Valkyrie One

[Jaden Luka]

Being an Alliance officer was a mixed bag. The hours were lousy. The pay was lousy. The ships were cramped. The quarters were uncomfortable. The rations tasted like seventeen different flavours of ass. The uniforms, they were fairly stylish, so that was a plus; until you hopped into a fighter cockpit that was, and had a neon coloured jock smock riding up in your crotch for several hours each sortee. And then there was the technology. Sometimes you stumbled upon a rare classic, like Jaden's beloved A-Wings; but the rest was either laughably old and falling apart, or so pristine and new that they hadn't worked out the bugs and gremlins yet.

"Valkyrie One, this is Tower. You are past the outer marker, and clear to accelerate for Hyperspace. Force be with you."

"Copy that, Tower," Jaden replied, reluctantly pulling his hands away from the vector controls to spool up the drive coils and green light the coordinates that the nav computer had spewed out. "Valkyrie One making jump."

The jury was still out on the U-Wing that Command had loaned him and Captain Quez for this little field trip of theirs. There was an uncomfortable amount of play in the manual controls, and as Jaden reached for the lightspeed handle, it sparked a wave of genuine relief when the stars before him stretched out into the swirling blue of hyperspace, rather than dissolving into a cacophonous cloud of explosive death.

On the other hand though, the U-Wing wasn't that bad. It was like the X-Wing's fat cousin, but the kind of fat cousin with confidence, and a shining personality, and who actually managed to work those curves into something that you could comfortably stare at for all kinds of dance numbers. She was surprisingly spry for a ship that, on the inside, fell somewhere between a LAAT/i and a Lambda; and there was a sleekness and responsiveness to the way she flew, especially if you went and broke atmo with her. Whoever had conceived those variable geometry aerofoils was a genius; far more so than whoever had thought the jumping jack s-foils on an X-Wing were a good idea. And hey, at least he wasn't having to make this trip in the Comet - that right there was an abundant reason for gratitude.

Locking down the controls, and double running all the appropriate checks, just in case, Jaden finally abandoned the cockpit - or is it technically a bridge on a ship like this? - and descended down into the passenger compartment, where Captain Quez had made himself comfortable. And by comfortable, the Captain was in fact buried beneath the various flimsiwork and data files that came along with this little jaunt. It was another of those mixed bag situations; another downside to the Alliance military. Having gone from a scrappy little rag-tag force of rebels into a sectors-wide legitimate government had forced a whole heap of changes, including rapid expansion in the Alliance ranks. Many were fresh recruits, while others were veterans from planetary militias, and even from Imperial services in some instances, much to everyone's surprise and suspicion. That influx had come in like a wave, and the rising tide floated existing servicemen to the top. Anyone with any kind of rank and status within the Alliance was in high demand, and there weren't always enough officers to go around.

Case in point, this little deployment to one of the boarder monitoring outposts that the Alliance had established in the Gordian Reach. Command needed two officers of Grade 5 or above to sign off on the outpost's functionality, before it could be officially marked as online. It didn't make a damned bit of difference to whether or not the outpost was operational and doing it's job - it was, and had been for a few weeks now - but something to do with Senate reports and performance quotas on the Military Requisition Budget meant that someone had to go there in person, sign a bunch of forms, and then starmail them back to the logistics hub on Jovan Station. Two someones, in fact: Captain Cirrsseeto Quez, and Commander Jaden Luka.

But of course, Command couldn't just divert the Novgorod. Oh no. The Novgorod was an essential part of the patrol cycle along Jovan's segment of the border, and the folks back on Dac and Bothawui were too paranoid to risk a potential gap in their patrol net that the Empire might somehow magically find out about and exploit within the space of 24 hours. So they'd left Tink with the keys to the speeder, much to his overwhelming joy, and had set off in a borrowed troop transport, completing a ten minute task in a little over three hours, just because the rookie operators at the outpost were intent on making it feel as if the visit was worth the officers' time.

Jaden heaved out a theatrical sigh, and slumped down into the crash couch a respectful arms reach or so away from the Captain.

"I'd like to submit my resignation, sir." A running joke, uttered for perhaps the third time today alone. "...again."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Denjied." Cirr replied in a droning tone, suppressing a grin as he licked a finger in between flicking through a new stack of flimsis.

Of course it wasn't a for-real request, but it was said with good reason. This was certainly the part of the service that was utterly bereft of romance. Of course for veterans, romance in the military was it's own joke. Cirrsseeto had certainly figured the punchline a long time ago, and Jaden wasn't long behind him.

Suddenly, the Captain paused his busy work. His ears flicked - piping discerning information to his brain that never stopped fussing over inconsequential matters of a starship hypochondriac.

"The ventrral comprressorr jiss out of cycle sync." It could all be chalked up under the broad category of who cares, but it was the kind of small ball that Captain Quez obsessed over when he had idle time.

"Cljick. Cljick. Cljick." He leaned forward in his seat, tilting his head so that it was parallel to the floor. It meant absolutely nothing in terms of performance, and was the sort of thing that could only be corrected by taking half the ship apart. But it was deeply annoying. To him, at least. Could his human subordinate even hear it?

Captain Quez sighed, stuffing all the flimsis back into his Navy-issue messenger bag. He wasn't going to get any more work done that would be meaningful, and Jaden's piloting was more or less done until they got the terminus alert. So now, in the grand navy tradition, they were two guys on a bucket with a lot of free time.

"Could be worrse. We could be the poorr bastarrds they posted to thjis statjion to begjin wjith."

[Jaden Luka]

On a scale of one to ten, Jaden wondered how much that sort of thing annoyed Tink. Finding a comparable situation for a fighter jock wasn't easy. Sure, you had your encounters with back-seat flyers from time to time; and sometimes you'd get a mechanic who thought they knew a thing or two about piloting, so they'd screw around with all your presets, so everything felt weird and wonky next time you were behind the stick; but at a guess, with Cirr it was worse. This wasn't some clueless sack of hot air spouting out baseless notions, this was an engineer who knew what he was talking about; and more importantly, everyone's boss. A lot of commanding officers were hands free when it came to the mechanical side of things: at peace with their cluelessness, and content to let the experts handle it. But how much of a pain in the ass must it be if, as an expert, your boss was an expert all on their own; and the kind of expert who didn't seem entirely at peace with the idea that he wasn't supposed to be experting any more.

In that regard, Tink was extremely lucky that Jaden had absolutely no clue what a ventral compressor being out of cycle sync actually meant - not unless it really did have something to do with bicycles and kitchen sinks, as his mind helpfully suggested. Sure, he knew a thing or two about how fighters worked. Every pilot did. If you didn't study the manual, and get the ground crew to help you understand how to take the girl apart and put her back together again, you were an idiot. But there was a difference between knowing this part goes there, and that doodad squirts the fuel into the magic explosion box and understanding any of the assortment of fancy - and quite possibly coded, for all Jaden knew - words that engineers splurted out whenever something was broken. Jaden had a theory about that, in fact: to his mind, everything had a perfectly comprehensible name, but engineers saved the complicated ones to help a crisis seem more severe, thus making their successful repairs that little bit more heroic.

"Do me a favour, boss," Jaden asked, fidgeting a little in a futile effort to find comfort on the U-Wing's utilitarian seating. "If you're gonna get you're tools out and dismantle the ship, it'd be great if you could make sure we're somewhere with a breathable atmosphere first."

A moment of contemplation added a quick addendum, considering the facility they'd just left. A breathable atmosphere was about the only thing that rock had going for them, and the prospect of being stranded there for even five minutes longer was worthy of a shudder. He made a mental note to reprimand himself next time he felt a little bitchy about being cooped up in the relative comfort of the Novgorod.

"A lack of predatory animals would be great, too. And a place with booze and strippers, if that's not too much to ask."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Cirr's ears perked up at that little comment, and the Captain's wry grin exposed a fang. He laced his fingers behind his head as he allowed himself to lean back against the headrest.

"Oh yeah? Seem to rrememberr hearrjing about an evenjing on Jovan statjion wjith a generral boozy...strrjipperry theme involvjing my executjive offjicerr."

No small secret on any of the multiple avenues from which he might have heard. Cirrsseeto didn't need a Bothan SpyNet for that.

[Jaden Luka]

If Jaden had been a Cizerack, his ears would likely have been fidgeting like crazy right now. Of course, if he'd been Cizerack, this entire situation would be entirely different. When it came to the Pride, Jaden was totally willing to admit how little he knew or understood about their culture. Not for lack of trying of course, but unfortunately his encounters with Cizerack thus far had all been with members of the same family, with varying degrees of rank-based awkwardness involved. A night spent with the younger of the two Meorrrei sisters had been the closest Jaden had got to a non-awkward opportunity to ask probing questions about the intricacies of Cizerack culture; but the probing that night had been of a different sort, and was exactly what had landed Jaden in this dilemma.

At face value, Jaden knew that the relationship roles in Cizerack culture were inverted. That was the guideline he tried to use as a basic indicator of what was and wasn't appropriate. If you were dating a Cizerack, it was the mother who'd threaten you with a shotgun. It was the woman who'd take the lead, pay for the date unless the guy insisted otherwise, and all that jazz. But when it came to siblings, things got a little weird. For starters, Cizerack seemed to have so many from what he could tell, and there was the whole complication of multiple spouses and political marriages. If Rai'faani and T'yeellaa spoke, he could imagine that at worst you'd get the kind of high-fives that fighter pilots shared. Jaden was down with that. In fact, honestly? He quite liked the notion of being the kind of thing women bragged about over beers. That, he could live with.

But what of Cirrsseeto? What would he think of Jaden's little one-night encounter? Was it utterly meaningless, too many siblings to keep track of to care? Had Jaden violated some sort of tradition or other that he was too intoxicated and distracted to worry about at the time? Or worse, had be become the kind of women that certain kinds of men spoke ill of? As far as the Captain was concerned, had the encounter turned him into nothing more than a cheap whore?

Jaden shuffled a little in his chair, but somehow managed to maintain his composure.

"I'm not familiar with General Boozy, sir," he deflected. "Is he one of the new appointments to Sector Command?"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

So his executive withstood mild-mannered interrogation. Cirrsseeto's toothless grin was a signal that he wasn't going to pull any truth in the light that Jaden didn't want to talk about. Besides, he knew Rai's reputation from his sister's own stories. Kiss and Tell was generally acceptable breakfast policy back home. If she stuck to her profile, Rai probably never called him the day after. If she liked what she had, she'd probably only darken his door again when and if she wanted more of it.

Jaden seemed upbeat, if a little evasive. Cirr knew enough humans to understand they just didn't deal with sex in a candid way, so with a wave of a hand the Captain dropped it.

"Well, jif he jis, jI guess he's one of Admjirral Tyrree's advjisorrs."

A bit of good fun in the direction of their superior, who preferred a quality dram and didn't deny it. One thing was certain though, General Boozy probably wasn't going to be joining the inspection at Listening Station KK3-X2. He might have a junior staffer present, such as Staff Sergeant Bathtub Gin, though Cirrsseeto really hoped he didn't have to play Bad Officer to a bunch of terminally-bored screen-jockeys.

"We'rre bejing sent out to the mjiddle of nowherre, so we mjight as well be thorrough. Let's make surre to keep an eye out forr contrraband. Last thjing jI want to hearr jis that we have a rreadjiness defjicjit because we went soft on a dozen lonely frrontjierr hawks."

[Jaden Luka]

"So great, we're the fun police?"

The sigh that escaped Jaden was a little more heartfelt than even he expected. These duties were about as far from being a carefree fighter ace as you could get; and while sure, Jaden was all for democracy, freedom from oppression, species equality, and all that good stuff, even a small amount of honesty forced the admission that his reasons for joining the Rebellion were far less selfless and noble. It was like a marriage where all the romance had gone, and the sex had dried up, and now you were stuck here raising the kids while she went off to focus on her career. Still in love enough to suffer through potty training and chiselling dry, cemented oatmeal out of plastic bowls, but sometimes you just wanted the Alliance to look at you the way she used to, and lust after your sweet bod and epic piloting skills.

Jaden found his arms folded across his chest, and couldn't muster the energy to amend the grouchy visual.

"You ever wonder if this whole peace treaty thing was a bad call?"

The question came out of nowhere, a frown furrowing at Jaden's brow.

"Not the premise of peace; just the way we got it. Yay, freedom, I guess... but it kinda feels like we're out here, pissing into the wind, trying to mark all this territory as our own; and all the while our pants are down, waiting for the Empire to be true to character and shaft us."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Cirr affixed his XO with a stern, hard look...for a second. His mouth split into a grin, tightening creases as the corners of his eyes as he shook his head in soft laughter.

"Karrabast...everry sjingle tjime. You crrack a ljittle folksy humorr, get my guarrd down, then hjit me wjith somethjing unexpected and phjilosophjical."

Still, it was a question with deep merit, so how to answer it. The Cizerack wet his lips, spreading his hands on his knees as he leaned forward.

"jI rread books. A lot of them. Yeah, jI know, when was the last tjime you everr saw my desk clean. Well, my motherr and sjisterrs taught me frrom a young age, and that's not exactly somethjing boys djid. So jI spent everry chance jI got wjith a book to rread jit ljike jit was stolen."

The Captain's organic leg bounced restlessly, and he let the pent up energy set a cadence.

"Used to be mostly maths. Scjience, engjineerrjing when jI flew forr the fjirrst tjime. A couple of yearrs ago, wjith command, jI took to rreadjing hjistorrjy. Memojirrs. Phjilosophy. Stuff ljike that. Fjigurred that was my new rrealjity, so jI ought to come about and face jit, rrjight?"

Cirr shrugged.

"Therre's a book, publjished about fjifteen yearrs ago, called On Command. Prrobabljy know the authorr. Grrand Admjirral Thrrawn."

[Jaden Luka]

Yeah, like you could have been a member of the Rebel Alliance for more than ten minutes and not have heard of the cerulean bastard who mercilessly hunted the fledgeling Rebellion across the stars in its infant days. You couldn't have a conversation about which Alliance starfighter was best without some annoying asshole of a Y-Wing pilot chiming in about the Archeon Nebula battle. Everywhere from Ryloth to Lothal, Grand Admiral Thrawn had been there, all up on the Rebellion's business.

Of course, it wouldn't have been Jaden Luka if he merely offered a simple statement to that effect.

"Name rings a bell. Blue guy, right? Pantoran or something?"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

The Captain simply gave a slight grin and a single soundless laugh. That was more or less the typical Jaden response.

"Close enough." He replied with a nod, at ease with the joke.

"Everryone rrememberrs the arrt obsessjion. You know, study someone's pajintjing, gajin a wjindow jinto thejirr mjind. jI don't know about any of that, but one thjing stuck wjith me that he wrrote. Adaptabjiljity jis the djistance measurred between vjictorry and defeat. To Thrrawn, that wasn't just a battlefjield mantrra. He mentjioned jit as often when he talked about peace as when he djiscussed how to wage warr. jIt was an obsessjion. To hjim, everrythjing could be wejighed between one's capabjiljity of adaptjing and one's wjilljingness to do so. The objectjive, accorrdjing to Thrrawn, was to become a completely adaptjive agent, one that could be whateverr the sjituatjion demanded."

Cirr paused, dragging a ponderous sigh out a measure.

"jIn the end, he deemed jit an unwjinnable campajign."

[Jaden Luka]

"Time has left us with nothing, save for a peace in pieces," Jaden quoted sagely, hoping that the words would play off as profound without Cirrsseeto realising he was quoting a children's holo-show. Sure, it had been nothing but Palpatine propoganda in its most insidious form, but damn if they didn't give that Rübezahl guy a bunch of catchy lines. Besides, he was a Governor now. Quoting him counted as classy and highbrow, right?

Jaden sighed again, trying to wrap his mind around the notions Cirrsseeto was trying to convey.

"So your boy Thrawn says that we're all wasting our time, huh? Or that we should adapt anyway, even though it's a futile effort, just to make sure we score points with him in the great beyond?"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

The Captain smiled. As always, Jaden painted his dialogue with jokes. That didn't mean he was throwing darts far from the bullseye.

"Not futjile, no. He just meant that therre wjill always be at ourr corre, somethjing small that doesn't bend. Somethjing that wjill always be who we arre. You don't adapt that. You'd lose yourr way otherrwjise. The rrest jis fajirr game."

Cirr leaned forward, propping his forearms on his knees.

"So maybe the blue bastarrd sees somethjing jin the jourrney and not just the destjinatjion. Learrn frrom ourr enemjies, huh?"

[Jaden Luka]

For a quiet moment, Jaden wondered what indestructible self was at his own core. The notion chafed against him, digging in to his being the same way that the buckle on the unfastened safety harness he leant against dug into the small of his back. His whole life, people had claimed to see him for who he truly was, and he had made an existence out of trying to adapt away from that. The last thing he wanted to hear was that his worst core nature was something inescapable, and that the gravity of his past was a black hole he'd never be able to thrust away from.

Jaden preferred to think of himself as an orbit. Where he was now, his speed and trajectory, his attitude and alignment, that was something stable. From there, life boiled down to a series of choices between which way you wanted to go. Falling down was easy, just like falling into bad habits. Gravity was on your side, and if everything else were to suddenly stop, down was the way you would go. But that course only led you back to where you'd started, back through past orbits, and to earlier stages of the escape trajectory that was supposed to be taking you towards you wanted to be. Up was much, much harder. It took more energy, more effort, more thrust to keep your life-orbit stable, and each time you looped around you had further and further to go. But there came a point when if you made enough effort, if you adapted enough, if you gained enough altitude above your past, the gravity started to lessen, and you began to escape it's sphere of influence. Enough thrust, enough inertia, and eventually you could be free of it's influence entirely, off in the stars to choose a new orbit around a sense of self that you liked better.

He had to believe that Cirrsseeto and his borrowed wisdom was wrong: because if it were true then Jaden was stuck in the same orbit he'd always been in, and the only course of action would be to nose dive and hope you burned yourself up before you made contact with the ground.

"See, that attitude never worked for me."

Carefully, Jaden filtered away his darker thoughts, keeping them carefully concealed so only something glib and in character could manage to escape.

"But then I'm a pilot, and we're all about destinations. How you get there only matters if there's beautiful alien babes to show off for."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

His XO was ever the artful dodger. Cirrsseeto's face wore skepticism as he leaned back.

"You everr wonderr how you'rre gonna explorre ljife's mysterrjies wjithout a handy pjilotjing allusjion? jI thjink that..."

And then, the Captain stopped mid-stream. His ears perked, trying to triangulate something, followed by his eyes veering off course in much the same fashion.

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden had served with Captain Quez long enough to know what that kind of an ear-twitch meant.

Back at the Imperial Academy, they'd pushed the Empire's agenda that humans were somehow superior. They argued it from all sorts of angles. They talked about purity. They talked about adaptability. They talked about how humanity had done what no other race could, spreading across the stars and establishing the Galactic Republic, as if no other species had ever been involved at any point. They talked about how it was the human genome and it's ability to be so readily enhanced that made the Grand Army of the Republic and it's victory during the Clone Wars possible, completely forgetting that it was non-humans that had done the enhancing in the first place.

What they didn't tell you was the real truth: that humans were boring. Average. They were the baseline that everything was measured against. Was your eyesight above or below human norms? Was your species from a world with gravity within or beyond human tolerances? By being so ubiquitous, by becoming the galactic measure of normalization, humans lost the ability to have anything special about them. They didn't get the coolness factor of being able to breathe underwater, to sense subtle shifts in weather patterns with their braintails, to peer into the ultraviolet, to hear things beyond the range of most species' perception - and Jaden was jealous of that, at least a little bit. Even an exceptional human such as himself was still exceptionally average, and in moments like this he envied the Captain and folks like him for their ability to bring something useful to the table.

In a situation such as this, that usefulness, that ear-twitch, usually meant that something was wrong. Cirrsseeto could hear if the torque buffers were misaligned, could notice if the power grid was humming at the wrong frequency, could perceive the warning sounds of a conduit about to rupture. If he was hearing something now, especially on this mesh taped together bucket of bolts, what he was hearing was almost certainly not good.

Jaden was on his feet before the Captain even said anything; a shudder of the deck plates confirmed the prudence of that move. Jaden clambered his way forwards as another shudder lurched the ship around him, fingers wrapping around the crash webbing strewn about the U-Wing interior to preserve his balance.

"I hope you can hear whatever the kriffing hells is wrong," Jaden half-muttered, half-shouted over his shoulder, colliding heavily with the pilot's seat as another lurch brought the barely padded surface up to meet him. Half a thought was spared to consider slipping his arms into the harness; he ignored it, grabbing hold of the flight controls instead. "I'm going to drop us out of hyperspace so we hopefully won't explode."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

A sudden lurch threw the Captain sideways, and he caromed into one of the vertical handrails that flanked the compartment bay door. Righting himself, Cirr was too busy to diagnose on the fly to immediately suss out the words coming from the front of the ship. Hyper conduit instability could happen for a number of reasons. Some of those were external, and some of those were the things you could control. Concerned blue eyes flicked from the ceiling compartment to the aft section, as if he could see through the veneer of alloy coverings at the guts behind them.

I'm going to drop us out of hyperspace...

Whirling about one-eighty, Cirr made a futile gesture at Jaden's unseeing back.

"No! Wajit!"

The overhead lamps flickered, and something behind the felinoid blew a flurry of sparks into the air.

"Shjit!"

The captain wobbled to the rear of the compartment, wrenching an access cover free.

"jIt's the pulse goverrnorr! We'rre gojing to rredljine unless we lose the drrjive corre!"

Cirr glanced at a worrying readout on the engine diagnostic terminal. Without a way to regulate the hyperdrive's power train, trying to drop out of hyperspace would only throw a cascade of energy into a system that could only handle so much and for so long. Without another moment to reflect on it, he grabbed the heavy lever on the drive core housing, torquing it with one hard motion. A loud hiss filled the cabin, followed swiftly by renewed violent juddering. It wasn't hyper corridor turbulence this time.

"Djid ourr vectorr just change?"

The Captain's blood ran cold at the thought. Again, the causes flashed through his mind. A proximity contact with a gravity well might do that. If that was the case, they were on a faster-than-light trajectory in a direction only the Goddess knew where.

[Jaden Luka]

It was always a bad sign when an engineer told you not to switch off the thing that was broken. That usually meant that switching off said thing would result in explosions, and in such cases leaving them switched on also would usually result in explosions, and so it was a mad race to try and resolve the problem before you got to find out whether it would be explosion A or explosion B that ended up killing you.

Or explosion C, Jaden mused, as the ship rumbled around him, hyperspace warping and twisting in reaction to the gravity well they'd just skirted a little too close to. Under normal circumstances, that wasn't necessarily something to be worried about. Skirting a gravity well was fine. Sometimes it was even deliberate. Spacers had plenty of tricks for milking as much out of every credit of star fuel you possibly could, to help keep your bottom line as low as possible. Cutting closer than advised to gravity wells could shave off a parsec here and there in terms of linear distance, but skirt just a little closer and the distortion effects of the gravity well could turn into a boon, slingshotting you off on a new vector with extra speed like the space probes and sleeper ships of old. With the right kind of calculations, you could subvert the laws of physics and bump an extra few decimals onto your drive's effective rating. Get the calculations wrong, of course, and you could fling yourself off into deep space, or on a collision course with a sun.

Right now, Jaden couldn't tell which of the above they'd just achieved. A gravity well had definitely done something, he'd felt as much, and the angry red spike of relative velocity data on the navcomputer display made that abundantly clear. Thing was, their course shouldn't have taken them anywhere near a gravity well, so either the drive surge had caused them to overshoot their reversion coordinates, or had somehow warped their trajectory, or they'd stumbled across an uncharted dark star or rogue planet by pure happenstance, or an Inderdictor floating in space where it shouldn't be, or -

Jaden dialed back on the speculation, forcing himself to focus on the facts. Something had happened, and the positional telemetry from the navcomputer could no longer be believed. Either they weren't where they thought they were, weren't heading the way they thought they were, or both, or worse. Of all the parts of the galaxy where you didn't want that to happen, the densely packed Goridan Reach was among the top five: the star cluster was a veritable minefield of gravity wells to collide with. If they were careening off into it blindly, it wouldn't be long before another star or planetoid played it's part in making things even worse.

"One way or another, we're dropping out of hyperspace," Jaden called grimly over his shoulder. "Either we do it ourselves on our own terms, or we rely on luck and stellar drift to pick the moment for us. Your call, boss."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Cirrsseeto stumbled back to the forward compartment, scurrying up to the cockpit. He fell into his seat, hooking the crash webbing over his shoulders before yanking the slack out of the protective gear.

"On a long enough vectorr, the prrobabjiljity of colljisjion jis one."

The Cizerack hooked his hand steadfastly around the oversized metal bar that flanked his seat at a perpendicular. Many a co-pilot before him had nicknamed the device the OSH, or Oh Shit Handle. Cirr wasn't about to debate their wisdom on that point.

"Get us out. On ourr own terrms." Sweat beaded on Cirr's forehead and nose.

At least the worst case scenario was painless. By the time neurons could fire in an FTL impact, they were half a parsec away from each other.

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden didn't need to be told twice. The drive lever was slammed forward with enough force to almost snap the handle clean off; and the ships two occupants were flung forward with equivalent ferocity. Cirrsseeto's forward motion was arrested by the crash webbing, but Jaden's wasn't, a supernova of pain erupting in his arm as one of his joints torqued in a way it wasn't supposed to. The U-Wing wailed in similar agony, sparks showering from overhead conduits as circuits overloaded and fried, the overhead lights flaring and flickering before following the example of hyperspace, the light shattering into total darkness as the void wrapped itself around them.

"Son of a -" Jaden grimaced, arm reflexively cradling itself to his chest, out of the way to be worried about later. Right now he was more worried about the ship's injuries than his, and the readouts on the console ahead of him - or more importantly, the lack of them - confirmed his immediate suspicions. He thumped the housing behind one of the darkened screens in a futile attempt to urge the sensor readouts into life once more.

He let out a sigh, slumping back into his seat. "Looks like main power is fried," he grunted, voicing the obvious. His eyes scanned across the few scattered lights and indicators that were still active: lucky for them, Incom had designed these tubs to be able to survive a direct EMP hit and still complete a troop deployment, so essentials like life support, sublight, and repulsorlifts were all wired with shielded backups that were slowly kicking in. Anything beyond that, though? Hyperdrive, nav sensors, comm transceivers -

Jaden's jaw clenched. "Please tell me we still have comms."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

The Captain waved a tendril of ozone-heavy white smoke from the air, quickly taking stock of the situation now that immediate danger had passed. In the event of a deep space event, primary concern was to stabilize the acute threat to ship and crew. Once done, the next task was to establish a line of communication to home port, mother ship, or the nearest friendly asset. Cirrsseeto attempted to do just that, but an attempt to scan for nearby transponders was met with a dull-sounding electronic rebuke.

"No sensorrs."

In the event that a direct line of communication could not be established, a crew must take stock of the situation. If the danger to ship and crew was not immediate and there was reasonable expectation of the ship's positioning to be outside enemy or contested territory, general distress was to be sounded. Cirrsseeto unhooked from his crash webbing, sliding on the handrails down the short flight of steps that connected the cockpit to the passenger compartment. Tucked into an alcove by the bay hatch, the comms terminal seemed have avoided physical damage, apart from the headset having flown from its cradle, now dangling by its coiled wire. Cirr slipped the headset on and began to flip a series of switches.

"Damn."

Deader than kibbuks. The antenna itself could have been destroyed, or the broadcast array could have been fused by a power surge.

"Not even statjic."

Cirr pushed the headset off his long ears, tucking it around his neck as he looked back up to Jaden.

"We'rre gonna need to put down somewherre. Nothjing jI can do frrom herre."

[Jaden Luka]

Yeah, sure, I'll get right on that.

The scrunch of Jaden's eyes was part wince of pain, part grimace of frustration, as he leaned forward and tried to peer past the superstructure of the U-Wing cockpit, visually scanning their surroundings. Moments ago, Cirrsseeto had announced that they had no sensors; and now he was expecting Jaden to magic a convenient rock for them to land on out of the aether. From the way the shadows fell across the forward-swung stabilizer foils of their ship - hell, from the fact that there even were shadows falling across the stabilizer foils - Jaden was able to figure out that they were at least in some kind of star system, rather than floating out in the infinite void between. That brought with it a glimmer of hope, and also of relief: to have landed within the sphere of influence of something as gravitationally potent as a star without having flown into or through it in hyperspace was either a testament to their luck, or to Jaden's correctness about needing to drop out when they did.

Still though, solar systems were big places, and spotting a planetary body in such a vast neighbourhood was hardly an easy task. Anyone who'd stood out in a field, stared up at the night sky, and tried to figure out which points of lights were planets and which were stars knew that. Jaden's only solace was the fact that all they needed was a rock to set down on - there was bound to be some breather gear in the emergency supplies somewhere, so even an airless rock was enough. Whether they found a terrestrial world, or a gas giant with a swarm of moons, or hell even an asteroid belt or a ring system with something large enough - right now, anything would do.

"Okay then," Jaden muttered. "Time to power up the emergency back-up optics."

He threw a glance over his shoulder, vision settling on Cirrsseeto to offer a flicker of clarification on his words.

"Grab a viewport, and keep your eyes peeled. I'm going to see if I can induce some gentle rotation, so we can start scanning the sky for space rocks."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

It was lean hunting.

For an agonizing minute, Cirr gazed the void, looking for anything that might be a tell. A planet, a moon, a planetoid, or even a stable band of asteroids. The Captain spent the moments in silence, swallowing down the beginnings of a fear that they were all alone in the night, with eternity in every direction. He had no intention of dying in hard freeze when the air or power gave out or both.

"Therre!"

He pointed as the ship banked, as if he needed to. It was far away, but the light they picked up in the cockpit couldn't be mistaken for the rest of the sea of stars. It was vivid, blue, and near. Well, near being a relative term when hobbled to sublight engines.

"Whaddya make of jit? Blue gjiant, maybe?"

Something curious struck him in that moment. Cirrsseeto activated the holoprojector, displaying the star map surrounding their last known coordinates for a distance of three parsecs. A cloud of fireflies filled the space in front of him, broken up at the center by a yellow icon showing their relative location, which was being calculated by the available visual references. It was a crude way of finding location, but it worked.

Cirrsseeto gave a low whistle.

"Want to hearr somethjing amazjing?"

He glanced at Jaden, raising an eyebrow and an ear in sync.

"Whateverr that jis, jI don't thjink jits on the charrts."

With over twenty thousand years of starfaring records shared among galactic civilizations, it was an increasingly rare event when a new star was explored. It was one thing to point a telescope to a thing and to see it in the sky from your bedroom window. It was another one to go to that star. There were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documented hyperspace lanes in the galaxy. New ones were discovered by wildcat explorers, foolishly risking their lives on a hope and a prayer of finding a clear path that might save future ships days or weeks. They were also found in freak events of fortune, like this one apparently.

And right in their back yard, speaking in manners of stellar relativity.

"Well, thjis calls forr a toast."

The Captain made a C-shape with his hand as if he was holding an invisible cup. He grinned, clinking air. Of course they didn't have a drop between them, and they weren't going to be drinking on mission. Still, this was a big enough thing to make note of it.

"You know what thjis means, rrjight? You have to name jit."

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden hated naming things.

More accurately, Jaden was terrible at naming things, and hated feeling as if he was a failure at something. For a fleeting moment, he considered challenging his Captain. After all, technically Cirrsseeto was the astronomer who'd first spotted it; usually it was they who got the honour of picking the name. Or at least, that's how things had been traditionally, until the Republic's navigation guild had come along and standardized everything. He knew an escape tactic when he heard one, though: if there was anyone else Jaden could have delegated naming responsibilities to and spare himself the grief, he would have.

"Blue giant you say, huh?"

Carefully, Jaden toyed with the thruster controls, keeping the ship's relative position in space as stationary as he could manage, while at the same time trying to orientate them towards the rough direction of where Cirrsseeto's vision had been aiming. The blueish blob ahead of them was certainly a damn sight closer than the other pinpricks of light scattered across the starfield, but it was still like peering at a sun from out at one of it's outer orbits. If the star was blue, then Cirr was right; probably a giant, which more or less pegged the lower limits of it's true size. Accounting for any lensing from the viewport materials, the apparent angular size, a quick parallax calculation, carry the four - in Jaden's estimation, the star's distance from their current position was approximately far. A whole heap of hours, if not longer.

Jaden let out a sigh. While sure, a star was a good place to start when looking for planets, and it would be a few orders of magnitude easier to find a lump of rock on a smaller close-in orbit than out at these distances, they were still searching for a needle in a haystack: it was just a haystack you could measure in AU rather than parsecs.

"Okay then, let's go say hello to Thrawn."

With a flourish, Jaden flicked his way through the sequence of control inputs to fire up the sublight drives; something that was easily done with one hand, fortunately. His arm had started to do that hey dude, you should probably do something about me kind of dull aching, but that was something that could be addressed once they were in motion. For now though, all they had to do was dial up the throttle until they picked up enough inertia to cruise, and then -

Nothing.

The sinking feeling in Jaden's stomach was buried beneath a frown. He checked over all the controls and readouts again. It should have worked. Fuel tanks were primed. Safety limiters were disabled. The hyperdrive was shut down, so the cutoffs weren't interfering to stop some kind of wonky misfire. He should be able to just reach out, flip that switch -

Flip that switch -

Jaden would have planted his face in his hand, if his good arm wasn't otherwise occupied.

"Apparently," he announced, "In the infinite wisdom of the Incom Corporation, the sublight ignition circuits are not something that require a shielded back-up."

He slumped a little in his seat.

"Don't suppose I could get you to pull open the access panel all the way at the back there, and flip the damned engines on manually?"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Thrrawn?"

Cirr flicked his ear at his XO, making a face. Somehow, he knew he'd rue the day he talked to Jaden about his bedside reading.

"We'rre not calljing jit Thrrawn."

He grimaced. Maybe that put the sajoi back into his bowl, not that he wanted it. At any rate, they apparently had plenty of time to think of a better name. Jaden railed against the sins of Incom, and Cirrsseeto leapt at the chance to fix something he could actually fix.

"Yeah, jI got jit."

He unclicked his crash webbing harness, and bounded the short ladder. From there, it was short work to the engine access manifold, which Cirrsseeto hefted away gently.

"You know..." he talked back to his pilot, an unseen grin on his face. "...sjince you have a few jIncom complajints, jI could take them up wjith the ownerr."

[Jaden Luka]

"Oh, hell no."

It was strange how powerful something as simple as a course and heading could be in a situation like this, both literal and metaphorical. Amid a crisis, amid strange circumstances, amid danger and uncertainty and confusion, the simple notion of a single point to aim your nose at made all the difference. In reality, it changed nothing. They had no idea how far they needed to travel, no idea if there was even a rock to land on out there, no idea what it would take to match that orbit and pull in for a landing, no idea if their fuel reserves and life support supplies would last enough; they were in just as much peril as they had been moments before, but for Jaden it was enough simply to know where they were pointing. They had a direction, they had a bearing, and that meant they could move forward. Forward was better. Forward was always better.

"This hunk of junk long predates your mother sinking her claws into the Incom portfolio, and I would very much like for her to keep letting me test out her shiny new prototypes, please and thank you."

He watched as the indicators subtly change as Cirrsseeto manually primed and charged the sublight engines. A faint flicker of colour began to fill the drive indicator, flickering in anticipation of being let loose. "Let's try this again," he muttered quietly, hand reaching across to slide the engine controls to a conservative level of thrust, feeling the forward inertia beginning to bite immediately. Teasing out just a little more, he let the thrust controls lock into place, before shifting back to his mono-dextrous grip on the flight controls, and with gentle, fuel-saving shifts, steered the U-Wing on track towards their hope of salvation.

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Cirr's smile broadened as Jaden squirmed to keep his preferential status as toy-tester safe and sound. The smile stayed when the sudden feeling of inertial lag came and went in time with a slight juddering in the decking, letting him know that they were under power. So they were limping and not at a gallop. It wasn't ideal, but they could make this work.

The Captain returned to his seat with a sigh. He glanced to Jaden, and his smile waned a little when he saw his pilot favoring one arm over the other.

"When werre you gonna say somethjing about yourr arrm?"

He bounded up again, rooting around in the back before returning with a red and white case.

"You don't have to fall aparrt wjith the shjip. Kolto spljint, come on. That's an orrderr."

There was just enough of a serious edge to his voice so that Jaden knew he wasn't asking. Still, Cirrsseeto helped him along the way, making sure his arm was properly secured. Didn't feel like a break, so maybe it was just a sprain. Either way, the splint would keep his pilot in working condition, and that's exactly what they both needed.

With that done, Cirr relaxed in his chair. This time, he didn't bother with the crash webbing.

"Hey, you mjind jif jI get comforrtable?"

That elicited a raised eyebrow from his XO.

"If you mean comfortable for a Cizerack, well, I'm not sure I'm ready to get to know you like I know Rai'faani."

Cirr's ears drooped a little and he rolled his eyes. Leaning down, he cinched up his right trouser leg, finding the mid-thigh seal catch on his prosthesis. With a click and a sigh of synthetic padding, he pulled his artificial leg free, propping against the console. In it's absence, the right trouser leg fell flat and empty beyond the thigh. The release and relief was visible on the Captain's face, and he licked at his dry lips.

"Betterr."

That left Cirr and Jaden with an indeterminate amount of space and possibly a long time on vector. As much as he wouldn't mind filling the gap with small talk, the Captain knew he had at least one more thing to tend to.

"jI'm gonna starrt a log. We should document thjis, just jin case."

The why behind just in case didn't need to be said. A log, alongside the ship's black box, might be the only clues to what happened here in the event they didn't effect repairs or get rescued. Cirr didn't want to dwell on that thought, and Jaden probably didn't want to either. Reaching in the overhead, Cirrsseeto pulled free an overbuilt datapad and began to type.

Valkyrie One

Log one. Day one.

Cirrsseeto Quez, Captain.

En route to destination touring listening posts in the Gordian Reach, our ship has experienced a catastrophic failure of the hyperdrive power regulator. In attempting to stabilize the system, our vessel has deviated from it's intended hyperspace vector - possibly due to near impact with a gravitational field. We are under sublight power within the Gordian Reach, precise coordinates unknown. Sensors and communication systems appear to have been disabled by the hyperspace exit event. Commander Luka has discovered a nearby blue giant stellar body that does not correspond to any known star on the galactic map. We have set a vector towards this star, as it presents the highest chance of encounter with a planetoid or suitable object to land upon and effect repairs.

At present there is no estimated time of arrival at the blue giant. I have taken a cursory inventory of rations and water. We are kitted for a standard supply, estimated two weeks consumables.

Recommendation for debrief - stellar cartography teams to perform a grid analysis of our last known position before event. There may be an instability along this hyperspace corridor.

For further note - this unknown star needs a name. Preferably not Thrawn.

By the time Cirrsseeto had completed the log, he could feel sleep starting to take him.

"You've got firrst watch. Wake me jin sjix hourrs."

[Jaden Luka]

* * *

It was an order Jaden had disobeyed, much to Cirrsseeto's eventual frustration. It hadn't been meant as disrespect; more an act of selfish desperation. Maintaining a linear course was hardly a complex challenge, and yet it was something. It was a focus, a distraction, a thought to hold all other thoughts at bay.

He'd busied himself with calculations: mental at first, then crude scrawls across a datapad screen after an unconscious snort from the Captain had inadvertently purged the last set of numbers from his head. Angular size. Standard limits for the radius of a stellar body of this class. Constantly updated estimates and guestimates at their range to target, it's actual dimensions, the likely distribution of viable planetary bodies around such a star; anything and everything to occupy his mind.

Grimly, he thought of how amused his parents would be if they could see him now: not that they'd relish in the idea of him being stranded and facing a high likelihood of death, but his mother wouldn't be able to resist the rueful I told you so smile that the astrogation lessons she'd insisted on were finally paying off. She'd been so disappointed in Jaden, when the erstwhile impulses of his wayward youth had lured him away from his studies time and again. It wasn't his behaviour that saddened her, she always said; it was that she hated to see potential wasted. A mind like his was meant for better things than juvenile detention and legally mandated military service. For a moment, his memory flashed a different look: first her eyes when Jaden had been taken from her by the Empire; and then his father's eyes as he'd explained she would not be there when he returned.

Jaden had wrenched his damaged arm deliberately, letting the rapid blossom of pain chase those thoughts away like a flaming torch driving wolves back into the shadows. Now wasn't the time for thoughts like that. Now was never the time.

The Captain was awake now though, and like Jaden his eyes were fixated on the orb that hung in space before them: not the star, which Jaden still called Thrawn at optimal moments to irritate the Cirrsseeto; but rather Thrawn Prime, the rocky companion they'd managed to spot in transit across the blue giant's stellar surface. Whether it was the Force, or fate, or just blind luck, Jaden didn't care: he was grateful to all three of them in equal measure, and focused his efforts on hoping that this rock would at the very least give them a solid surface so they could start welding things back together.

Jaden's hand scrubbed across the scruff that had begun to form as the U-Wing limped its way in-system. He peered at the planetoid, still distant but growing slowly larger, trying to make out some hint of distinguishing features, topography, something; anything. Perhaps his eyes were tired, perhaps the viewport was scuffed, or perhaps the edges of Thrawn Prime really were hazy like they appeared to be. Optical distortion from a persistent atmosphere. It was almost too much to hope for, and even if it wasn't buildable it would still be a boon: Jaden would feel a lot more comfortable about landing this antique if there was enough of an atmosphere for the stabilizer foils to do their thing.

"Any luck with those sensors, Cap?" he asked, a fraction of a glance thrown in Cirrsseeto's direction. "Can't tell if that fuzz is atmosphere, or if I just need to get my eyes lasered."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Uugh...ng."

He was awake, but that was on the lowest end of a gradient scale. Cirr blinked the bleary dullness from his eyes, rubbing the heels of his hands over closed lids as he grunted into an upright sitting position. Damned humans and their immunity to sleep. His ears were full of cotton, packed in so deep it had encroached on his brain. The Captain sucked in a sharp and needful breath through is nose, then let his hands fall, blinking quickly a few more times. When his eyes did end up focusing, he nearly startled.

"That's a planet."

He looked to Jaden quickly in surprise, then a second later realized how stupid his declaration had been. Or had it been stupid at all? They were in deep space without a life line. Even with a star within theoretical sublight reach, Cirr couldn't have counted on reaching it, much less reaching it relatively quickly and finding a potentially suitable planet to boot. He leaned forward to hug his XO, thought better of it at the last moment, and gave Jaden a firm and enthusiastic shoulder clap.

"That's a planet!"

The sleep was retreating from his brain, and Cirrsseeto began to unpack the words he'd only half-heard through waking. He took another gulp of air, whooshing it out in a sigh.

"Rrjight, rrjight. Let's see."

A quick survey of the scopes brought only disappointment.

"Well, sensorrs arre stjill dead, but we'rre a bjit ahead of schedule, so maybe we can get a few vjisual cues."

He leaned forward in his chair, kicking over his empty prosthesis as he jockeyed for leverage.

"Therre's a ljittle prrjismatjic colorr shjift at the horrjizon. Also see some sort of djistorrtjion effect. Looks ljike an aurrorra to me. Ejitherr way, jit surre looks ljike therre's an atmospherre. Just can't tell jif jit's one we'll ljike."

Jaden continued on approach, and Cirr strained his eyes for more detail. Two colors seemed to dominate. Deep opal blue and rich streaks of wooly white superimposed above.

"Looks ljike a lot of ocean."

[Jaden Luka]

While Cirrsseeto operated the visual scanners, Jaden focused his efforts on trying to approximate their way into orbit. With sensors down, it was all a case of guesswork, as much an art as a science. Too high and too fast, and they'd slingshot back out into the system; too low and slow, and the gravity would drag their orbit down into deterioration. Fortunately, for their purposes, the latter option was completely acceptable: whether this planet was hospitable or not, the odds of them finding another rocky body and managing to transit their way out to it's orbit before either their fuel or power or supplies ran out seemed slim; they'd be landing eventually, and if that began with a slowly degrading orbit, so be it.

An ocean planet though? Damn. In a survival situation like this, finding a planet with abundant water should have been a boon: but too much water was a problem, especially if it didn't give them anything solid to land on. He wasn't sure how buoyant a U-Wing would be in practice, and attempting to fix the damage they'd sustained while splashing around in waters teeming with Force knows what was not an appealing prospect. He didn't even know if the Captain could swim, though that felt uncomfortably close to an inappropriate racial stereotype, and so he pushed that thought firmly aside.

He didn't like the sound of the aurora, either, and spared a glance to swirling shifts of colour and light that Cirrsseeto had mentioned. It made sense, he supposed: auroras were caused by the interactions between solar radiation and a planet's ionosphere and magnetosphere; with the amount of radiation that a blue giant like Thrawn must have been kicking out, this poor planet's atmosphere must have been getting pummeled. That the aurora even existed was a good sign, he supposed - a promising indicator that the planet even had the kind of atmosphere that could shield against that much radiation - but he didn't relish the prospect of having to maneuvre a damaged ship through that kind of a radiation threshold.

Satisfied that he'd managed to bring the ship into a crudely circular orbit - for now, at least - he fired the torque thrusters, gently rolling the U-Wing so that the oceanic sphere filled as much of the transparisteel viewshield ahead of them as possible.

"We should keep our eyes on the equator," he observed, leaning forward to peer up beyond the superstructure of the fuselage. "There's no moon to cause exaggerated tides, and rotational stresses during planetary formation tend to make them oblate - long story short, if there are any islands or continents, there's a good chance at least part of them will be straddling the equator."

He shifted his gaze a little further, trying to peer around the sphere of the planet towards the poles, unable to tell without sensors which way the planet's axis was orientated. His eyes tried to track the motion of the clouds across the surface: hardly a reliable metric, but better than nothing.

"Might be some polar ice caps if we're lucky," he added. "Won't be fun to land on, but it's better than an ocean. Planet might not get cool enough for any sort of cryosolids to form, though. It's possible that Thrawn's just too damn hot."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

There was a certain stereotype about fighter jocks, well, pilots in particular - given that they were piloting something sexier than a scow or a ship over the thousand tonnage tier. They were twitch-happy meat heads who didn't know more than what their gut told them, and didn't know what they could pull off until after they tried to do it. Not Jaden Luka. Jaden Luka, wunderkind and apparent astrophysics hobbyist. His XO already tended to spin rapidly around a subject that interested him. And here, well, he sounded downright professorial.

"Should jI be takjing notes?" Cirr quipped, the corners of his mouth curling slightly.

"Honestly, whateverr patch of terra fjirrma you fjind wjill sujit me just fjine. Even an jiceberrg. Not ljike jI haven't sufferred thrrough a ljittle cold..." Something caught Cirr's attention in the orbital vista, and his voice trailed off, "...beforre."

The Captain pointed ahead.

"Look!"

It was there, barely tucked in the outer tendrils of what appeared to be an atmospheric cyclone in a glancing blow. Somewhere on a canvas of blue and white, a tiny patch of green emerged.

"Therre you go. One equatorrjial jisland. Good. All that talk about the cold can go stuff jit. jI hate the cold."

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden was already three hyperjumps ahead, hands flipping at an assortment of switches to ready the craft for reentry, while his mind tried to visualise the way that their craft was moving relative to the planet's surface below. The islands had just appeared over the horizon, and that was a problem: begin their descent now, and they'd overshoot by half a hemisphere. Under normal circumstances, star pilots would generally brute force the approach: a steep descent, an expensive deceleration burn, and a reliance on deflectors and hull integrity to hold you together. In such a precarious position though, Jaden didn't want to waste a single gram of fuel if he could help it, lest it strand them on the surface below; and who knew what complications the undiagnosed damage might have caused? This was the reason that fighters and freighters so frequently carried breathing gear aboard: it might be unpleasant out in space with nothing but a mask and a flight suit to sustain you, but it was a damn sight less taxing to set down upon an airless rock than it was to wrestle your way in and out of a complex atmosphere.

Those options unavailable, they'd have to go for the old fashioned approach. Orbits were circles, and if their U-Wing was gaining on the island below, that meant they were completing each orbit faster than the planet's rotation. Back in basic - hell, back in high school - they explained one simple solution to that problem: make the circle bigger. The bigger the circumference, the more distance you'd have to cover each loop around, and if your velocity stayed the same and you had further to go, then boom: the higher orbit takes longer, and the thing lower down gets to pull further ahead. It was how they used to pull off orbital encounters back in antiquity, when you didn't have fuel to waste on thrusting as and when you felt like it. Lower orbits to catch up, higher orbits to drop back. Jaden watched as the planet began to slowly draw away from the viewshield, the landmass beginning to crawl its way back towards the horizon.

"Don't worry," Jaden preempted. "Just gotta give the island a little bit of a headstart. Once we start reentry, we'll be falling plenty fast enough to catch up."

Jaden waited until the island disappeared completely before inverting the ship, pitching down slightly so that the planet became a more conventional horizon in front of them. He waited, an arbitrary handful of seconds, flexing a little against his splint to stretch out as much responsiveness in his limbs as possible. For a fleeting moment, he considered handing over the controls to Cirrsseeto. All things being equal, that was the smart call; but a damaged ship, dubious reserves, and that ominous aurora dancing across the sky? Things absolutely were not equal; Jaden would just have to man up, and Rogue his way through the bumpy part. It'd all be fine once they got down to the thicker air.

He glanced over at the Captain, checking that his safety harness was fastened, before taking the time to shrug into his own. That was usually a bad sign, when the pilot chose to buckle up: but Jaden offered no reassurance, leaving the gesture to underscore the potential severity of what was about to happen.

"Stand ready on the S-Foil controls," Jaden instructed, firing off a quick pulse of the main thrusters to push them more ernestly into a lower orbit. "As soon as there's enough air to cause lift, we're gonna need their help slowing down."

He let out a breath as the horizon began to grow larger ahead of them, the muscles in his jaw bunching as it involuntarily clenched.

"Brace for reentry."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Rready." Cirrsseeto replied in a clipped, taut-lipped manner, stowing loose talk now that they were about to perform a complicated maneuver without the safety net of an onboard sensor suite. It was the sort of contingency that the Captain had first encountered as first mate on Layla. He'd learned his visual cues and trusted instincts as an Outer Rim bush pilot, but then as is now, he deferred the actual deed to a better pilot. Even with one splinted arm, Jaden Luka was the man who ought to be at the stick.

Taking his copilot duties to heart, the Captain checked down the systems he still could control. Fuel flow looked good. All the thruster gimbals and repulsors seemed green. S-Foil control was also good to go.

"Fljight systems grreen forr entrry. Standjing by to deploy S-Fojils."

The ship began to judder as it kissed the outer edge of the atmosphere. Cirr kept waiting eyes ahead, patiently waiting for Jaden to thread the trajectorial needle. That ever-familiar handle up and to his right seemed inviting, and the felinoid grasped it with a full-handed grip.

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden had been ready for the vibrations that shook the ship, as the hull violently protested the transition from empty void to friction-filled atmosphere. Metal chilled by vacuum exposure quaked with impact and heat as the as molecule after molecule of alien air smashed into it with ever increasing fury. The atmosphere resisted as it always did, fighting back against the intrusion, and against the movement of something travelling so fast. Though invisible, air clung to the front of the ship like a bow wave, an ever thickening curtain draped across the hull in a desperate attempt to stop them from breaching the speed of sound.

He watched their linear velocity indicator, mind focused on back-of-an-eyelid calculations for what this world's mach value should be at these altitudes. At the extreme edge of an atmosphere, breaking the sound barrier was comparatively easy: the air was thin, and so its resistance to motion was easily overcome. As they descended, gravity was able to grip onto more and more atmosphere, and so the pressure and density would increase - and with it, the speed of sound. As the ship descended, the shockwave of that barrier being breached would persist, a constant cone of sonic boom inaudible until the atmosphere became dense enough for the sound to propogate.

The more gravity a world had, the thicker the atmosphere would be and the quicker it would become that way; and so in his mind, Jaden eyeballed a few examples. There went the thin atmosphere of Kessel, too diffuse at this altitude to offer much resistance. There went the atmospheres of standard gravity worlds like Corellia, Coruscant, and Naboo. There went Ord Cestus, Jaden's world of birth and where he'd first learned to fly. There went Malastare, notorious for it's high gravity and dense atmosphere. Jaden frowned; surely a planet of this size couldn't possibly have more gravity than Malastare? And yet, the vibrating resistance continued, the mach barrier stubbornly refusing to break. Still the ship shuddered; still this planet resisted. From the corners of his vision, Jaden could see the heat of entry friction flickering at the edges of the U-Wing's forward-swung S-Foils. But no, not just heat: other colours danced along the surfaces too, tiny echoes of the aurora that they had seen swirling in the atmosphere above.

"Something's not right."

The statement was simple, and grim. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen, but Jaden was at a loss for an explanation. Something about the aurora and the magnetic field? Some strange circumstance that caused a far denser atmospheric barrier than should ordinarily have been possible? Jaden couldn't be sure, had no way to tell; and it wouldn't do them much good regardless. If they didn't punch through this resistance, if their linear velocity started ticking the other way -

'Karabast," Jaden hissed under his breath, one hand straying from the flight controls to grab hold of the thruster handle, kicking the main drives into life. It would cost them part of their precious reserves, and they'd surely pay for the extra velocity later on when they tried to slow down; but at this point it was either punch through or bounce off, and Jaden had no desire to rebound back into the cold of space without a hope in hell of survival.

The fury of heat and colour along the U-Wing's forward structure shifted and changed as Jaden forced the nose downward, converting the U-Wing from a falling leaf into a downward arrow. The colours clawed at the viewport canopy, the full-front deflectors barely holding them at bay. The shudder hit a harmonic frequency, and the hull around them began to sing, an ominous drone and rumble as if they were finally able to hear the U-Wing's screams.

A crack of thunder exploded around them, and Jaden was flung further back into his seat. The variation of colour vanished from the viewshield, leaving only the angry redness of a starship burning alive as she fell; and an ominous spike gripped their linear velocity as the planet's threshold surrendered against Jaden's efforts to punch through.

Jaden's jaw was clenched too hard to swear. He haulled back on the controls as hard as he could, straining against the atmosphere once more to try and present a larger profile towards their descent, and shed as much speed as quickly as possible. The air fought against him, nose forced back downwards with every attempt to pitch back, but Jaden persisted, over and over, velocity bleeding off in tiny increments.

"S-Foils!" he demanded loudly over the cockpit's deafening ambiance, desperate for a little more pitch agency. "We need to flatten out this damn descent!"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Somethjing's not rrjight? Somethjing's not rrjight. What do you mean somethjing's not rrjight?"

For all the exactitude of engineering work and the big picture perspective of the command chair, there was a disturbing amount of mystery and mumbo jumbo behind the stick, and the pilots who negotiated it. Cool sunblockers, ice cold attitudes, they fit pilots so well because they were supposed to not let all of the possibilities get to them. No one ever wanted to be on a star transport and hear the relaxed baritone of their pilot as he said Oops, my bad. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room for oops. There weren't any mulligans in space.

Jaden cursed, and Cirrsseeto responded by hooking a handful of claws into the overhead handle with full force. He'd flown plenty of times before. This wasn't bad yet. It wouldn't be bad until it was.

"What's gojing on, pjilot, you'rre makjing me nerrvous overr herre."

But even as he said it, the Captain was starting to get an inkling. The ship should have slotted into a comfortable descent trajectory by now. This was a lot of turbulence, a lot of friction, and a lot of heat. Even without instruments, Jaden could make this approach.

With the call for foils, Cirrsseeto got to lend more substantial aid than white noise commentary. He torqued down the release lever, listening to the labored servomechanisms swing the U-wing's long atmospheric flight foils into a swept position. His lunch immediately found purchase in the bottom of his stomach as G-forces pushed against their vector, playing an inertial tug of war as the horizon reluctantly rose into view again.

"This isn't an A-wjing, Luka! You yank hjis stjick ljike that, he's gonna take jit perrsonal!"

[Jaden Luka]

"I'm acutely aware of that, Captain!" Jaden bit back, too busy focusing on his grip on the controls to usher a respectful tone into his voice, worsened by the volume required to be heard over the cockpit's ambient roar. "The damned distracting commentary was my first clue!"

The U-Wing hit a pocket of turbulent air, and the ship shuddered like it had hit a rock, it's course jerking through a few degrees of roll that Jaden fought against, the ship swooping through the air with all the directional resolve of a downhill skier. Jaden's teeth continued to grind against each other as he struggled and strained, another slam of turbulence dislodging them just long enough to find purchase on the edge of his tongue, the taste of copper welling up inside his mouth. His arm flared and ached with spikes of pain of it's own; Jaden tried to shut them down, concentrating on the horizon, trying to confine the jumping darting motions of the distant island within the confines of the viewshield.

Suddenly a groaning shriek erupted through the ship from behind them, and the craft lurched, thrown into a rapid tumbling spin as one of the stabilizer foils tore free. Aerodynamics thrown asymmetric, the U-Wing hurled itself eagerly into a lopsided somersault, spiraling and tumbling like half a samara on a more or less ballistic arc towards the ocean.

Fighting against the G-forces, Jaden barely managed to get purchase on the thruster controls and slam them down to nothing; the shift in inertia made his stomach churn and flip, the dizzying sight of ocean and sky, ocean and sky, alternating back and forth in front of him, making his eyes feel as if they'd already began to swim inside his skull. His gaze darted around, looking for solutions; they settled on one, an inviting-looking big red button, safely out of reach on one of the auxiliary console panels. As the yellow-black surround and the aurebesh characters below explained, one hit would trigger explosive bolts in the S-foil mechanics, ejecting them in case of emergency. If they could shed the other stabilizer's disruptive influence, if Jaden could somehow steer into the explosive impulse as it released -

It was a plan. Not a great plan, but an extant one. Jaden reached out towards the relevant control, but immediately the inertia slapped his arm away, the sprain or fracture or whatever it was screaming with a sickening hot wave of agony. Jaden tried again, but his own body fought against him, conflicting impulses refusing to allow him the motion that would deliberately trigger another pain response. His eyes darted around again, finding the reflected controls on the other side of the ship.

"Red button, panel four!" he ordered, leaving no room for protest or question in his voice. "Hit it, now!"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Somehow through the howl of volatile atmosphere, Cirr could pick out the strain of metal an instant before the stabilizer sheared itself into oblivion. As an engineer, you classified that as a non-actionable field incident. In other words, it wasn't the kind of lick you walked away from with a little spanner time. Unless they snatched the needle from the haystack in a galaxy of worlds with neither needles nor haystacks, they weren't recovering that alloy panel. Even if they could somehow track it down, an alloy shear caused ductile faulting that required the whole damned thing to be refabricated in order to expect any hope that it would catch air with the same fidelity they needed. Simple, right? Just needed to smelt and cast into a mold that he absolutely did not have and didn't have the proficiency in metallurgy to fabricate - even assuming he'd miracle the resources to do it.

That was a lot of consideration to say that this was no longer a trip they'd be flying home from, but instead one that they were going to need rescuing from. It changed the calculus of this whole bad trip, lowering statistical probabilities a little closer to bad. And that was assuming they were about to have a good landing, ie, any sort you walked away from.

"Red button, panel four! Hit it, now!"

The Captain hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath during this death spiral. He should've realized he wasn't yelling or cursing, and the silence was worse by far. Letting his breath out in a rush, Cirrsseeto strained against rebellious G-forces, kissing knuckles to button with an unsubtle jab. The ship gave another savage lurch, then seemed to find a patch of eerily calm air. The horizon pivoted around just right again. Of course, now there wasn't the comfort of bone-crushing air resistance friction to keep their air speed down. They were smoothly and quickly gliding over a big unbroken ocean, save for the tiny hump of green in the far distance.

"So."

Cirr swallowed heavily.

"Waterr landjing?"

[Jaden Luka]

"Maybe."

Jaden had gone quiet. Not the kind of quiet that came from a man who was merely focusing, but rather a deeper kind of quiet, the kind that came over a person when they were resigned to the terrible inevitability of their situation, and were trying to figure out how to minimise the level of disaster involved. Potential options cascaded through his mind in the blink of an eye. They were going to hit the water: do that too fast and they'd shatter as if it was duracrete; too shallow an angle and they'd skim off the surface; all the same factors that had affected atmospheric entry, just with a significantly more unforgiving fluid involved. Right now they were safe within the sealed atmosphere of a starcraft, and that would withstand water the same as vacuum, for a short time at least; but too violent an impact could breach the hull, and then their air-filled sanctuary would turn into a sinking coffin. That might be fine if the water was shallow, but Jaden had no scans to be sure, no topography to work with to find somewhere survivable to submerge. The only shallow point they knew of was where the island ahead breached the surface, and that was way too far -

Realisation snapped in Jaden's mind, and his hands flurried into action, hurriedly flipping the controls that would power up the repulsorlift coils. During a standard entry, a ship would decelerate significantly in the upper atmosphere, and then rely upon repulsorlift technology to counteract a planet's gravity, and keep it aloft. Such technology had made aerodynamics somewhat obsolete, but only when you were moving slow enough that air resistance wasn't a significant factor. Move too fast, especially downward, and you were asking too much of the repulsor coils. Best case scenario they just wouldn't be enough to hold you aloft; worst case, they'd try, and you'd fry everything and plummet like a rock.

But they didn't need to hold themselves aloft. Hell, they didn't even need to slow down. All they needed was enough upward impulse to shallow out their descent curve. If they could shed a few more degrees, enough to bring them closer to the island?

Jaden's hand slammed down on the repulsor controls, and the U-Wing bucked, a pulse of energy thrusting against Thrawn Prime's gravitational field, deflecting their course upwards. The ship rocked from side to side in protest, each movement of Jaden's controls exaggerated as they teetered atop a cushion of anti-gravity. He watched the island ahead sway in his viewshield view, horizon dropping as their descent became subtly less severe. Jaden did his best to maintain the island central in their sights, but each application of yaw cost them precious height, so he resisted his instinctive urges as much as he could. The island loomed, larger and larger. A different kind of grim realisation dawned on him.

"Maybe not."

They were close enough to make out details now: trees, outcroppings, probably some sort of volcanic formation. Close enough that terra firma might be underneath them when they kissed the surface after all. That was definitely the drier possibility; but it came with a whole host of new complications, namely things to crash into and explode.

"There's a quote from General Windu, back in the Clone Wars, that I always say to my pilots in situations like this."

Jaden reached for the thrust controls, small pulses of engine power gingerly applied, sacrificing deceleration in favour of forward momentum. The ship's half-functional systems offered no guidance or input, instinct taking their place instead. The scuffs and scratches on the viewport became navigational markers, constant estimations projecting when to turn, how much to bank, and which obstacles they were likely to contend with.

"Hold onto your butts."

Slamming the controls to one side, Jaden swerved the U-Wing just enough to avoid the first rocky spire that tried to reach up and lance them out of the sky. Through the trees he caught a glimpse of it, the shimmering blue of a lake or lagoon that he'd hoped would lie at the center of the volcanic caldera. Banking the opposite way, Jaden tried to steer for a space in the trees, but his control agency was too low, and the U-Wing drifted further to port than he'd expected, ventral surface crashing through a second spire and jolting them further into the turn. They met the treeline almost side on, but not quite; the impact against the ship's back third toppled the trees, but also reversed the direction of the U-Wing's spin. More planetary resistance kicked them the opposite way yet again, and the ship began to tumble, artificial gravity wrestling with real gravity as the perspective of the ship's occupants inverted.

There was nothing to be done: the surface was rising up to meet them, and Jaden's last hand had been played. With all the willpower he could muster, he pried his hands free of the controls, and braced himself for impact.

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Eventually, the world around them pitched and thrashed to such a degree that it made straining for a reference point useless. About that time, Cirrsseeto had pitched his head towards his knees, covering the back of his head with both hands.

The world went blank.

When it returned to him, Cirrsseeto didn't remember opening his eyes or waking up. Cognition wasn't ever that tidy in duress. It happened somewhere around the fifth or sixth attempt at trying to get his prosthetic leg to fasten. The Captain sat hunched in his chair, hands making feeble and clumsy movements against the pressure seal. There was a stink of smoke, something like burned plastic. A gentle sway played out, casting momentum here and there as the distinctive burble of seawater sloshed against the windscreen.

"jI've got to wake up."

His own voice sounded dull in his ears.

"jI've got to wake up. jI've got to wake up. jI've got to wake up."

Repetition felt like a litany, something holy. There was a word floating up to the top of his head. Concussion.

Crew. Tend to the crew.

"Jaden?"

[Jaden Luka]

They were the right way up. All things considered, that was pretty close to a best case scenario. Things could have been better, of course: air and land outside the viewshield would have been nice. Jaden blinked, trying to process his surroundings. Had they ditched in the ocean? No, no. There'd been rocks. Trees. The lagoon then. Shallow water. Or at least, shallower. Deep enough to submerge them, but maybe not too far. That was good news. Good news. Good, good, good.

Jaden's hand rose to his forehead, and he winced immediately in pain. More blinking as he tried to focus, vision settling on the angry red smear across the splint wrapped around his injured wrist. A ginger inspection above his brow confirmed it: damn thing must have punched him on the way down. He could feel the blood already beginning to matte into his eyebrow. Medkit, probably. Probably a good idea. Medkit. Where were the medkits?

Cirrsseeto was talking, though apparently he had his head jammed into a duffelbag, if the muffled sound was anything to go by. He waved his good hand vaguely in the Captain's direction, before setting about fumbling himself free from the pilot's chair. "Yeah, yeah," he managed to mutter out, extracting himself successfully, his boots landing with a wet slap onto the deck. Huh. The floor was wet. It was wet outside too. That probably wasn't good. Why wasn't it good?

Oh right. Crashing. Sinking. That was bad.

"We've got a breach," Jaden grunted, his good arm reaching for the superstructure above his head, using it for stability as he withdrew a little further into the bowels of the U-Wing. The movement slowly began to pump consciousness back into his mind, the pounding of his head acting like a beacon through the fog that had descended across his thoughts. He remained still for a moment, watching the way the water shifted and flowed around him. The leak was slow; minutes, not seconds. That was good. Of course, as soon as they opened the doors to get the heck out of there, the interior would fill up mighty fast. But that was a later problem. First problem first.

Turning back towards the cockpit, Jaden's concentration zoned out for a moment, studying the movement of the water as it rose up and past the viewshield, some unrealised impulse to calculate their rate of descent. His mind offered nothing; another fragment of it argued that it wouldn't matter. Slow the leak, then get out; do that fast enough, and you wouldn't need to worry about how fast you were sinking.

"You got atmo control up there?" Jaden called, not entirely sure what volume he was speaking at. His ears were still ringing, either from the blow to the head or the aftermath of the cacophonous decent, and the deafening silence it left behind. "We need to dial up the positive pressure, make it harder for the water to get in."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

The words were floating in the air, still in a code without a key. Cirr didn't realize he was speaking the same language for a moment. All his attention was fixed on making his insurgent fingers find the ratchet catch to secure the stump of his right leg into the socket of his prosthetic. By chance he drug his fingers in just the right way to remember. They curled, and the Captain gave the mechanism a sharp pull.

"Nng!"

It hurt. It always did, going back on. But right now the sharpness of it woke him up. Cirr sucked in a breath of the close, ozone-tainted air.

"Got jit."

The atmospheric bilge wasn't designed to do what Jaden wanted it to do. Not indefinitely, at least. As the pumps whined, Cirr tumbled from his seat, remembering at the last moment to catch the log entry datapad before it clattered into a pool at the decking. The felinoid unslung a satchel from the cargo webbing, upending his books in order to stuff the log inside. From there, he made a quick inventory. There was a medkit on the wall. That got pulled free. Next came the portable commset.

"The moment we blow the egrress hatch, we'rre gonna sstarrt gojing down. We need to make surre we'rre rready to go."

Something boxy and yellow caught Cirr's eye. He lifted up on his toes, pulling a parcel down from the overhead webbing before tossing it to Jaden.

"jInflatable rraft. Not forr us, we've got to salvage whateverr we can pull beforre we lose the shjip."

[Jaden Luka]

Salvage. Right.

Under normal circumstances, Jaden's mind would have rattled through an inventory of the ship's contents and emergency supplies. Its unwillingness to do so was definitely a bad sign. Still, there were a few obvious basics for him to rummage around for: things that would fit in the raft that the Captain had found; things that would be important to keep them alive. Blasters. Spare packs. Medkit. Rations. Portable comm gear, so they could signal for a rescue. Flares, to attract attention when that rescue arrived.

Flare gun, where is the damn flare gun?

A few curses escaped from Jaden as he fumbled through the assortment of annoyingly similar and annoyingly unmarked plasteel containers in the U-Wing's emergency supply locker. A kit of basic maintenance tools was kept; a spare pack of filters for the atmo scrubbers was not. Finally, something a garish shade of orange yielded what he was looking for. It, and the tools, were scooted across the deck towards the hatch, while the blaster rifle was carefully slung across his back. An idle thought about whether or not blasters were waterproof floated through his mind; something he should have had an easy answer to, but one was not readily available.

Carefully but hurried, he set about unfurling the emergency raft, cautious not to trigger the auto-inflate valve, and began to load their supplies into what would soon become the raft's center. A wince pinched at the corners of his eyes as he imagined the inflated raft's voyage to the surface, containers tumbling from the sides as the lagoon's waters got in the way. Sithspit. His eyes turned upwards, glancing at the webbing that served as most of the U-Wing's storage; without another thought, a service knife had been plucked from his belt, and Jaden set about slashing through the fabric mesh.

"Give me a hand with this," he half-ordered, half-requested. "We're gonna lose everything if we inflate that raft without everything tied down."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

Still slow to the take, Cirr was glad a marginally clearer head could steer him to the next immediate thing. At least he was getting his dexterity back. He was going to need it once they popped the hatch. The Captain took the edge opposite his XO, the claws at his fingertips nicking through the polymer meshing with a few repeated attempts. They had to work fast. The bilge was keeping as much atmosphere in the cabin as possible, but water was beginning to seep in and outstrip the mechanism's ability to displace it. Inwardly, Cirrsseeto was thankful that it wasn't freezing cold water, once he could feel it sloshing into his left boot and rising up his calf.

"Watch out."

The Cizerack gave a few heavy pulls down against the webbing, torquing a section free from the bits he'd frayed. Jaden's end was nearly free, and a moment later, they were hastily lashing the webbing over the deflated raft and contents within.

"When we open that doorr, the waterr's gonna come jin fast. Hang onto somethjing untjil we'rre full, then push out fjirrst."

He was trying to sound decisive, but Cirrsseeto knew he was making this up on the fly.

"jI'll follow you."

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden's innards squirmed in conflict at being sent out first. On the one hand, it appealed to his impulsiveness, the same rush to action that had landed him in almost every situation in his life: jail, the Stormtroopers, an A-Wing, the works. Head first and headlong was a way of life for him, and that part of him was appeased by the Captain's sensible choice. On the other hand, though, he bristled at the instruction. Was going first riskier, or safer, and that was the reason? Was the Captain relying on him to surface first and help him? To act as a distraction for hostile creatures lurking in the depths? Jaden's head swam with those thoughts; too many thoughts; too many to dwell on.

He nodded, bracing himself on one side of the hatch while the Captain took the other. One arm wrapped around part of the U-Wing's superstructure, while the other coiled part of their floatation-webbing hybrid around itself, ready to drag their vital supplies out into the water with him. He familiarised himself with the position of the inflation valve, mentally measuring it in hand spans from his other arm, ready to fumble and find it in the cold. Stray thoughts from basic training filtered through his mind, and he nodded along silently to himself, before glancing over to the Captain to impart what he remembered.

"Cold water shock is going to make your body want to gasp for breath," he warned, a stray thought wishing he had an Imperial-issue thermal body glove right about now. "Kinda goes without saying, but try not to let it do that. Breathing underwater is -" Jaden winced a little at the thought. "- bad."

All the talk of breathing made Jaden hyperconscious of his own. Careful, steadily deepening breaths were cycled through his lungs, making the most of the U-Wing atmosphere that he was about to be deprived of. His mind tried to calculate how deep they must be by this point, but all that came back was a scrambled and confused response. Hopefully not too deep. Hopefully, his lungs would hold out.

"Okay," he said with one last nod, as Cirrsseeto raised a hand to the door controls. "In three, two, one -"

A literal blast followed, as the emergency explosive bolts fired and hurled the U-Wing's hatch clear. Water slammed in behind it, all the air that had been trapped within the ship eagerly rushing to change places with the ice cold water beyond. The wave of water that slammed into Jaden knocked the air from his lungs, and he scrambled to replace it, cursing himself mentally for not following his own advice. Water began to fill the internal space at a rapid pace, rising up the U-Wing's innards like water poured into a glass. Stretching upwards to suck in one last lungful of air, Jaden shoved himself downwards, gripped onto the edge of the hatch frame, and thrust himself forward into the lagoon, dragging the bundle of supplies behind him.

Drag was definitely the right word: the inner space beginning to fill with water, the weight of all those supplies and equipment began to wrench against Jaden's arm, reluctant to depart the threshold of the ship. Working fast, Jaden's boots connected with the side of the ship, and with an almighty kick he threw himself and the supplies backwards, clearing the path for the Captain to follow. Immediately they began to sink, and so Jaden fumbled, hands grasping and triggering the valve that transformed the emergency raft from dead weight to floatation device. Swiftly it began to ascend, racing towards the surface at a pace that Jaden's kicking legs and sweeping arms couldn't keep up with. He chased after it, lungs tightening in a desperate vice-grip desire for another breath, clambering up through the water as fast as he could manage.

The supply raft breached the surface, and Jaden soon after. In hindsight, he might have hoped for a majestic mermaid experience, but in the moment it was frantic and gasping, eyes stinging from the water, arms swaying back and forth to pivot around his view. His vision settled on the raft, and he swam his way over towards it; grasping one of the straps, he tried to find his bearings on which shore of the lagoon was closest. Calculation made, a few seconds made, his eyes frantically scanned the surface again.

"Captain?" he called, looking for the tell-tale splashes of movement across the lagoon. "Captain?!"

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Eeeuuugggh!!" Cirrsseeto gasped the moment his head cleared water. He tread in place in graceless splashes, gasping to let in breath. Okay, the water had been a lot colder when it all hit him in a rush. Just in thinking that, he realized he was alive and had managed the push to the surface.

"Captain?!"

"Nngh....herre!" he croaked through a wet cough as he chopped arms and legs to pivot in the direction of the voice that competed in his ears with the sounds of the sea and the roiling last gasps of the sinking U-wing somewhere behind him.

"jI'm herre!"

He'd been an okay swimmer before, but with one leg now not exactly his own, Cirrsseeto was halfway learning how to do it all over again. He pushed through the water, finally catching sight of the bright yellow raft and the man hanging along the side.

"Jaden, jyou alrrjight?"

[Jaden Luka]

"Honestly, sir? I've been better."

There wasn't as much deliberate comical snippiness in those words as Jaden would have liked, but it was as much as he could muster in his current waterlogged state. As utterly drenched and uncomfortable as Jaden felt, however, the Captain looked worse. Apparently at least some of the idioms about Cizerack and water were true.

"But it's nothing that a little dry land can't fix."

Jaden scanned his surroundings, trying to eyeball the shoreline of this lake, or lagoon, or pond, or whatever the proper name for a waterlogged geological feature of this size was. The information was in his brain somewhere, along with a horde of other information that, prior to now he would likely have considered useless trivia, but he wasn't in a mood to go searching for it. The nearest point of shore wasn't the most important thing: they needed somewhere with a gentle enough slope to drag the raft out of the water - and possibly just the one of them, if the slightly lopsided way Cirrsseeto was moving in the water was anything to go by. All his evasive respect of the Captain's privacy regarding his injury had come back to haunt him. He'd seen how problematic it was while moving through the water; he wasn't about to assume that everything would be hunky-dory if they tried to do something labour-intensive like dragging a heavy raft of supplies out of the water onto unstable ground.

He spotted a gentle slope that extended beneath the waterline a ways, minimal undergrowth, and reasonably sturdy-looking surface to stand on. It would have to do. "This way," he gestured with a nod, wrapping his arm into the crash webbing as best he could, and beginning to swim backwards towards the shore with the raft in his wake.