Sarah is fiddling with a flamesuit, trying to boost the emergency storage capacity. She's been working on it on and off for the past year - the ship loses a few scavengers to suit-related flame exhaustion every year, and if the suits just had a bit of a larger reserve to work from... 

A puff of mist diffusing into the room's aura notifies her of her guest, and she looks up to find Angela breathing out a thick stream of it in the middle of the room. The Commander has never been very good at efficient porting, Sarah knows, always using more mist than necessary (just in case) and ending up shunting it to her lungs as a result. At least she figured out how to deal with it without hacking up said lungs. The properties of mist flames had made it an unpleasant sight. 

"Why the port, Commander?" She asks midly, setting the flamecore down on her desk. 

"Time to go," Angela tells her, then pausing to cough out the last few tendrils of mist. Clearing her throat, she continues, "The Sparrow's ready?" 

Startled, Sarah stands, "What, now? What happened?" The original plan had them leaving in two weeks, "There's nothing wrong with her that I can see, but there's no knowing for sure until we take her out. That's why we were going to do that test flight." Still, she starts packing up the few projects she has out, sticking them in her work cases - she's always ready to move, being a mechanic on the Clam means you live wherever the ship needs you.

"Well, we're going to have to skip it," Angela says, ignoring the question. The very fact that they're leaving is enough insight into the lives of her and her siblings, frankly Sarah has no need to know exactly what their father has done to drive them away. 

"The Lily is only a little farther than it would be in two weeks," she tells Sarah, striding over to her workbench to help her pack, "Gerault is on scanners, he won't notice anything if I tell him not to. I've already alerted Arthur, he's covering the Lily's scanners; the kids are at the Sparrowdock, they're all packed - we're as ready as we can be." 

Packing up the last loose scrap, she slings a bag over her shoulder and picks one up in her left hand, before reaching out to offer Sarah her other hand for the port. When she takes it, she gathers up her mist, covers the two of them with a shroud of it, and moves.

Gabriele glances up at the small explosion of mist that heralds Gina's entrance. He feels Nido stir in his lap, his head lifting from his arm to check who's arriving before he lays it back down again. Gabriele lifts his youngest brother up into his arms as he gets up to greet his sister, Xandro hopping down from the crate he was sitting on at his left. 

"We can go, then?" He assumes, reaching out to take one of the four large bags Sarah is carrying in his non-occupied arm. Xandro had helped him pack up their own things while Gina was porting around alerting everyone who is in on their plans.

"Yes," the Commander agrees, "Let's get Sarah packed up and then get the Sparrow running, our departure window closes in an hour." 

Sparrows looked like long cylinders with flat bottoms, a wide rim extending all around the middle of it. The door opened downwards from the both port and starboard sides, allowing easier evacuation in emergencies - the Sparrows were intended for exploration as well as ship-to-ship movement. They could hold up to six people with fair comfort, with six bunks in a room at the back, but could hold up to twenty temporarily before the oxygen scrubbers became overburdened. 

The five of them troop up the stairs onto the small ship, setting Sarah's bags down inside the bunkroom and continuing into the cockpit. Gabriele sets Nido down in a chair and buckles him up while the others all take their seats, and Sarah sets her hand down on the handprint scanner in the center of the controls and feeds a stream of Lightning into them, waking the ship. 

She goes through the startup sequence one-handed while she straps herself into the pilot's seat, gesturing to Angela to key herself into the scanner as well so she can take over if there's an emergency. 

She does so, seals the Sparrows doors, and then contacts Gerault.

"Sir?" Gerault's voice sounds from her bracer.

"We're ready, open Dock 12," she tells him.

"Sir," he confirms, and the wall before the Sparrow shudders and starts to pull apart. 

Once they're all the way open, she disengages the Sparrow's magnetic locks and beings slowly, carefully guiding her out of the Sparrowdock, and out into space. 

Tense, she guides them further from the Clam, the giant cityship intimidating in its size and vastly superior weaponry - not that she believes the Admiral would order the Sparrow shot down, but the tractor beams were still a threat. She can't see the other ships in the fleet with the naked eye, with the distance and the dark colour scheme of the Titan Fleet, but they register on the scanners. The closest ship to them (aside from the Clam) is the Tridente, then the Dagger, and finally their destination, the Black Lily - all in different directions, of course. She turns the ship towards the Lily and brings their speed up as much as is safe; at this speed, they should reach it in five hours. 

"There," she murmurs, relieved. She leans back and glances to the Commander, "Five hours, Sir," she tells her. She turns to look at her brothers, "Don't leave the seats, please," she tells them, "I can't be sure if this will be a smooth ride all throughout, so it's safer if you stay strapped in unless you need to use the facilities." 

Angela nods, glancing back as well. Nido is asleep, and Gabriele and Xandro have their bracers on, setting up some kind of cooperative game to keep themselves occupied. Angela sets her visor to keep an eye on the Clam's security feed, settling in for a long ride. 

In an alcove near the Black Lily's Sparrowdocks, Arthur flips through his deck, absently setting out the cards for a round of solitaire. Facing him his visor sits, hooked up to a maintenance box on the wall, running a little mist-aided program to make a certain ship invisible to the Lily's scanners. He's had it up and running for about six hours now, since Angela had contacted him. He knows the Clam Sparrow should be arriving any minute, if all went well, but there's no use worrying. He sets a red seven on a black eight and hums to himself. 

Moments later, his visor lets out a soft chirp, and he glances up to check the holographic display. Hurriedly he leaps to his feet, pulls his cards together and pockets them, reaches out to detach the visor and settle it over his right eye, and heads out into the corridor. A few turns later finds him outside the Sparrowdocks, and he lets himself in and leans against the inside wall to watch the doors to bay twelve, keeping an eye on the Lily's security feed on his visor. 

With both of them on the case, nothing will happen on either ship that one of them won't know about! 

The trip goes smoothly. They arrive just after the five hour mark, sliding into the Lily's Sparrowdock without incident. While Sarah shuts the shuttle down, Angela gets out of her seat to stretch, and then kneels down in front of Xandro and unbuckles him. Once he's free, she carefully lifts him into her arms; it's been a hell of a day, and she woke her brothers to leave in the middle of the night.  

He stirs, cracking his eyelids open to see who is carrying him. 

"Gina?" He mumbles into her shoulder. He reaches out with his flames to get a read of their surroundings, colliding with the aura of the Lily's soul. The foreign sensation brings him to full wakefulness. 

"Let me down, I can walk," he demands, tapping Gina's arm. 

"Alright, no need to hit me," she snorts, setting him on his feet. She leads him into the bunkroom to pick up some of the bags, then heads out of the open Sparrow doors. 

Gabriele carries the dozing Nido and their bags behind them, trailing Sarah out into the main hangar of the Sparrowdock. 

Where Arthur is waiting.

He pushes off the wall to greet them, giving a lazy hybrid of a salute and a wave. "You made it," he says, "That's just great. If we could maybe hurry it along, though? She's waiting for you, and I'd really like to get some sleep before my shift, which is in four hours, just by the way." 

"Thanks for your help, Arthur," Angela says, ignoring the majority of the snark, "Just lead us to her, and you can go." 

With a sarcastic bow, Arthur does as asked, leading them out of the Hangar and into the maze of hallways. 

"You didn't have any trouble, did you?" He asks as they enter an elevator, trying to push back the silence, "You're two weeks early," he adds, "We could have been better prepared."

"Nothing went wrong," Angela tells him, eyebrow ticking. 

"Ah... huh. Alright. Why did you jump the gun, anyway? We had a timetable." 

"Not really your business, is it," Xandro butts in, eyeing him with hostility. 

"Xan," Gabriele sighs. He gives Arthur an apologetic look, "Our father was being... Less forgiving than we would have preferred." 

"If by less forgiving you mean, 'a bastard of epic proportions', then you might be getting somewhere." He mutters.