Gideon popped open a bottle of beer, since his Alpenbitter was already sucked down. It was a pretty traditional hunter's drink here in the back country, the sort of thing bored monks mixed up and perfected because monks got bored. Beer did the trick, however. There was the whole Lily conversation but they'd heard that one over and over. Lily Krieger was basically one of the objects of lust in the entire class, but Gideon never went there. The truth was that the training, especially the last couple years, was a lot of hormones. Everyone was in peak physical fitness and were thrown in with each other away from parents. Citadel command stopped pregnancies from happening, but banning fraternization was pointless. Humanity was designed to find a way.

The musing would have gone on, but it was cut off by the appearance of flame in the sky.

"Shit. That isn't one of ours. Fuck." That was beneath the public image of the royal family, but Gideon had spent a decade and then some training to be a soldier, and it was the divine right of the grunts to cuss and complain. He started to douse the fire, mostly out of the sense that it might be problematic to leave it unattended. There went the party and the campout. If that wasn't a Rassvet airship, stood to reason it was a Vangar one. And it got shot down this far in. Something was going on.

"Think we better grab medical supplies and check it out. Might be survivors. Anyone got a connection? My phone hasn't got a thing."

He was already estimating how far they'd have to hump it along by terrain, as he knew it pretty well. "Whatever's there got shot down, see those aircraft in the sky? And that wasn't one of ours..." The phone thing worried him; this place had cell service, hell it had a tower real close by as a provision of being royal property. It wasn't supposed to just go freakin' down like that. Something was up.

"Better saddle up, this here's now a goddamn combat patrol. We can take this truck some of the way down the road, dismount and proceed on foot to reconnoiter. Priority is to find out what the hell is going on there, and get in contact with regional forces HQ for further instructions. If there's more than one running around in the back country..." He shook his head. He didn't want to imagine the consequences. The idea of a major Vangar incursion in the wake of the peace talks was a possibility and it didn't sit well with him. Until they could contact higher HQ, they basically had a duty to do what they could. It was getting darker and colder, but at least they had plenty of firelight to guide them right to where the crash site was...