The thought of facing a dragon on the field of battle would be terrifying to Devika.

The though of pitting herself against one in a battle of words, though, is even scarier.

”I don’t think there’s anything I could tell you that a dragon couldn’t explain away.”

    "She's hard to lie to, even for them - they're not so alien that she can't sense their emotions, and she'll be looking for outside proof, too, not just at what they tell her. And if she really can't be sure that way, she has precognition, too."

"All these powers..." (Devika is not even 100% on what 'precognition' even means. It's the sort of word you'd only ever see spoken in a work of fiction or in the National Opera and, to the best of her recollection, she did not read a whole lot of books growing up? But it sounds pretty impressive.) "...if you discovered the dragons were lying to you, could you thwart them? Just you, against them and all their holdings?"

She's pretty sure that her mission parameters were assigned under the assumption that their primary objective could not escape the Draco Territories without assistance. If she could, that would change the tactical situation quite a bit.

    "Precognition is seeing the future; that's another one that's difficult for her. Whether she could thwart them - she doesn't know their capabilities; she's not sure. If they don't have anything too much more advanced than you do, she could probably defeat one, though she might not try it right away. She could definitely make a nuisance of herself, especially with some time to prepare."

"The general consensus is that dragons are a lot more dangerous than SLAYERs, mostly because they think too fast for most human pilots to keep up with. But SLAYERs have killed dragons before." (Emotion Read: Determination, Defiance, Pride.) "Dragons are formidable, but not untouchable."

    "It sounds like she would have a fair chance, then."

"Alright. I guess that's my endgame, then. Wait for you to see the truth, trust that you can fight your way free once you do, and then give you a ride back to safety afterward--either on this SLAYER, or on any Draco craft I can seize hold of."

Well. That plan still vaguely resembles her original mission objectives.

It'll have to do.

    "That's reasonable. We should figure out what to tell Culamine about you; keep in mind that if it turns out she's right, you might have to live with it indefinitely."

"I'm aware that my freedom's on the line here, yes."

"What is there to tell about me, really? I'm a SLAYER pilot. I'm loyal to humanity. I have two good friends--my StratCom, and the girl I bunked with at the Pilot Academy--and no other interpersonal attachments. I was almost kidnapped by secessionists when just a dozen decacycles old, and badly injured in the process. I do not like secessionists. I do not like dragons."

    "What we need is a story about why you're here, one that doesn't tip Culamine off that Deskyl is suspicious of her. She's not assuming that Culamine won't figure it out eventually, but the longer she has before that happens, the more untainted evidence she can collect. And it's especially important right now in particular, while there's no clear path for where she'll go next; it'll be harder for her to notice if Culamine sends her someplace deceptive without knowing that there was someplace else she was going to go instead. Not that she won't be on alert, but we want things stacked in our favor as much as possible."

“That makes sense.”

Devika is glad that the primary objective is taking this seriously, and she is glad that the two other-universe-persons are so... clever.

Finally, some good news in this whole mess.

”Just give me a minute to think...”

Deskyl nods, and waits patiently.

“Tell them you hijacked the transport. That I doubled-back to stop you. That you disabled me and, rather than leave me to die in a plasma bloom, you then hauled my SLAYER back here.”

She does not at all like where this is going: her, defenseless and beaten, in a Draco holding cell. But the metal woman is right: the more believable the story, the more likely the mission is to pan out right.

Speaking of verisimilitude, there’s one more detail they’d need to get right and the thought of it makes her cringe.

“You already wrecked my piston-sword. We’d only have to damage my SLAYER a little more to make my capture believable.”

Deskyl winces when Devika thinks of disabling her SLAYER, but nods when DZ translates her words.

    "There really wasn't any chance you'd be able to keep it, anyway, unfortunately. All right."

Devika reaches back and ejects the uplink cable from her spine, so that she at least won’t have to feel it when Deskyl mangles her SLAYER.

“Make it quick.”

She does - a few precisely-aimed fragments to the thrusters, and a quick barrage of smaller ones that do only superficial damage, to simulate the effect of not being able to maneuver for a little while.

    "Done. She's sorry, Ma'am."

She reconnects.

"Alright. Let's go meet your dragon."

It's not much further to the approximate stretch of debris that Procyon Station used to occupy.

Navigating through an environment like this is, of course, a bit more challenging than charting a course through a traditional planetary system. While most the the disk has a roughly even rate of rotation--performing a full orbit around the system's dwarf star in what the humans of Deskyl's home galaxy would call 36 days--enough of the debris deviates from that norm to make finding steady landmarks quite difficult.

Complicating things further, Procyon Station is no longer emitting radio transmissions of any sort. They have to hunt for it the same way they would for any other inert chunk of stellar flotsam.

Eventually, though, they find it. Or, at least, they find a lump of near-uniform grey sludge that approximately resembles Procyon Station in mass and volume.

"Don't get too close. The nanocontaminant is probably still active."

- wow. Yeah, she's not getting close to that.

She settles in to meditate, a fraction of her attention on keeping her ships safe, the rest searching for any sign of life outside them.

There are a few scattered lifesigns in the vague vicinity.

Most of them radiate terror.

One of them radiates determination.

    "There are some people still alive out there, we're going to go get them. I'll need to go get the pilot again, do you have any questions before I go?"

Devika shakes her head.

DZ gets Reva, and they head out, keeping Devika's SLAYER close enough to shield. They head for the determined one, first; Deskyl will be able to tell whether it's Shreya or not with a little more proximity.

It's Shreya.

Her SLAYER's badly damaged--armor torn open in a dozen places, missile rack wrenched halfway loose from its shoulder housing, left leg missing entirely below the knee--but she remains mobile.

She has a half dozen of Procyon Station's escape pods in her possession: one under each arm, and two trailing from the grappling tethers on each of her hips.

Her primary sensor array swivels in the Gamma Savior's direction as Deskyl makes her approach.