People were pouring in the room, making Aidan feel more and more nervous with each member of the Roughriders present; the only thing that he could hear or feel for a while was his heart bumping hard against his chest, putting the dog on the edge and full alert. Luckily, no questions came his way, so he tried to calm himself down a little, convinced that he looked like a scared deer. As the debrief went on, Aidan kept his eyes mostly to the papers, the only time he stopped scribbling was when the two downed pilots were mentioned; the dog sighed through his nostrils and closed his eyes during the recollection, only to be embraced by disappointment as images of Arcade's body poured into his mind. It appeared that the female goat, Myrina, had died too; he couldn't remember anything about her situation, but for a report of her going MIA or something similar to that. He felt even more guilty as Blade took most of the responsibility on himself, something Aidan did not agree with; he didn't quite have the occasion to counter his argument as his superior just dropped the bomb: they had another task coming up.

That finally broke Aidan's focus and, his attention was drawn to the colonel, whom he listened carefully for the rest of the debrief. The situation was all sorts of FUBAR, every bit of information made it more and more unbelievable to his canine ears; his mouth slightly gaped open as he tried to process through the very delicate situation at hand. One wrong move and what could be a well thought-out plan would turn in a war against the empire; to Aidan, the risks definitely outweighed the possible outcomes, a situation that made him question the motive behind trying to mettle in an issue that, really, wasn't theirs to begin with. He chose not to speak his concern as it would plant a seed of doubt in his colleagues and the last thing he wanted to add to his own list of morally questionable deeds was inciting a revolt. The colonel was expecting questions, but did he expect for someone to question his decision-making? With all the mixed feelings he had, tension and the burning need to get an answer was added in there and the volume of his concerns was high enough for him to exhaust them out of his system by frantically tapping his heel against the floor. Ken and Es were the first to voice out their thoughts, only then noticing that the captain was there in the room, behaving as if nothing really happened a few hours earlier; Ken basically asked to get another pilot to help him, a sound idea that Aidan thought to consider for himself. Working alone was a tiring task, today's operation was proof of that; next time, he might not get as lucky, he couldn't be in two places at the same time. It was then Aidan's turn.

He handled the papers to Blade along with his pen and pointed his finger at the dotted line where he was supposed to sign.

"Sir, with all due respect-" he nearly bit his tongue as he wrongly formulated his speech intro, then quickly changed the subject "but I don't think you are accountable for today's tragedies. No one is. Throwing or assuming blames won't bring anyone back to life, but what we could do to honor them is to make sure their sacrifice was worthwhile and fight harder on the field. If things ran differently today, we wouldn't have become cautious for tomorrow's hardships."

"How long'til we get to Martenstown, sir?"