They waited hours. Hours of basking in the heat of latent smoke in the hallways and rooms, or failing that, freezing in the cleaner air in whatever sections of the ship hadn't experienced infernos or been ambushed by smoke and gas through the vents. The place already appeared dingy; the smoke simply added to the look. Lakretians, many of them connected as kin, some friends, some total strangers still -- anyone huddled with anyone else in groups in those cleaner sections of the ship to stay warm.
	Zuorn did not huddle with the tech operators on the bridge. The commander had procured a batch of flairs and lit them one after the other, for both heat and light. The hours crawling by meant fewer and fewer flairs. Colder and colder decks, quarters, halls. The background noise of emotions on the ship grew in anxiety; hope waned.
	The third message buzzed through their half-shot speakers. Max volume and it wasn't enough to be louder than a mumble; disappointment weighed down the tech operators. The message itself struck Commander Efrit like a tuning fork, and the tone his stress-addled mind produced was a discordant one. Power down the FTL? Lower shields? That was no different than being led around by soldiers pressing guns into their backs; this "Earth" no different than the empire they worked so hard to escape from.
	Zuorn averted her gaze when he turned and scanned the room with such laser-focused eyes. She almost [i]"went cold"[/i], too -- that would've saved her from the terrible wave of frustration as he, no doubt, ran his gaze over her. Frustration at how she killed his best men. Frustration that she had lumped all that responsibility onto [i]him[/i] after that mission. No other reason he might've been so tightly wound.
	He did not speak for a long time.
	"Vátne."  His voice, so gruff. So done with it all.
	She hesitated; at this delay in response, he growled out a sigh, and further frustration tugged her gaze towards him.
	"Vátne. You will ride the shuttle to 'Earth'."
	Zuorn blinked. Her confusion spiked his frustration, forcing her to confirm. "[i]I[/i] will be the diplomat?"
	His frustration fell. Panic rose by the same amount inside her.
	Before she could protest this decision, he turned to the screen, his readiness a cue for the tech operators to turn back on the voice transmission. "We have identified one willing diplomatic volunteer: Zuorn Ėtil Vátne. As for the... manifest of 'souls' and supplies, we will send you our manifest across radio frequencies. We hope you can figure out the -- for lack of a better term -- 'file format' that this information will be sent in; assume an image width of 680 pixels. Apologies for the lack of other means of relaying it."
	He nodded, and they turned off the voice transmission again.
	Zuorn's mind raced. 680 pixels was not a lot, compared to other species they knew of. It was an archaic amount. It was enough for the Lakretians, however, especially the average family wanting to video-call their relatives; high framerate and low latency was the priority here. So she would need a camera -- she might have to take a security camera off the walls or find a bodycam somewhere, maybe work with the tech ops to...
	She was procrastinating. Focusing on the task that Obnimar might hand to someone else rather than the task that he had declared [u]her[/u] responsibility. Diplomacy.
	A quiet sigh escaped her lips. Even thinking about being the linchpin again made her throat dry. No, she needed to be strong. She needed to burn as a pyre of hope in the darkness of hopelessness that pervaded the ship's atmosphere. But... she couldn't manage to light the match. She couldn't do this.
	"Permission to speak freely, commander?" she asked him.
	He slowly turned his head towards her. An alien might say he had a dead look in his eyes. But, to Lakretians, that was the sociopathic look of withheld vengeance.


	"Permission denied."
[@circ]