Chương 32: LOG-029.

Shit shit shit!

"What now!?" Vermilion's panicked voice echoed in my ears, but it wasn't quite enough to distract me, considering the plethora of other rather distinct issues I had to deal with. My fingers continued to fly across the simplistic control interface affixed to the Roaming Eye's primary navigation console, even as I warily glanced out the corner of my eye, taking in the view of several Avian ships beginning to jump into the Warp.

"Elements of both fleets are beginning to tangle together, lots of violent energy flying around that we're hopefully avoiding-I think we have a different problem though." I resisted the urge to bite my lip as a small frigate sized vessel continued to tail behind us, despite the utter chaos erupting just behind it.

If our stolen ride's sensors were to be believed, the homeships of the Avian fleet had presumably finished fueling up, considering they were practically racing away from the abandoned freighter they'd been latched to, the surviving combat vessels that weren't busy getting utterly thrashed by Imperial warships hot on their metaphorical heels. Which meant we were on an even stricter time limit than before.

Not too much of a problem, I just needed to continue to evade our annoyingly persistant pursuer and figure out which of the destinations present on the FTL registry aboard this old thing meant Earth. No biggie. No biggie at all! Oh Stars we were gonna die here.

"They're getting closer!" A low snarl threatened to slip loose as I directed the Roaming Eye to veer left, bringing us into a sharp arc that the far larger frigate struggled to replicate.

"Just give me a minute, I've nearly got it!" Earth, Earth, Earth. Where the fuck was Earth? Sort by sector, what sector? Useless. But I was going about this the wrong way, wasn't I? There was a far simpler solution to this. Sort by Diamond." Viridian?" One result, far, far further away than any other destination, and practically buried in various warning glyphs.

"Viridian!" Off limits. Dangerous. Abandoned. Do not approach. Exactly what I needed- Stolen novel; please report.

"VIRIDIAN!"

"WHAT!?" I'd whirled around to face my fellow Pearl, only to follow her shaking finger to one of the secondary display screens. The freighter, far behind us now, was beginning to crackle violently. Visible arcs of golden lightning danced across its form, intensifying and illuminating the surrounding darkness as several Imperial vessels surrounded it.

Even further away, the last surviving spear-ships belonging to our temporary organic contacts disappeared with the signature flashes of large vessels entering Warp space. If I had a heart, it likely would have stopped in that moment. But I was a Gem, and had been for years. So instead of keeling over, my hand slammed down on the control interface instead, palm slapping against the touch screen-esque device and confirming our oh so distant destination. An entire galaxy away, to be precise.

At the very least we were on the closest edge we could reasonably get when it came to facing it. Unfortunately, preparing a Warp jump to an entirely separate galaxy wasn't exactly a low intensity process. The sound of the Roaming Eye's drive core beginning to spool up thundered in my ears, even as my eyes remained fixed to the image of the steadily erupting freighter. Space was utterly silent, this was an objective fact.

Yet my racing mind more than made up for that particular fact, imagining the shattering, rumbling sound as light burst forth from the glorified fuel tanker. The gargantuan vessel's hull finally gave up, the entire thing cracking open like a fucking shaken soda can, and things only really devolved from there.

A veritable supernova of golden light erupted from the freighter as space around the newborn star broke, reality itself visibly tearing apart, all while almost continent sized tongues of living energy crackled across space, impacting with the swarm of smaller ships around it and obliterating several of the less sturdy ones (the larger cruisers and battleship had still been in the process of catching up, and thus were spared the brunt of the cataclysmic effect) still caught in the blast radius in a spectacularly violent dance of molten metal and flashing energy, all while an almost brilliantly white wave of force seemed to push out as a result of the initial blast.

The positive of this was that the frigate, still steadfastly chasing behind us, was caught near the edge of the wave, a loose arc of lightning slamming into and effectively slagging its engines, sending the starship into a violent spiral, even as its form shielded us from the brunt of the spreading energy.

The negative was that the Roaming Eye began to rattle so hard that I damn near instantly lost my footing, barely catching myself against the navigation console and wincing as Vermilion fell against the chair behind me with a cry of pain. That horrid white force continued to push forward. Closer, closer, the edges of it just about ready to impact with our own craft.

Then the light tone of a successful FTL charge sounded out, and reality distorted as our reappropriated ship's gravity drive effectively slung us through the now significantly thinner fabric of spacetime. The laws of speed became more of a suggestion as a result, even as we both desperately clung to anything we could, trying to ride out the shaking. My eyes closed tightly as that terrifying rattling feeling only seemed to increase, until the entire damned hull was effectively vibrating around us.

Some part of me wanted to reach for Vermilion, for anyone, before I was scattered into countless pieces stretched throughout an obscene length of space. The rest of me focused on just hugging the console I was using for support as hard as possible, even as a pathetic whimper managed to escape my mouth. Then? It all stopped.

I remained in my curled up ball of a pose for a few moments after the fact, knees on the ground and arms desperately grasping the control interface as if it were my only lifeline, before finally gaining the courage to finally open my eyes. A perfectly intact Roaming Eye bridge greeted me, alongside the immediately fantastical view of an uncountable number of stars and other bright obstacles whizzing past the primary view screen.

Slowly getting back up on shaky legs, I wobbled my way over to an exhausted looking Vermilion, collapsing next to the crimson Pearl and tightly wrapping my arms around her, prompting a quiet yelp.

"Is... is it over?" Oh but Stars if the poor thing didn't sound exactly as tired as I felt in that moment.

"I think so." A moment or two passed like that, as I hugged my Batchmate perhaps just a little desperately, before I finally felt an identical set of arms to my own wrap around my lightform to embrace me in turn. I sniffled. She sniffled. We both continued to hug each other, sniffling quietly as we slowly comprehended the fact that we'd apparently made it by the skin of our Stars damned teeth. And after all of that, well...

it was all we both could really do, two Pearls desperately holding on to each other as the waterworks inevitably started, interspersed with the occasional manic laughter of those who'd fully expected to die a terrible, violent death, and then suddenly hadn't. The subsequent glow of fusion that came along with it really shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, considering the... very much heated emotions attached to that particular situation. Oh well.

Maybe Honey Lemon would be able to handle the excess of feelings better than the two of us could on our own.