!" the blue paladin declared without even being able to see it. He would have recognized the scent and the particular way water reflected light anywhere. "But why is there a pool in a place like this?!"

His eyebrows drew together as he walked towards the source of the light splashing sound. He moved slowly, already forgetting the hand Matt had on his shoulder, until he could put his hand on the thick glass.

Is there was a pool hidden in one of Area 51's hangars, that could only mean one thing: there was an aquatic alien kept somewhere in there, there was no other explanation. The picture of Plaxum appeared into his mind and Lance's heart started beating faster.

"Matt, I think there's an alien in there. We have to help them!"

The latter shot him a worried look. What was Lance thinking about?!

The other hangar was divided in two parts: the first one, closest to the door Pidge and Hunk had entered by, was full of shelves ; the second part was a huge room full of space debris and ship leftovers.

The two paladins knew they should have foremost focused on the ships, but their curiosity was too strong and they had chosen to explore the first room a bit before taking a look at the spacecrafts.

Their hangar didn't seem to be used for weapon storage. Instead, they were surrounded by alien and non-alien-looking things, and it looked more like a normal museum than the block Matt and Lance where in.

On one shelf were disposed a red fez, next to a hand that looked human and which was floating in a jar. It reminded the two paladins of something but they couldn't put their finger on it. Next to them, they recognized an Arusian horn-shell like the ones Arusians had on their head. They didn't know if they were just fancy hats or part of the aliens' bodies, and it sent a shiver down their spines. Some Arusians might have found a unhappy ending on Earth at some point in History...

"Hunk! Look at that!" Pidge exclaimed a few minutes later, her eyes sparkling with joy and fascination and pointing at a shelf with unconcealed excitement.
The yellow paladin turned to her and took place behind the girl. She was pointing to a pyramidal object which seemed to be a deactivated robot. When he looked closely, Hunk spotted lines curved in the sides, and suddenly he understood the reason of her bliss.

"Ooooh, is it really a Galra robot?" he whispered.

"It's the exact same model as Rover!" the girl almost yelled. She extended her arm to brush the surface of the robot, tears in the corners of her eyes. "I wonder if I could take it…" she thought out loud, raising an interrogative and begging look at her companion.

"And I wonder what two young people are doing in a place like this," a strong unfamiliar voice replied behind them.

They turned round as one and faced a tall man in a black tuxedo. His skin was dark and his hair cut short in the military style. He was wearing a pair of opaque sunglasses, and Hunk saw a badge on his chest which read "James D. Edwards".

"We… were looking for the toilets?" Pidge hazarded, glancing at Hunk.

The boy seemed to understand the message because he saluted the man like they used to do back at the Galaxy Garrison. The move allowed him to press his heels together, activating the rescue button that Pidge had -thank God- cleverly put on a discrete spot.

"We are sorry, sir... we are from the Galaxy Garrison, sir… we just wanted to see if the aliens rumours were true… sir!" Hunk exaggerated, his heart racing fast in his chest. It wasn't like him to play a role to trick people, and he had to admit that the exercise was pretty difficult.

Pidge sighed, pretending to be exasperated so that they could earn some time.

"Oh, thank you, David, I was going to save our skins and you just chicken out like always!" the green paladin acted, doing her best to keep their identities a secret. If the guy knew about the Galaxy Garrison -which was most likely the case, considering they were at the place where all alien-related things were hidden from civilians-, he surely knew about the cadets who had disappeared years ago. Chances were that he knew about the little trick the Holts had recently played to the Garrison too.

The man wearing a tuxedo smiled. "Listen, kids, I don't know what you're doing here, but I'll have to ask you to follow me. There is nothing to see, and there has never been any alien on Earth before. We are just keeping movie replicas in here, but we must entertain the myth. You know, it brings a lot of money to the government," he lied with so much assurance that the paladins wondered if he believed his own words. Perhaps he was going to brainwash them.

"Oh, but then what is this?" Pidge asked, taking the Galra robot from the shelf and now playing dumb.

"Just a military drone prototype. Now put it back on its place and come with me."

The man named James started stirring and he was keeping his hand near his pocket, which was ominous, in Hunk's opinion. The man was going to get something out of his pocket when he froze suddenly. He turned round in the time of a blink but the projectile hit him and he fell down on the floor, shaken with slight spasms.

"Team Latte saves the day!" Lance exclaimed, standing up from behind a box. In his hand was a metallic crossbow he had found in the other hangar. The bolts that went with it had the particularity to release electricity when they hit their target and it had seemed to be the best and the safest choice for the sharpshooter, as he didn't know how the gun-looking weapons worked.

"Thanks, Lance!", Hunk declared, relieved. He let out a huge sigh to release his tension and clenched his fists several times.

"Guys, what is that?" Pidge enquired with a frown, holding her future Rover 2.0 close against her chest. She pointed at the giant tube on wheels that Matt was rolling behind him.

"We've found an alien who is still alive," her brother explained, looking at the small being who was looking lost in its fishtank. "They had left him in a pool and, well, we couldn't just leave him in this place…"

The alien locked its big black eyes into Pidge's and she nodded in agreement. The creature had a very human-like face shape that made it look like a young child, it was also the same height as an average six years-old kid. Its skin was black and white, like an orca, and when the paladins looked at it, it clapped its fins happily. The two big seal fins were half the size of its body and in Lance's eyes, it made the alien look like a clumsy young selkie - a folklore creature.

"How do you know it's a he?" Hunk asked, looking at the humanoid seal. "I mean, we never know, with aliens."

"Actually, we don't know either. Matt is sure that they're a he, and the alien doesn't seem to know our language…" the blue paladin said, glancing at the space selkie again. "But abandoning this alien over there… it just didn't feel right."

They paused for a minute, then Pidge reminded them that they should hurry before other guards showed up. James D. Edwards was still lying on the floor at their feet, looking asleep, and they checked that he was still breathing before they left.

Matt carried the seal alien with him all the way to the second room of the hangar ; there, the four humans stopped, stunned. They had wished for spaceships but they would never have thought that there would be so many of them. They were surrounded by spacecrafts in diverse operating states.

The little group walked down the aisles and Lance stopped in front of a arrowhead-shaped dark-coloured ship. It was destroyed and parts of the hull were missing, but he took a photo by instinct. When he turned to face the others, he could only see the selkie staring at him with what he interpreted as fascination.

The team examined a dozen of spaceships but none seemed able to take them off Earth. Some of them were lacking a motor, others were lacking a means of propulsion, and even the engineer trio didn't manage to figure out how some of them worked.

Eventually, the group stopped in front of a huge, classic flying saucer that could have been straight out of a movie. They looked at each other with hope in their eyes: it seemed big enough for them all to fit in, even when they'd have joined their friends. The motor was there, the hull was okay, and it looked able to get off the ground.

"Do we try this one?" Pidge asked, waiting for her friends' opinion.

"I don't think we've got the choice!" Matt yelled, already pulling the fishtank on the ramp to the ship and pointing at the three people who were running in their direction, holding weapons in their hands.

The paladins climbed into the ship in hast. The technology was old enough for the group to easily understand how it worked. Lance turned it on and the spacecraft got off the ground immediately. The engine wasn't fluid to drive like the Lions, instead it was rough, coarse and heavy, more like the cargo he used to pilot in the Garrison simulations, but quicker.

The blue paladin smirked.

"What do we do about the roof?!" Hunk screamed, hanging on anything that could avoid him from falling. The scene felt awfully familiar, it felt like the very beginning of their adventure, when they had saved Shiro and travelled through space in the blue Lion. And to Pidge and Hunk, it felt like Lance's piloting skills were the same as they had been at that time, too.

"We don't have time to worry about the roof!" Lance declared in a tone that terrified his teammates. "We're going through the wall!"

The paladins' hearts missed a beat.

The pilot didn't cease smirking. He glanced over the instrument board and crashed his hand on the big red button in the middle.

"LAAANCE!"

They closed their eyelids, waiting for the impact.

A weird noise came from their craft, high-pitched, followed by the angry yells of the men who had been going after them, and when Pidge, Hunk and Matt opened their eyes again, they could see the desert under them. The flying saucer was hovering in the sky and Lance shot one last look at the earthen landscape. He turned to his friends for a short second, etching the moment in his mind, and pulled the lever.

"What… What happened?" Hunk stuttered, finally daring to breathe again.

"I pressed the red button," Lance said with a shrug that he wanted nonchalant. "It activated the lasers and got us out of there."

The four humans remained silent and the only sound to break the quietude of the instant was the soft clapping of the water against the glass of the selkie's fishtank.

Through the window, Earth became rounder and soon they were high enough to distinguish the oceans and the continents. Lance glanced at their planet again and his chest ached dramatically. He pressed his fingers against the lever and only Matt's warning prevented him from hitting what he first thought were asteroids.

If he hadn't been struggling to save their lives piloting the flying garbage can, the blue paladin would surely have screamed out of anger and frustration. Around Earth, their beautiful, precious home planet, was gravitating a space debris belt made of satellites and tiny bits of metal that were flying around, fast and sharp, threatening.

"To your left!" Matt warned again, holding onto the pilot's chair.

Lance took a corner so tight that Hunk hit the wall and water spilled from the aquarium that Pidge was struggling to keep upright. The selkie yelped and took refuge in the lowest part of its shelter, terrified. The alien barely understood what was going on nor who those people were, and it was surely going to die there. It had barely known anything yet...

"Why is this ship so stiff?!" the paladin complained, gritting his teeth and taking another rough turn in order to avoid the metal dust.

After a struggle that felt like it had lasted hours, he successfully got his little group of friends out of the debris belt. Fortunately, the hull of their saucer was so thick that it had barely taken any damage, and Lance was a good enough pilot to limit the impacts. Anyway, they were lucky that old alien technologies were resistant.

"O-Okay," the sharpshooter managed to pronounce once his hands had stopped shaking and he had caught his breath -why did flying Altean spaceship feel so much easier?!. "Does anyone know where we're supposed to be heading?"

The green paladin weakly took her phone out of her pocket and scrolled through her old messages. She copied figures into one of her apps, which seemed to be written in Altean letters, and a loading logo appeared in front of her. After two long minutes -should they use doboshes again?-, the result materialized in the air above her phone.

"The good news are that Shiro and the others aren't too far: they're on Aldebaran b, a planet located in the Alpha Tauri system," Pidge declared. "We can see the star from Earth, near Orion."

"And what are the bad news?" Hunk questioned, already regretting it.

"It's a bit more than sixty-five light years away from here," the girl continued in a grave tone. "Let's hope that this thing can create wormholes or travel faster than light, or else…"

"If this garbage saucer managed to reach and crash on Earth, there must be something like a turbo among all those buttons," Lance cut her, denying the possibility of their mission being a failure. "Lend me a hand to find it, and we'll be with the others for dinner!"

"Actually it would be a good thing, because I don't think we'll find anything edible on this ship…" Hunk pointed out.

They took one second to take the information in and all the group started looking for the touch that would save them all. Even though the spacecraft was big, they couldn't last more than a few days without water - and drinking the water from the aquarium didn't sound like a good idea.

The humans gathered around Lance and examined each button on the board. It didn't took them a long time to understand that most of them had absolutely no purpose. They might had been broken long ago and were now out of order, unfortunately for the paladins.

"Guys, do you think we'll have enough oxygen? Oh god, I feel bad, I think I'm suffocating…" the yellow paladin panicked, looking around him and putting his hands around his throat.

Matt put his hand on Hunk's shoulder and advised him to take deep breaths. The spaceship was big enough and there was surely an oxygen synthesizer somewhere on board -in the case that the little green men who had been using the ship before them breathed oxygen, but Matt avoided mentioning this condition.

Pidge stared at a lever which was hanging from the ceiling and climbed on Lance's seat to reach it. She grabbed the bar and put all her weight to lower it, ending up only hanging on it without any other support, but it still resisted her. It took all the boys' strength to get the lever down, and when they finally succeeded, an alarm activated and rang so loudly that they were convinced they'd be deaf by the end of their journey. A voice raised in the speakers but none of the paladins could understand the language. Pidge was taking her phone out of her pocket in order to find a translation when her brother spoke.

"It says that we've activated the autopilot mode," he affirmed, beaming when he realised he recognised the language one of the rebels he had worked with had taught him a few sentences of. "All we have to do is to enter the coordinates!"

Pidge executed immediately and the ship accelerated greatly as soon as she validated their destination. An informatic screen substituted to the sight of stars scrolling on the other side of the glass screen, displaying figures that seemed to be a countdown.

"Um, guys, are you sure it wasn't the autodestruction mode?" Lance asked, swallowing, his eyes locked on the numbers that were rapidly decreasing.

"I think it's the time that's left before we're there," Pidge hazarded, tilting her head on the side. She walked to a seat near the wall and sat down, quickly joined by her brother who took a card game out of the only bag he had managed to take with him on the ship.

"Anybody's up for a little poker game?" he offered with an ominous laugh.

Lance wasn't listening anymore, absentmindedly playing with his phone in his pocket. He finally took it in his hand and stared at the lock screen - a blurry selfie Selena and Leo had snapped when they had stolen their brother's phone. A small white piece of paper stuck in his phone case caught Lance's attention, and he unfolded it. A phone number was written messily, and Lance couldn't help but smile slightly when he saw it.

He hadn't texted Gabriel yet. Actually, he didn't know anymore whether he should do it or not: they were in space and Gabriel was just a human who had absolutely no idea of how gigantic the universe really was. Was it selfish to ask him to wait for Lance to go back on Earth - if he did go back -? Was it better not to want to involve him in that spatial mess that Lance's life was?

To be honest, the blue paladin wouldn't have traded a minute of his adventure for anything in the universe. He had grown so much, and even the way he looked at the sky, at the world, had changed. He had made precious friends, he had learnt many things and discovered peoples and planets that he was sure no human would ever see again. Going back to the course of his previous life would be impossible for Lance, and he knew better than anyone that his friends felt the same way.

Suddenly, his gaze met the selkie's, and Lance got up from his seat to the center of the room.

"We promised we'd take photos for our families, right? Let's start now!" he cheered with a huge grin, holding his phone in front of him.

He put his arm around the fishtank and the selkie pressed its head against the crystal glass as if to hug Lance. Pidge slipped beside the aquarium, pressing her cheek against its side, and Matt pressed his face against the glass behind them, making weird faces at the camera through the deformation of water. Hunk joined them, laughing out loud, and hugged Pidge tight. The photo that resulted of this scene was so ridiculous that it immediately became one of their favourites.

Lance sent it to his brother and his sister right away with a huge grin on his face, asking them to print it for him. While scrolling through the massive amount of pictures he had into his phone -selfies, cute girls, food, useful photos he kept in the eventuality of future blackmailing-, Lance came across the photo of the damaged ship he had taken in the hangar and suddenly a detail hit him.

In the background, near what was left of the pilot seat, was a symbol that he knew very well, for having seen it -and kinda missed it- for months. The Blade of Marmora symbol was engraved in the wall behind what was left of the command board.

"How high do you think the probabilities of several Galra ships with the Blade's symbol crashing in the USA are?" he asked around, his face so pale that he looked like he had just seen a ghost -which was more or less the case.

"What are you talking about?" Pidge replied with a deep frown.

The sharpshooter handed his phone over to his friend whose face displayed various emotions in the time of a few seconds.

"Do you think…" she began, turning her look to the Galra robot she had taken with her, and then back to Lance, a light of what seemed to be worry into her big hazel eyes.

"How many Galra-human hybrids who lived in the USA do you know?" Lance tried to joke, not sounding convincing at all -he sounded concerned, almost afraid, with an ounce of feverish hope piercing through the very bottom of his voice. "Perhaps… I think that this ship might have belonged to his mother. To Keith's mother, I mean..."

The paladins looked at each other in silence, Matt was staring at Lance from his place. Then, he glanced at the screen on the front of the ship. If he understood it correctly, and considering the spectacularly high speed at which they were passing stellar bodies, they would be on Aldebaran b in fourteen hours.