In retrospect, not very much time had passed. The incident had lasted maybe twenty minutes at the very most. When Ariel finally set down her stunner, however, the exhaustion she felt was as if she had just been in an hours-long standoff. Thank goodness Natasha and Abaddon had managed to convince the rogue militants to depart peacefully!

Natasha’s six-wheeler looked more familiar than Ariel would ever have expected, though. It would hardly have seemed out of place in a military garage or a boarding shuttle — Moonstrike must either have some excellent R&D teams, or a well-placed network of infiltrators among the ranks of the Ascendancy; or perhaps it was more likely to be both. Seems like they were more than just your typical ragtag rebels.

The grateful storeowners had offered the Star Marines (as they were now apparently called) a few pallets’ worth of free wares and generous discounts on their products. While the group was hardly lacking in funds, exploiting the 15% off would be saving money nonetheless. But Ariel would leave the shopping to the rest — her equipment was satisfactory enough, and only needed electricity to run, so it wasn’t like she needed ammunition either.

Ariel’s attention turned to Narvia, who was fiddling with her omnitool and sheepishly complaining about a… fourteen hour countdown?! 

[color=e9e6e1]“Wow.”[/color]

With advances in computing, it took truly unique circumstances or massive scales to achieve such a long timer. That omnitool was military-issue, too, much like the majority of Narvia’s equipment. Her service history was rather unique, in that she was assigned to an autonomous fleet under Admiral Zahrin, one of very few such formations in the Ascendancy’s armed forces. Much like the Windsors’ fleets, such independent units had often been viewed with suspicion and wariness by both other military commanders and the civilian government, though it could hardly be called baseless — the Dragon’s Brigade had developed their own unique versions of a lot of tools and systems, and if they decided to defect one day, their odds of survival in the long term weren’t bad.

Must be one [i]really[/i] bulky document. (Unless the estimate was simply off by an order of magnitude or two, which was still within the realm of possibility.) Narvia’s godfather had probably butchered the formatting or something to inflate it to a size like that. Fourteen hours? Unless she felt like staying up hideously late, it would probably be better to take a look at it the next day instead. 

[color=e9e6e1]“Make sure it doesn’t overheat~”[/color]

Actually, perhaps the decryption would go faster if Ariel lent her omnitool’s processing power. It wasn’t like she had plans to use it in the immediate future or anything, so… no harm in trying!

[color=e9e6e1]“Navi, want to try linking our omnitools together and see if it deciphers any quicker? At this rate, it’s only going to finish tomorrow.”[/color]