I paced the corridor near our rooms, my mind reeling from the day's events. I'd already had so much to think about, to consider, but the Protector's visit to us, her questions for Jayken, had added so much that I almost couldn't handle it. As if I hadn't already been conflicted enough. Putting aside the sheer fascination I felt at the Protector's existence - I was desperate to question Sophie at length about her connection to the Protector and everything she knew about her species and history and what she had to do with the Alliance, but that would need to wait for a less turbulent time - her words were weighing on me. Was I really so sheltered, that I could be shocked by the awful state of the settlement on Aandrigo? That I could be so unaware of any pro-Weraynian sentiment, and protests to the war?

I felt awful, corrupted by my own upbringing. I'd been raised to hate Weraynians, to think of them as irredeemably evil; I'd spent years dreading this war, psyching myself up for horror and bloodshed and for my whole life to be upended. As the war drew closer, all I'd wanted was for my side to win, for the Weraynians to be defeated and my life to go back to its nice, relaxed normal.

Now things were different. I was unbelievably ashamed at the way I used to think. The team who'd gone to Aandrigo had been comprised of sentient rights activists, an Aandriggian, a Weraynian, and me; an entitled Paladanian who'd only recently had the mindboggling revelation that what she'd been taught about an entire species being evil had in fact been propaganda. Oh Staarus I was a disgrace.

Where did we go from here? The Protector had presented us with a terrifying option - defect. The notion consumed me. I knew that if I stayed here at this station, remained complicit in this war when I knew it wasn't right, that the guilt would consume me. But the alternative, becoming a renegade? I wasn't sure if I had what it took for that. Sophie and I had worked against authorities before, in times of crisis, but this was a whole nother dimension.

I'd been left alone too long with my thoughts; right after returning from Aandrigo, Alexa and Jayken had been taken aside for a debrief, Sophie needed to help Rojjel with one of their projects and Beth and Mickey immediately went into a call with one of the Alliance teams at the blockade. I was waiting for the latter to finish so we could talk about all this. Of everyone here, they were the most removed from this deranged situation, and therefore the most impartial. I knew my perspective was completely warping my judgement in this situation, and I needed their insight.

After enough time for me to spiral almost entirely into madness, they finished their call and we headed into mine and Sophie's room to discuss. Beth perched on the shelf and Mickey sprawled awkwardly on the bed next to me. My anxiety got the better of me and I alighted and began pacing once more in the cramped space.

"So what happened Abigail?" Mickey asked worriedly. We hadn't felt safe filling the others in when we'd appeared back on the ship - even now I wasn't entirely sure that we weren't being observed, but they needed to know. "You look really shaken."

"Well..." I explained everything that had happened, from the depressing state of the settlement to the surprise visit from the Protector and everything she said to us. Beth and Mickey listened intently, exchanging worried frowns and reacting in interest to the Protector's appearance in the story.

"The Protector's here? Wow." Mickey looked awestruck.

"What is she doing in this sector of space?" Beth wondered at the end of my story. "She's from mine and Sophie's area, that's ages away. I guess if you can teleport anywhere it's not that big a deal; but still, the fact that she's here, and on the Weraynian's side..." They cocked their head to the side and hissed air through their teeth. "That's, uh... that's definitely not an opinion to knock."

"You're right - it's all I can think about." I spun and stared pleadingly between them. "I really need your counsel. What should we do? Do you think it's at all realistic for us to defect?"

Beth and Mickey glanced at each other, communicating silently for a long moment.

Mickey shook his head. "I don't know. It's a tough decision, and whatever you and the others decide, we'll stand by you."

"It's not as if they're expecting you to kill Weraynians or anything." Beth added. "And the Alliance is already here in a neutral capacity; we're an aid organisation not military. So for us, defecting just looks like bringing our ships out from their spots in the blockade and focussing solely on medical and rescue. Like Mickey said though, you're the boss."

I wrung my hands together. "There's so much to consider with this. I don't know what difference we can make. Maybe it's better for us to be here, at the center of things - we might have some influence over decisions that are made. It's not as if we can stop the war, but our presence might be able to change people's minds about Weraynians, especially with Jayken here. We've only got the vaguest notion of what the Protector wanted us to do. I wouldn't even know whether to start."

We were interrupted by a sharp knock on the door.

"Abigail?" Alexa called out.

"Come in." I said, and moved out of the doorway as Alexa and Jayken squeezed into the room.

"Oh, we're having a party huh." she said flatly at the sight of Mickey and Beth.

"I was informing them of what happened on Aandrigo." I explained. "How did your meeting go?"

"It was... tense." Alexa looked at Jayken with a worried frown. "They were really weird about Jayken going to Aandrigo. Reading between the lines - they want him to stay on the station where they can keep an eye on him. I don't like it."

"Well... we were just discussing how the Protector encouraged us to leave this team and join an Aandriggian activist group. What were your thoughts on that?"

Alexa's eyes glinted darkly. "It sounds like a pipe dream. They're never gonna let us just leave, even with the teleport watch. They'd probably track us down and drag us back. Like yeah, obviously I'd like to be helping the side who actually give a damn about people rather than upholding the status quo, but I just don't see how we could. It's too dangerous."

I nodded. "I get that. We would never want to put you or Jayken in any danger."

"Don't worry about me." Jayken said. " Lexie's just being paranoid."

"What are your thoughts Jaykey boy?" Beth asked from their spot on the shelf. Jayken shuffled around awkwardly to look at them.

"I trust Anise and I'm glad she sought us out, and it sounds like we really could be helpful. Whereas here, I'm mostly just being watched by the leaders." He looked at Alexa now. "I want to do anything I can for my people Lexie. We don't even know what we're working on here, the machines Sophie and Rojjel are installing could be for anything."

"He has a point." Mickey turned to me. "Has Sophie said anything to you about what they've been building?"

"It's all so secretive, they're being given parts of plans and instructions written in code. Sophie told me that everything they've put together has to be set to specific frequencies, and she doesn't even know what technology could even interact with them. Her best guess is it's to interfere with Weraynian technology, but even then... Look, guys, I'm not sure what this project is, but we've been put on this team for a reason. What happens to all this technology if we do leave?"

"We should probably find out what it does before we make any decisions right?" Jayken said.

"Why don't we ask Rojjel?" Beth suggested. "He's been here longer than any of us, he might know something we don't."

"You're right." I said. "Let's go now and talk to him. He's with Sophie."

"Should we let Rojjel know we're not 100% cool with our deal here? I've got no idea what he thinks about all this. He might snitch on us." Lexie said, arms crossed.

"Nah, Rojjel would never do that, he's super anti-authoritarian." Beth waved their hands dismissively.

We all stopped and stared incredulously at them.

"What? We've hung out a few times, he's cool. I was hoping we might hook up but he's gay and engaged, so no dice. He's still chill to vibe with though."

"What!?"

"How the hell did you get him to tell you something that personal? He's a weirdly private person." Alexa looked impressed.

Beth shrugged. "He loosens up a bit when he's tipsy. Besides, I saw his betrothal necklace the other day and asked about it - he normally has it hidden under his shirt but, again, tipsy."

Jayken's face lit up. "Rojjel's engaged?! That's so exciting! I need to talk to him about this. I wonder if he'll let me help him with the wedding planning..."

Alexa rolled her eyes. "Okay, let's focus up here, maybe. If we trust that Rojjel is cool, let's go find him and ask about the project. And by that I mean the tech he's building for the war, not his wedding."

"Yeah, yeah." Jayken held his hands up defensively as we all filed out of the room.

We found Sophie and Rojjel bickering over the controls of the device he'd been working on before we left for Aandrigo. After checking the general vicinity for anyone who might overhear our conversation, we crowded around them.

"Hi guys!" Sophie said brightly.

Rojjel raised an eyebrow inquisitively. "What's going on here?"

We exchanged glances between ourselves, and then I spoke, "Rojjel, we were just talking about the technology you and Sophie have been working on. I've got to confess, I'm not sure I quite understand the purpose of it. All the devices we've been installing in various places - how are they contributing to the war effort? We thought you might know, since you've been here longer than the rest of us."

Rojjel fixed me with a long, querious look, then delicately snatched a mesh of wires from Sophie's hands. "It's quite interesting that they put us on this project, huh, considering how secret and important it seems to be. I have been able to get something of an inkling of what we've been working on. As I'm sure Sophie's told you, the code comes to us pre-written, and our main task is configuring it to work with Weraynian technology, or those ancient machines like in the force field generators. All of the devices we install need to be able to connect remotely to each other, so they all have sophisticated transmitting ability. They're also all capable of transmitting signals than can lock onto specific wavelengths, and transform them in some way. For instance, they could potentially isolate technologies on the same frequency and stop them from functioning."

"So kinda like a superpowered EMP." Sophie added enthusiastically.

Rojjel clenched his jaw and scorched her with a look that told me that he was trying to figure out whether to explain to Sophie that he didn't know human acronyms, and then decided it wasn't worth it. "Sure. Anyway, my best guess would be that our dear leaders have had intel for quite some time about the Weraynians, perhaps something they're developing, and that they want to inhibit that in any way they can. The proximity of the devices we've been installing to Werayne can't be a coincidence. I'm surprised I don't know more about this technology, though. It's impressive the lengths they've gone to disguise their purpose..."

I studied Rojjel closely, utilising the intrinsic Paladanian skill of elucidation. We needed to know if he was trustworthy, whether we could reveal our intentions to him without it backfiring horrendously. It was possible, for a Paladanian, to understand this in someone simply by looking at them, with some effort of concentration. The moment I'd met Sophie I'd known I could trust her, in direct spite of the fact that my planet was being invaded by humans at the time. I needed that same clarity now. As the tense conversation continued I realised that Beth had described Rojjel accurately; although not as motivated by altruism and justice as the rest of us, he was not loyal to our leadership and was in fact quite sceptical of authorities. He was used to keeping his opinions close to his chest and liked to appear aloof and snobbish, but when push came to shove he would align himself with people in need over anyone in power. There was no way he'd betray us.

"Rojjel," I interrupted the conversation now that we could get straight to the point. "We're asking about all this because... we think we might be fighting for the wrong side, and we're considering leaving, but we want to know as much as we can about what we've been working on so that we aren't making things worse by abdicating."

For the first time, I saw Rojjel's cynical veneer drop. His eyebrows creased together and he surveyed our faces as he took in our words. "Ah... Well I've never had much of an opinion on the Weraynian war until I got dragged into it for my tech skill but I trust that you all know more about it than me, especially Jayken and Alexa." He nodded in their direction and Jayken smiled appreciatively. "About the devices however, I really don't have enough information to know if there's any reason to stay. I imagine they could carry on this project without us. I'll try to see if I can put something together to hack into their systems, potentially find out more. But overall I don't imagine it would be a problem if we left this project."

"Would you come with us then, if we go?" Jayken asked.

Rojjel shrugged. "Sure. Better than being in this bleak place."

"Okay, so that's the plan then?" Alexa asked. "We gather information if we can, but we get out of here?"

"We can start diverting Alliance ships basically straight away." Beth said. "Probably easier to do that from here, but after that, if we're not too suspicious, it shouldn't be too hard for us to get a ship and go."

"Where will we be going?" Jayken asked.

"I'll look into the protests the Protector told us about." Alexa said. "That'll make it easier to find those groups for us to link up with afterwards. But uh, not here is good enough for me."

And so it was decided. Over the next few days we covertly started preparing for our imminent departure. It was exhilarating, though terror inducing, to be anticipating such an open act of defiance against the Paladanian and Halapatovian leaders. The law abiding part of me was trying to flood me with guilt, paralyse me into staying safe and good, and so I was constantly walking around with this anxiety plaguing me, actively trying to push out those selfish thoughts and just focus on what I knew was right. It wasn't easy, especially since, once again, I had the least to do out of everyone.

Plans were in place, wheels were moving. Then one day we were called into the conference room to be given a mission.

"So Staarus forces have recently succeeded in claiming a section of Werayne, and now we have the perfect opportunity to integrate our devices right on the planet, which we think will be very helpful for our cause. We can assure you that it is perfectly safe - we are sending you to an old abandoned facility out of the way of any significant military sites, therefore unlikely to be targeted for retaking by Weraynian forces. However, we will be taking precautions. For instance, you will all be provided with weapons, and Jayken will be staying behind due to the increased risk."

I couldn't help but glance at Jayken. I could imagine he'd be conflicted about a mission back to his home planet. Since being snatched away years ago, he hadn't been to Werayne, and he wanted to go back, but the war and the way our leaders perceived him as a threat meant that that wasn't possible. I remembered how emphatic he'd been about defecting the other day. He was normally such a chill and passive guy, happy to go along with other people and do whatever it took to keep the peace. But everything he'd gone through was clearly starting to affect him. To be denied the chance to even just visit his planet again felt unnecessarily cruel, and no matter how much they claimed it was for his safety, it was easy to see it was just a way to control him, to keep him under close watch.

Behind him, Alexa's eyes burned with fury. I caught her gaze for just a second and felt the weight of her confliction. She knew it would be futile to argue for Jayken to come with us, that we were already under enough scrutiny and we couldn't get away with a teleport trick this time. But Jayken was family to her, and she would rather die than stand by while the people she cared about suffered. She wanted to question and provoke and fight for something better but in this climate she was worried she would simply cause more trouble for us all, when we were right on the cusp of pulling away from this military nonsense.

So she did something surprising; she smiled vaguely and calmly said, "If it's alright, I'd like to stay behind as well and keep Jayken company. I'm sure the others would manage okay without me."

The leader frowned. "We really would prefer you had a team of at least four, plus Trista, for safety purposes. Perhaps your Alliance friends would be willing to take Alexa's place?"

"Of course they would." Sophie said confidently. I had to stop myself from laughing at that - they were busy at the moment organising the Alliance to convert all their work to a neutral stance. It would put them back a bit if they joined us, but Sophie was technically right - for Alexa and Jayken's sake, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

"This is good." Beth whispered loudly to us as we strapped ourselves in for the trip. "While most of you are installing the device, blah blah blah, we've got a perfect opportunity to assess the site, local frequencies, see if we can find anything to narrow down exactly what this 'project' is trying to interfere with. That way we might actually have useful information to pass on to the activist groups or whatever."

"It could be anything though." I said. "It could be a weapon the Weraynians are building; in that case they have a perfectly good reason to want to stop it working."

"You're right." they said. "But it'd be better to know for sure. I have no idea how it could be much more sinister than that, but we've all agreed it's kinda shady right? If the Protector knows what she's talking about and we're fighting on the wrong side, making Weraynian weapons less powerful just gives them less of a chance in a fight against people who are oppressing them. You don't have to be evil to build weapons."

I was speechless. Beth was being completely reasonable, and empathetic in a way I wished I was able to be. My prejudice against the Weraynians was blinding me even now. If they were being mistreated, did I expect them to just peacefully protest that mistreatment? They were being actively engaged in war by my people, how could I consider it unfair for them to have weapons to fight back? I nodded sternly. Beth was right. No matter what it was, we needed to learn the true purpose behind our mission.

It wasn't long before we descended on Werayne. It was beyond weird to watch Weraynian landscape come into view, with its mismatch of dense cities filled with factories and machines, and then vast empty spaces, forests and mountains that appeared virtually untouched. The air seemed denser than it should, probably a latent effect from their atmosphere being enclosed by a force field. All the images of Werayne I'd seen growing up had given me the impression that it was inherently corrupt and evil, filled with horrible machinations and crime riddled streets. It shouldn't have surprised me that that was propaganda too, focussing on the bad parts of a planet to make all of Werayne seem that way. Even from a distance you could see swathes of nature, and what development there was, except in specific spots, was the result of people living life, just as it was on Flauraan or Halapatov. It was infuriating to me how easily I'd been sucked into prejudice growing up, but what mattered now was that I was challenging those notions, and finding things out for myself.

I'd gotten Jayken to tell me what he could about the part of Werayne we were being sent to. It wasn't anywhere near where he'd grown up so he hadn't had too much information, but he had told me that it wasn't that significant as a military or research base, from what he knew it was mostly rural. I saw just as much as we neared the facility which Staarus forces had taken. It was a very small, basic research station surrounded by scorched and abandoned farmland; we landed by a fence that girded the building. It wasn't very big, but it had elaborate antennae and radio dishes spouting out of the roof. It was at a specific point of the planet that lined up with multiple of the space stations that had maintained the force field in previous times. I wondered if it had been constructed in an early attempt by the Weraynians to escape.

There was a vague sense of anxiety among us as we exited the ship, each with a gun strapped to our sides. We'd been assured that this section of Werayne was under Staarus control, which felt kind of gross and colonialist - even if the war against the Weraynians was for a good reason, what reason did we have to take over part of their planet? I knew the leaders had their justifications, but all I could think was that if Weraynians found us here and killed us, they'd be entirely in the right. Like Jayken had said, this wasn't even a military area. All the Weraynians who had been... (driven out? Captured? slaughtered? I didn't want to know) they would have been civilians. The facility we were commandeering had been long abandoned. There had been no threat here, we had seized Weraynian territory for pure strategy.

As if I hadn't already felt assured in our decision to defect. This mission was pushing me over the edge. At the very least, Jayken could've been here, to see his home planet again, but the leaders wouldn't even let him have that.

"Okay, so they reckon there's dormant computers in here that we should be able to reboot and connect our device to." Rojjel said, consulting the hologrammatic device on his wrist. "Hopefully they're similar to the models Sophie and I have been working with, otherwise this will take a while. And there's no guarantee the Weraynian army doesn't know we're here. We wanna be in and out as fast as we can."

It didn't take long for us to get into the facility. Sophie had done a basic scan of the building, and was pretty sure they had the technology needed to connect to, so we decided to split into teams to check them all out faster and more thoroughly. Rojjel, Mickey and I formed one team, and Beth and Sophie the other - on top of our assigned mission, I would keep an eye out for anything unusual and Beth had their own scanner to snoop with. Trista stayed with the ship, like she usually did. She was a good ally to have. I'd had less interaction with her than the others but she'd tolerated all sorts of suspicious behaviour from us and either hadn't noticed or hadn't cared about our secretive detour on Aandrigo. I wondered where her thoughts lay in all this mess. I knew that she was better than your average Halapatovian or Paladanian - she was the only pilot who'd been willing to work on a team that included Jayken. I didn't get the sense that she would defect with us - she had kids back on Halapatov that she had to think of, to protect - but I at least knew she was willing to look the other way while we did it.

We found a room with computers set up that Rojjel thought might be good to set up our device with. He opened one up to start the process, and then paused.

"It's been gutted." he said, frowning. Then moved over to the next one and tore off the outer shell. I looked in bewilderment. Both computers had empty spaces inside them, with frayed wires lining the edges as if the technology inside had been ripped out haphazardly.

All of the computers in that room had received the same treatment.

"None of this is useable." Rojjel said, shaking his head. "I don't know why they'd do this, what a waste."

We quickly headed to another part of the facility which we'd identified would have what we needed, and we found exactly the same. As Rojjel was opening up a control panel on the wall (to no doubt find vital components broken or missing), our communicators alerted and I answered.

"So heyyyyy," Beth's voice sounded from the comm. "Just wondering... are you guys also finding a lot of smashed up tech because uhhhhh, it doesn't look like we're gonna have any luck here babes."

"We've got the same situation here." I told them. "If we can't find anything in the next ten minutes, I vote we just head back to the ship. This is quite peculiar."

"Well, I don't know if we can use it, but it seems like there's a pile of scrap tech outside the facility. It's difficult to get a read on, but it might still be somewhat functional. We're gonna check it out."

"Okay, we'll finish up in here and then we'll head to you."

"Sounds good." The communicator crackled as the call ended.

After a quick poke around the rooms for anything we may have missed, which garnered nothing, we headed outside the facility to meet up with Sophie and Beth.

It all happened too fast. We were just approaching a corner when I sensed... something. I barely had time to react before my ears popped as a shockwave swept through us from the direction we were heading. I stumbled and clutched my head as a blood curdling scream rang out, and then silence.

Then we were running. I blindly yelled out Sophie's name. We rounded the corner and found them crumpled against the fence as if they'd been flung by the force of whatever had caused the shockwave. I froze and stared. Sophie had blood covering her face and her arm was twisted at an odd angle, like it was about to snap off, and Beth... Beth lay unconscious on the floor, their face pale and their side bleeding profusely.

Thank Staarus Mickey was there. While I was gripped by panic, he sprung into action, pulling gauze and syringes out of his belt bag and barking directions at me as he focussed on stopping Beth's bleeding. My brain unfroze and my medical knowledge was summoned to mind in a a somewhat useful manner; I listened to Mickey and assisted him throughout the longest half hour of my life. We put pressure on Beth's wounds, cleaning blood so he could inspect their body for further damage, and I attended to the graze on Sophie's head while Mickey injected Beth with medication to stabilise their condition. Beth's biology was ... strange, but it seemed their lungs were compressed and several bones were broken, as far as we could tell. They were completely unresponsive, even once we'd gotten them to a more amicable state. I dreaded to think the internal damage they'd sustained. Beth must have been in front of Sophie, their body protecting her from the worst of the blast - but they'd taken a direct hit.

From a safe distance, Rojjel had poked at the discarded mess of devices that had caused all this, glowing faintly among the scrap.

"This was a trap." Rojjel advised us darkly. "We always scan for any forms of weaponry before we land; this was designed to avoid our scanners. This would have had to have been done recently, far more recently than the facility was functional."

I looked tiredly up at him, hands on Sophie's shoulders as she kneeled beside Beth's comatose form.

"Alright, I've done all I can for now." Mickey said, wiping sweat from his tendrils. "We need to get them to one of the med stations as soon as possible."

"Yes, we do." I said, then glanced at Sophie, and it only now registered that she had not moved since Beth had passed out, but remained there still, staring, hands clutching at her best friend's limp ones. Her face was frozen in grief.

I softly placed my hand on her shoulder. "Sophie? We have to move now." I didn't think she even heard me, eyes fixed somewhere the rest of us couldn't perceive.

I turned my head and the three of us exchanged thoughtful looks. After a moment I said, "Mickey, Rojjel, take Beth back to the ship." My voice almost failed me. Mickey locked gaze with me for a second and at an imperceptible nod he moved forward, gently taking hold of Beth's shoulders while Rojjel carried them from the other end. I carefully pried Sophie's hands from theirs. She still didn't move.

The others started to head back toward the base, to where the ship was parked just beyond the gate, but Mickey looked back in concern at where Sophie and I knelt, at the husk of his friend. I waved him onwards and turned my attention to Sophie as they left.

"Come on Sophie, we really have to go." I felt emptied of everything as I nudged her again, only half-heartedly trying to urge her to move. I tried to imagine the depths of what she was feeling right now; she'd watched too many friends die in her life, I knew she was terrified that she was about to lose Beth as well, no matter what Mickey said. I didn't know how to comfort her.

We were both lost, and the others so far from us, when I became aware, as if from a vision of the past, of a craft descending towards us from the sky. Alarm rang through my being, and I jumped up, shaking Sophie violently.

"Sophie! It's them, come on come on come on. We can't be here, we have to run. Sophie!"

Frantic energy coursed within me. Sophie gasped as if emerging from underwater. Her eyes still distant, I dragged her to her feet.

The scout ship had landed mere metres from us. I pulled her along with me, completely disoriented, as Weraynian soldiers began to pour out, overwhelming us.

I knew we wouldn't outrun them so I turned to defend us. Sophie reached for her gun, still in a daze.

The first line of Weraynians shot at us, trying to incapacitate us. I summoned all my concentration to combat the bolt of energy that raced at us and in a burst of light was flung backwards twenty metres, ripped from Sophie's side.

I pulled myself up and watched, horror struck as the swarm encompassed my girlfriend. She was fighting back, her body responding finally to threat. "Abi! Abi!" She yelled and then fell silent.

I watched her crumple in their grip and stumbled further backwards, dodging attacks only by instinct. The Weraynians started to move toward me, blocking Sophie from sight and I ran for my life, surviving by bare inches.

The low thrum of our ship sounded in my ear range, and I glanced up to see it moving in my direction, the boarding ramp still extended. Rojjel stood on the platform, arm extended and shaking. I ran to meet the ship, and as it got close I grabbed his hand and swung myself up, up, almost failing. But in a final moment of agility I succeeded, and bare feet against metal sounded as I landed beside the Halapatovian, panting. I turned and stared back at the Weraynian force as we stuttered then began to ascend. I screamed Sophie's name, barely coherent against the rushing air.

What had been the point of all this, of anything?

I was pulled into the ship so the entry could close and I sunk to the floor as Sophie was taken away, away, away.

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