[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/NISMglX.png[/img][/center][center][h2][color=#b9dde9]Laurey Karlin[/color][/h2][/center]A young girl watches the transport leave until long past when the after-images of its thrusters fade to nothing. Ghosts of ghosts. She does not cry now. Behind her a gate stretches high, higher and high, as if to deny her from Heaven itself. She shivers and wonders at when it got so cold. 

In the prismatic forests on Maiden’s Reach a monohorn drinks in the moons with its mirror-eyes. It cannot know that in less than a week starships will arrive and tear down the night sky. It will never see it, either. A glass lion shreds its throat and it’s dead before it hits the ground. The lion laps up blood dyed silver by the moon.

In a satellite orbiting Terra a computer system wheezes, coughs its last bit, and dies. It’s a ternary system, the back-up of a back-up. It’s cold in space and so far from anything. So far from home. Even if somebody could come up, they wouldn’t notice that the system was dead; it’s the back-up of a back-up. The satellite continues to orbit.

On the floor of the Xuanzang’s medical bay Laurey Karlin convulses. She has just left Nero with a handful of choice words, only noticing his vanishing act on a semi-cognisant level. For close to a minute her body shakes and her face rocks against the floor. When it stops at first she is confused, and then the pain wakes too. Steaming vomit chokes her senses, her throat raw, nose whistling and burning as chunks of curry seep out. She does not cry now.
[hr]
Laurey is in her workshop, interfacing with a roomba. The procedures are dusty, and when she shifts them round it sends sneezes through the system. It makes the process slow. There are only two more robots left to work on, stacked inactive on another workbench, whilst the one in front of her has its guts splayed and tacked into various devices. In space it's about efficiency, not just in cleaning, but in making use of what you have. Hence the security subroutines Laurey was also crafting for each roomba. 

She has not told anyone about her seizure.

The mood-adaptive music is quiet, close to monotonic, as the weak AI shapes it into an ambient sound that smooths away the edges of the world and allows her to sink deeper into her focus. 

Bridge. Now!

The music stutters then stops. The muted ring of footfalls and a deeper bass drumming bring her back. She scrambles to the bridge. 

Through the viewport it is chaos. The stars themselves seem to burst. Laurey looks away fast.

The plan itself is equally shambolic. Thought up fast and full of flaws, but any action is better than no action. Most of the time. What Ashton proposes seems close to suicide, and Natasha goes along with it! Laurey’s no soldier; this is too close to death, it’s decaying musk crawling down her neck. But to fight seems futile. They are outnumbered, in guns, ships, and manpower, taking on unnecessary risk against a foe who would either be dead or limping from its wounds very soon, if the flash of the battle Laurey had glimpsed was anything to go by. It just seems so stupid! So - 

The world fuzzes into static, and when Laurey comes to she is slouched in a chair, and Samuel is telling her something. A slice of time taken cleanly from her brain. She looks over and stares blankly, then her mind catches up.

“Right.”

She stumbles over to a mechanical interface for the comm systems. One of the screens shows a radar, fuzzy, but interpretable. The blobs show her the problem again, the sheer odds stacking against them. Her lips feel dry as she licks them. She sighs and turns to Natasha.

“Captain, do we really want to send up a beacon and paint a target on ourselves? We could just get out of here, let them kill each other. I don’t care if one of these kids is worth ten men, or even a hundred in a fight, if we get blasted out of space then they’ll die as well as one.”