Together, they manage to calm the injured H'Raka enough that he lies down on the floor which gives them plenty of space to take a good look at his injuries from the leopard-like animals.
While they're not life-threatening, especially now that Alex has poured some antiseptic over them from her little medical kit in her pack, something that made him roar in pain from the sting of it and almost send Lena flying when he bucked upwards.
"You're ok, we've got you." Kara tries to reassure him, peeking over to look at the damage, his back legs now wrapped up nicely thanks to Alex. She thought about using the bandages she has but his legs are so large ad the gashes are equally as big so she instead used the spare crew's robes that happened to be stored in a cabinet off in the corner of the room.
His legs took the worst of the attack but his back-right wing took some damage too and that's going to be a problem. It was already in question whether or not he could fly them out of there with injured legs but an injured wing, that's just out of the question, it's even in question whether or not he could fly out of there solo.
They're trapped here because they can't take off in this ship without the ship being tracked by Krypton's council and they can't make themselves that visible, it would ruin the mission.
Kara's now pacing across the room, eyes barely leaving the hatch that she and Lena dragged the, now empty, cabinet on top of in the hope that it will buy them some more time if the lock breaks because they can hear the animals below leaping up and bashing into it from below, trying to get to them.
"Kara?" Lena calls out from where she's tenderly stroking Bolt's head.
"Hmm?" Kara turns to her, still keeping the hatch in the corner of her eye. "Are you ok?"
"Where's Kelex?"
Kara's eyes go wide, Alex's eyes matching them too. "Oh shit. He's down there. That's all of our samples."
Lena drops her head into one of her hands, the other staying on Bolt's snout. "Today is just getting worse and worse, I'm starting to think we're just going to have to call Brainy to come and get us and end the mission."
Alex shakes her head. "That's out of the question, we can only call him when the whole group is together, remember, The Legion ship would be able to be tracked when he starts flying too so it would be just as bad as if we took off in this one."
"Then what do we do? We can't just stay here, we're trapped and we're one tiny lock and a cabinet away from being eaten by wild animals, we need a proper plan." Lena shakes her head, confused and terrified.
Kara just shrugs, "I have no idea, we've been saying we need a plan since we got on this damn ship and yet, here we are, still plan-free."
There's nothing to say to that, she's right. They have nothing to go off of and no way to escape despite being in a ship that for all they know, might have the ability to take off. There are no obvious answers to their problems.
Kara goes back to her pacing, trying to find a way to get Kelex and the samples and then get them out of there, Bolt included, while having no other transport at their disposal. Or well, they do, they just can't use it. Unless they can.
The idea jumps into her head and in an instant, she heads for the controls pulling up as much information as she can, she knows what she's looking for but doesn't know where to find it in the system so she has to trawl through as much of the server as she can to find it quickly.
"What are you doing?" Alex questions.
"Making a plan." She keeps tapping and going through the controls until she finds what she needs, an outline of every system on the ship. "Gotcha!"
She pulls it up and starts filtering through it, she just has to find the tracking system in the ship and if her plan is feasible, they don't have to escape the ship, they could take the whole thing.
"What are you looking at?" Lena comes over to look over her shoulder, trying her best to translate the Kryptonese so she can understand without slowing Kara down.
"Figuring out where the tracker in the ship is. If we can get to it and ditch it, then we will take longer to be tracked when we take off because they would have to pinpoint our location by our power source instead of the tracking system and by then, with the speed of these ships, we can be clear of the jungle and be heading back to the others."
Alex is shaking her head vehemently, "No, that won't work."
"Why not?"
"Uh, maybe because even if we fly off, there's still a load of wild animals on board and if we tried to tip them out or anything, we'd lose Kelex and the samples too."
Kara's shoulders drop. She was so sure she just had somewhat of a viable solution. "Ok, so we can't use this ship. How else are we getting out of here."
Lena has an idea. It's a good one but there's one major hole in it. "We could call Astra."
"How?"
"I have Kara's spy beacon in my pack on top of the ship. Astra gave it to me when we left the accommodation. We don't have to try and get out of here, we just have to find a way to get to my pack so we can call her, she can bring reinforcements."
Kara's head falls forward, her eyes tired despite her mind running at a million miles per hour. "That won't work either. Even if Astra did want to come, I don't think The Rebellion would allow her to send a ship of any kind to come and get us, they needed us to be the ones to come out here because they didn't dare do it themselves, they aren't about to send us a rescue party."
"I think you're underestimating how far your aunt is willing to go to keep you safe and protect you, Kara. She loves you." Lena says, "She gave me that spy beacon for a reason, I think it's our best shot."
"We can't even get to it, it's out of the question, we have to come up with something else, if that fails then maybe we can revisit it but for now, I don't think that's an idea we can have on the table, I'm sorry." Kara feels bad for shooting down Lena's idea but involving The Rebellion isn't an idea they can run with. "How about I see if we can still get to the armoury? We might still be able to make a run for it."
"Make a run for it? Kara, we saw how fast these animals can run, we wouldn't make it five steps." Alex scoffs.
"Not necessarily. It sounds like they have all gathered down in the engine room and if I can get up the cameras on this damn console that doesn't want to do what I tell it to because it's so old and kind of broken from the crash, we will be able to see where they are."
Lena scratches at the back of her neck, all of her hair standing up. "I guess that's a start but just for the record, I'm totally against the just wing-it-and-run method you've got going on at the minute."
"Noted." Kara scratches her forehead like she's about to dig into her brain to find some kind of intellect she can use to get them out of the situation. Instead, she only gets halfway to any kind of thought before she's no longer on her feet.
In fact, none of them happens to be on their feet anymore, all now sprawled gracelessly across the ground while rapidly slipping down across the room as the floor shifts and tilts beneath them, sliding them downwards in a rush their brains can't keep up with.
Even poor injured Bolt is sliding across the room, his injured legs too weak to help him grip onto his spot on the floor and his wings too fragile to move at present.
It all happens so fast that they barely notice the jolt that causes the ship to slide and it's all so fast that they can't even figure out if they really felt the jolt, if they were hit or if the ground beneath them just gave way.
Perhaps the jumping from the animals below them caused whatever was below the ship to give or break, the new pressure too much for it. That's the only thing they can think of that could have happened. It's the only thing they want to think of that happened, the alternative might not be as nice.
Kara's back hits the wall hard. She lets out a grunt that is quickly followed by that of Alex and then Lena, Bolt only letting out a strangled whine when he ends up pressed against some furniture, a table that's screwed down and a couple of chairs they hadn't sat on before because they don't look sturdy but have somehow survived being flopped against by a dragon.
"Ow! Are you guys ok?" Kara recovers first, using the wall to push herself up and slowly try to get to her feet, struggling because of the angle the ship is now sitting at, probably somewhere around the forty-five-degree mark.
"Uh, yeah, I'm still in one piece at least." Lena wheezes out since she got the wind knocked out of her when she made impact with the wall. "Just about anyway."
"That'll have to be good enough, we have work to do." Kara grabs at Alex as she passes her, forcing her to stand up too instead of just leaning against the wall looking dazed. "Come on, you too, loser."
"Hey! I could be injured for all you know!" Alex says indignantly, her hands trying to move to her hips but giving up on that mission after barely a second when she comes to the realization that she needs them to stay upright.
Kara climbs up the slope of the floor until she's back to the control panel and while holding onto the edge of it to keep herself steady, goes back to searching through the systems until she finds something that catches her eye. Cameras.
She pulls up all of the footage readily available, a live stream coming in from multiple sections of the ship and giving them a play-by-play of what's happening on board, the screen boxed off into several smaller screens.
The main one she finds herself focusing on is one of the rooms below them, the engine room. The place where the leopards are all still trying to shake off the fright from what just happened, a few of them seemingly injured and one that has had a heavy piece of machinery fall atop of it, effectively turning it into a rug.
Only around seventy percent of the cameras are working but it's enough to tell her that the majority of the predators are downstairs with just a couple of stragglers hanging around in the hallway nearby.
There's a reason they are disbanding from the engine room though, she notices after just a few moments of staring at the footage, there's a leak from the machine that fell on top of one of the leopards, it must be a tank of some kind because it has, or rather had, pipes attached to it that have splintered off and snapped, leaking water in a steadily growing pool. A steadily growing pool that all of the leopards are avoiding like the plague.
Lena manages to pull herself up to Kara, grabbing at her belt and waistband to get up, thankful for Kara's obscenely strong legs for not buckling under the added weight as she uses her girlfriend as a jungle gym. Her eyes fall onto the console and widen a fraction. "That's pretty helpful actually."
"It really is, it means we can start planning the best escape route but I think I might have a hypothesis for an experiment if you're up for it."
"If we're going to get eaten on an alien spaceship in the middle of a mega-deadly jungle, I want to go out doing science," Lena says with a hint of a smile, wrapping her arm around Kara's waist in what she doesn't even pretend to be an act of love, it's just to help stabilize herself better. "What's your hypothesis?"
Alex cuts in, climbing up both of them in one movement that isn't as swift or graceful as she thinks it is, almost taking all three of them for another slide down the room. "Don't I get a say in this?"
"No, not really." Kara deadpans. "Now, look at the camera from the engine room and look at the nice new centrepiece."
Lena shudders. "That's disgusting."
Kara nods along. "It is but it's also very telling."
"Because they're avoiding their dead friend?" Alex questions.
"No, because they're avoiding the water. They don't like getting wet. A cat is still a cat, no matter how big its teeth are."
Kara minimizes the screen, keeping only the footage from the engine room up in the corner as she keeps searching through the data until she finds exactly what she needs, a good ol' instruction manual. One that tells her all of the safety features of the ship, including an excellent sprinkler system.
They don't have to fight the leopards, they can flush them out in one very good, very smart move.
Kara gets to the page simply dedicated to fire safety on the ship and all of the ways the ship is programmed to prevent its crew from becoming toasted and starts skimming the page, giving it a quick once over that skips out on most of the stuff she deems to be boring and unnecessary.
"Oh cool, we just need to light a small fire and then the sprinklers will go off in all of the hallways, the kitchen area and the communal areas. There's a handful of rooms that won't get splashed by it, a couple of which are in here and the engine room, which is understandable. If we're in the water, then I would hazard a guess that the leopards are less inclined to take a bite of us while we can go and get the spy beacon from outside." Kara explains as she summarizes what she just read to Alex and Lena.
"Wait, you're open to the spy beacon plan?"
Kara sighs slightly. "Yes, I am. I probably shouldn't have brushed off the idea so quickly before. It's actually probably the only way we physically can get out of here without abandoning the mission completely or dying."
Lena smiles. "Glad we're on the same page but we still have a couple of other problems."
"Like what?"
"Kelex for starters. Then there is where the best place to wait for help to arrive is. How we're getting Bolt out of here. All the fun stuff." Lena ticks the problems off in her head as she goes.
"Those are all very valid." Alex agrees with Lena and as much as she wants to have all of the answers to their problems, her brain is just tired at this point. She can solve maybe one of those issues and that's a big maybe. "Bring the screen back up for the cameras."
Kara doesn't question the demand, just gets on with it. Alex gets the remote to Kelex out of her pocket and jiggles it a little until the feisty little fellow comes into view of the engine room camera. She uses the controls and the cameras to navigate the little robot along the halls until he's in one of the main corridors, a few leopards trailing after him, confused by what they're looking at but sensing that he isn't prey, probably because he smells just like everything else on the ship and slightly of the plant samples, basically, nothing that's too appealing to them.
Alex ditches him in that corridor. They are going to have to use it to get out of there anyway so they can just pick him up as they go. "Kelex is good. We'll get him when we go past there."
"And Bolt?" Lena questions.
Kara digs through her pack for more rope and then goes through Alex's too. "Alex, you better do this because I'm not going to be able to do it in a way that is strong enough."
"Do what?"
"You're about to make a harness for a dragon so he can be airlifted by Astra if she shows up."
"When she shows up." Lena corrects her.
Kara sucks in a healthy breath of oxygen. "Yeah, sure. When she shows up."
Alex takes the rope and starts working on the strongest knots she can that won't take up too much of the rope, needing the length so she can loop it around Bolt's body in the best way to keep him from slipping out whatever makeshift harness she manages to conjure up. She's never been taught how to make a harness for a dragon before so she's kind of flying by the seat of her pants here and soon, Bolt will be too, but literally.
While she's doing that, Kara is doing more research. It turns out that the sprinklers will only stay on for a few minutes, so they have to get out quickly and pray that the leopards don't follow them out and just take shelter in the rooms where the sprinklers aren't on but if any of them run out of the ship then they're going to have no choice but to face them outside, a duel they probably won't win. "Do you think we can make it all the way through the ship in like, seven minutes?"
"Probably, why?" Lena answers, watching the camera footage closely, working on seeing if there's a pattern to how the animals in the ship behave because they aren't all that focused on getting to them now, something she knows will change when they go out there but for now, it's strange. They might
"That's an estimated time of how long the sprinklers will run for so that's how long we have until the leopards will come back into the halls."
Lena makes a little noise of recognition but her eyebrows furrow and she gets a troubled look across her face that Kara doesn't like the look of.
"What if they decide they would like to eat us more than they wouldn't like to get wet?"
"Then we gave it our best shot," Kara says, blunter than she's ever been. "I'm sorry, baby, and I wish we had a better plan with better odds but for now, this is all we can do."
"Then let's get on with it."
They work quickly and get everything ready as they possibly can. Bolt is harnessed up, Kelex is waiting and Alex has her lighter ready, a few sheets of paper out of Kara's notebook in hand ready to set off the fire alarms and the sprinkler system. They just have to summon up their courage.
Kara has her pack strapped tightly to her back, as does Alex. Her dagger is held firm in her hand and in her other, she holds a metal bar she managed to break free from some of the things that broke when she ship tipped. Alex took one for herself too, purposefully keeping the sharper one for herself and demanding she be the one to lead the way. If the plan goes wrong, she'll be the appetizer.
There's no time to waste, they can't put it off much longer, and they have to get out of there. Alex drags a chair over from where they had fallen with the ship and Lena and Kara then hold it in place so she can stand on top of it and light the paper. It doesn't take much before the sprinklers start. They can hear them through the door.
Alex and Kara work together on the crank this time, getting it open much quicker than when they took on the task alone before.
As soon as it's open wide enough, Kara grabs Bolt's harness, the one still around his head, and leads him out of the room, limping and reluctant to walk back into the lion's den, a saying that is far too real for the situation.
The stream of water, oddly powerful, makes it hard to see what's in front of them and their vision is blocked much more than they would like it to be but they don't actually have much say in the matter so all they can do is move as quickly as they can and keep an eye out for any snapping teeth.
As they go, they see the first lot of leopards. They're slightly soggy and have taken refuge in one of the rooms off the hallway. They can't tell what room it is but it doesn't matter because while they are making some horrible snarly noises at them and they are proudly showing off their pearly whites, they aren't coming into the water so they're safe while the sprinklers are on.
Bolt struggles against Kara a little when they get close to moving past them but with a little bit of encouragement and a harsh tug she feels kind of fealty for, she has him limping behind her and moving closer and closer to the door.
Alex keeps leading them on and eventually, they pass Kelex and Lena is quick to grab him and uses the rope they never bothered to detach from him to pull him along, twisting the rope around her wrist.
They pass the panel they took off the wall, the one where they found the snake, and then, they're at the door leading outside. Outside, where there might be teeth and claws waiting for them. They got in the breach to get into the ship, they can get out of it, it's just a matter of time and yet they have to go out there to get the spy beacon and they're running out of time.
With the lights on, Kara can see where the manual lever is for the massive door and grabs it. It opens easily and they all prepare themselves but nothing is waiting for them, not immediately anyway.
No time is wasted, they make a break for it, clambering up the vines where the pods are that they used to distract the leopards before.
There's a bunch of bugs still fluttering about but they don't have time to be afraid of them or squeamish when their horrible slimy wings bat against them from time to time, the massive things still searching for more pollen and waiting to see if any more pods from other nearby vines will burst open for them.
They clamber up onto the top of the ship, a feat that is made slightly easier by the new tilt to it and Lena falls to her knees beside her pack, dropping the sword beside it so her scrambling fingers can get inside it and dig out the beacon. It takes a few long seconds of fumbling before she manages to close her hand around it and pull it out.
She holds it out to Kara, who is quick to snap it up out of her hand and activate it, sending out a signal for her aunt, the only woman who can help them out now.
Bolt is uneasy, it's easy to see but there's literally nothing they can do to help him out and all of them have one thing on their minds. The sprinklers are going to shut off soon and then the animals are free of their cages.
They end up in a sort of circle, their backs pressed to each other's and their weapons facing out. This gives Lena the perfect vantage point to stare out into the trees, her eyes assessing. She couldn't make anything out of the behaviour of the leopards from the cameras so she's got to expect the unexpected. It's just hard to do that when the trees are so intriguing.
"Hey, guys?"
"Yeah?" Kara keeps her voice low, not wanting to attract any unwanted attention to them.
"Why are all of the trees around here splintered and broken when they weren't before?"
The question has Alex and Kara looking around them too and sure enough, in a full circle around the ship, the trees have some major damage, some kind of light blue sap seeping out of them where they have been broken. Alex's eyes can't possibly get any wider. "I don't think the ship just slipped. I think it got rammed."
A tree falls before them and a creature stands before them, stalking and looming.
"Shit." Lena whimpers out and Bolt, the coward that he is, tries to take off, his wings are too damaged though and just leaving him crying and trying over and over again to fly and escape but his body is physically incapable of doing so. Instead, he runs. He goes with so much power that Kara loses her grip on his harness and he's running through the broken trees until he slips between a gap where two fallen trees come together to form a little shelter, the most amount of protection he can find.
As for the creature, it doesn't move. It just looms there, great orange eyes peeking out from a huge black reptile-like body.
It just stares at them before taking a slow step closer. They have nowhere to run. They know that and this creature knows that too.
The sprinklers stop. They hear the moment they do because the leopards are making their way out of the ship now, rounding on them and snarling as they get closer. That is until they see the creature anyway, then they hightail their way out of there.
If murderous cats run away, they stand no chance of surviving this now. There's just no way. There's no winning.
A sound in the distance.
An alarm ringing and a light so bright that even in the day, it shines light into every nook and cranny in miles.
A small ship.
Astra?
That's not Astra.