The tape stopped there, giving way to a painful ear-piercing noise, and then the recording stopped. I groaned, falling to the floor as my ears rang for brief moments after. I soon felt Luc's hands on my face as he let out a distressed noise. I'm not sure how he had gotten to me so quickly but I was grateful, when I opened my eyes I was met with his — huge beautiful pupils staring down into mine. I smiled a bit, looking down at the device in my hand that was now displaying an error message. Luc snarled at it, but I shook my head at him.

"Jessie, okay," I said, and he seemed the call down. The feathers on his neck and shoulders settled as he helped me get up.

The colony never got a proper explanation about what caused the crash beyond there being an ionic storm. This complicated things. The flight and navigation crew had done what they had been supposed to be doing by attempting to manually fly the starship during the ionic storm, but they had been disturbed — they hadn't been concentrating. The military had tried to start a fucking coup in the middle of a fucking emergency.

Fuck.

Well, they had sort of got what they wanted. All diplomats on the starship didn't make it. It had been a confusing stat because they all lived in different sections of the ship, but knowing now why they had all coincidentally been at the lobby at the same time, it all made sense. The person who started the coup didn't survive, but the military quickly filled the governing-sized hole left behind in the chaos regardless.

"Jessie?"

Luc's voice pulled me out of my thoughts. I looked up at his worried gaze, and then back at the device in my hand. The error message was still flickering, but there was even more recorded data after this, and before this. It was likely jammed — possibly data corrupted. I shifted the weight of it to one hand, before pulling my backpack off my shoulders.

I knew there wasn't exactly a point in keeping it.

What exactly could I do? Walk into the main settlement and declare that the people currently running the colony had doomed us in the first place. How would that go down? I'd get shot before I made it past the parameter...

"I'm done," I mumbled, shoving the device into my bag before zipping it up. I looked at Luc again, taking his hand. He seemed to understand that I was done with this place and gathered me into his arms. He walked out of the main command center, and then through the dark corridors, looking upwards for any hole to exit from, and when he did he pushed against the metal floor with enough force to throw us into the air past the hole in the ceiling, and soon we were flying again, continuing on our way to Luc's alternate home.