Breathe Deep

Sky

Keith sighed thoughtfully, the light of the star maps playing several different shades of red across the features of his face as he glowered. What was their game? There had to be some reason. He just had to find it.

"Surveillance?" The tone in Kolivan's question seemed curious, but not pressingly so.

"Yes, Sir." The agent nodded curtly, "We caught a transmission from the ship while we were scouting in the area. We figured they were passing through the quadrant, but when they didn't leave after a while, we started to wonder. We've kept an eye on them since."

Keith's brows furrowed much more pensively than Kolivan's seemed to. The Blade of Marmora recon team had intercepted a transmission and managed to pinpoint the location of the command ship just a few thousand leagues from the atmosphere of a planet called Vartex. A command ship sitting cloaked in the middle of the Out Reaches? Why?

"And that was weeks ago? Has there been any other transmission?"

"No, Sir." The subordinate looked to the smaller figure at Kolivan's side, "It's been complete radio silence since then. Not even scout movement."

"Are they waiting for something?"

"It's hard to say, Sir." The agent shook his head.

"We'll keep it in mind. Thank you for your report." Kolivan waved him off, but not before giving orders of reassignment for the agent's team.

Keith looked at the Galran with some slight surpise, "You're reassigning them? But what about the Galran command ship?"

Kolivan turned back to the console and began inputting coordinates of the ship into the database of Galra deployments. "We have better things to use our resources for than babysit one ship that's been doing nothing for nearly two months."

"But what if it's something we can't ignore?" The fact that the leader of the Blade of Marmora seemed to just shrug off this information pricked at Keith a bit, "Kolivan, what if they know something?"

"Keith, they know a lot of things." He never turned to look at his faction counterpart, "But we need to figure out which things they know that are going to affect us and the rest of the universe in a more urgent nature. This isn't one of those things."

Not yet... Keith thought dejectedly.

He felt very different about the situation.

Some home worlds Keith had come across in his travels with The Blade of Marmora and the Voltron Team had been a little sparse on records. But with a bit of effort from within the group, Marmora always managed to elucidate a bit more on the unknowns before they would be stepping foot on any surface, should it ever be deemed necessary; which had occurred from time to time.

Vartex, however, seemed almost non-existent. They would have deemed it a completely unknown world, but what forms of records they could find did state that it had once been known to someone in the past. But what would the Galra Empire want with it now? Maybe they wanted to use the planet as a foothold outside of possible Resistance detection? But, if that were the case, why hadn't they? The Galra Empire wasn't known for it's patience when it came to taking a planet. Even Lotor's approach was 'shoot first, friends later'. What was the difference with Vartex? And why couldn't anymore information be found on the planet? Was it even still inhabited by anyone? That should make setting up a base of operations a complete snap. And yet...

Keith rubbed his eyes with a hand, as though it would help smooth some of the kinks in his thought process. He sighed deeply again and crossed his arms over his chest as he stared at that blinking red dot in the middle of a grid square, next to a cerulean orb. His eyes narrowed as his lips pursed. Perhaps, if he concentrated enough he could bore into the walls of the ship that pixel represented, straight into the mind of the captain and see every answer he sought. Are you waiting for someone? Are you dead in the water? Are you deserting? You can't be. Not while still communicating with the Empire – even as rarely as you are.