"So, what are we doing?" Jack asked himself, shaking his head. It didn't make sense for the captain to split up the crew like this, leaving the ship in the control of the engineers. Vulnerable, with fewer hands to defend it. While his team was heading off with the Cervitaur Glen, the ones that wanted to use them to win their game, while the captain was off to meet the leader of this empire who's lands they were on the edge of.

Was she hoping to make use of the cameras in his head to catch Silbermine in some compromising situation, making them the bait? If that was so, the captain was basically sacrificing them. A not unexpected situation. If the lordling's word could be trusted to return them, then he could be trusted to make an attempt on the ship, too. 

Maybe the'd get lucky, maybe the Captain could convince the queen of this empire to make them autonomous, a protective enclave. If so, the rest of the crew had a good chance for survival.

His team, on the otherhand, were going to have to try and conserve their masks and hope they didn't drown in their own fluids. The human body evolved on a world with 21% oxygen in the atmosphere, not 30%. Not even the doctors were sure what would happen without their masks. Their alveoli could burst, their lungs collapse, or develop pneumonia. Overstimulated, their minds could slip into delusions.

And what tests could they do on the atmosphere zones? Under greater pressure and higher oxygen, the atmospheric layers were closer together. Radio might not stretch as far as they were traveling, not that they had any distances.

Nothing he could do about it now.