“Iba- wait!” Vigdis tried to grab the Cuban engineer’s wrist, but didn’t react quick enough, “If something happens to you, [b]none of us[/b] are getting back to Sol!” She shouted after Ixtaro. Vigdis, Zhao and Varen could to a degree do each other’s jobs, so from a purely resource-management point of view losing one of them wasn’t that big of a deal, but figuring out what went wrong with the FTL drive and how to get it to behave was critical. She wasn’t gonna live out the rest of her days neither here nor during the centuries-long sublight journey home. “If she dies, I’m gonna kill her.” Vigdis growled under her breath, thinking that maybe she should’ve let Ixtaro be scared. Too late to fix that, but despite the necessity of Ixtaro’s survival, Vigdis couldn’t find the courage - perhaps madness - to go out and drag her back. She hoped Eva would.

“We’re holding a choke point, they’ve got Ezra and the two droids in their backs, and we’ve got Eva. We’ll be fine. Why don’t you post up over there?” She tried to reassure Darnell and pointed to the other side of the barricade, formulating it as a suggestion rather than an order to try to get around his combative attitude, “The farther apart we are, the fewer of us they’ll take down with a single area attack.” While spacing was a good thing to do, she mainly just wanted to get the tipsy corporate drone out of immediate earshot before responding to Zhao, since technically passing any information to people inside might’ve been considered insubordination since neither of the officers explicitly allowed it.

“Actually, hold that thought, the captain just walked up to one of them. They’re huge, no way they can maneuver well inside. If they breach, just park two armed sentries in the hallway and wait for them to come to you like Lemmings.” Zhao would’ve noticed Vigdis suddenly sounded a bit more relaxed, “Doctor, come here for a second. I don’t know how much you know, so from the start: Bumped into a bunch of local birdfolk, a centaur and a burning tree-man.” She said to bring both Feng and Zhao up to speed, hopefully without Darnell noticing her mic was open, “We started communicating, kind of, but they seemed friendly. But then a bunch more centaurs showed up, and these guys are loaded for bear. They’ve been yelling at each other in Alienese for the past five minutes now, and now the captain and Ibarra are within stabbing distance. Promise not to laugh at me, but some of the locals are fucking sorcerers. I tried to find a better explanation for what I was seeing, but I’ve got nothing.” The thought of magic was absurd enough on its own, but seemed to be doubly so in the world of engineering, where if you couldn’t model it mathematically, it didn’t count.