Speed Demons

Part 20

Percy

The Paladins and I were on our way back to the ruins of Olkarion. Katie... hadn't taken it well. I sat with her the entire way back. "Y'know," I started, over the comms in case anyone else needed to hear. "My people have this concept. Most myths take place in the past, or even the present. But Ragnarok takes place in the future."

"Great," Keith sighed sarcastically. "This story again. Hey Percy, make sure you don't forget the details!"

I rolled my eyes, "Ragnarok is the prophesized end of the world. But it isn't portrayed as an entirely bad thing. Almost the entirety of the gods die along with humanity and everyone else that doesn't fall under those two categories, but afterwards, the world remains with just enough rubble left to start again and do it better this time. The old makes way for the new."

"Like a volcano," Keith clarified, "or a Weblum."

Katie raised an eyebrow, "Sounds scary." She said, "Your people go through their entire lives believing that it's all for nothing?"

I sighed, "Did the Olkari exist for nothing?"

"No!" She said, "Of course not!"

"The Olkari were incredibly knowledgeable about the world they lived in," I told her. "They must have known theirs would come to an end, but they never gave up. And Altea never gave up. So we can't give up. Then it really was for nothing."

It was quiet for a few seconds. "You heard the man!" Lance exclaimed, "Let's get back to work!"

"Atlas, come in!" Keith called, and Coran and Shiro appeared on a screen. "We're on our way back. Rendezvous at the coordination I'm sending you."

A few minutes later, we received a transmission to meet up on a different planet. I raised an eyebrow. The planet was even farther from the Atlas than the coordinates Keith sent were. It was made of mostly volcanoes, high levels of CO2 and very little Oxygen. "We'll need to use wear our helmets if we want to go out there," Katie reported.

"I'm not going out there," Hunk pouted.

"Guys look!" Keith said, "It's the Atlas! Shiro, I've got visual."

The Atlas began moving towards us. It suddenly stopped, and suddenly in its place was a Galra Cruiser! It activated the tractor beam, only instead of pulling the lions up, it pushed them down. "I can't move!" Lance reported. The other paladins each responded with their own agreement that the lions were pinned down.

"We need to get out of here!" Keith said, "We have to go on foot."

We ran out of the lions and into the woods. "Somethings coming," I said, "A drone of some kind. It's really fast. Hide!"

We hid behind randomly strewn logs and fallen trees when the drone arrived. We had activated a kind of virus in the drone so that it simply wouldn't notice us. It hadn't worked. It was somehow able to track our suits the same way we track each other. "Shit," I cursed after we had dispatched the drone. "Whoever sent that drone must have broken the encryption in our suits."

"Is there a way we can upgrade the encryption somehow?" Alura asked me, "We won't survive here for long without our armour."

I laughed mirthlessly, "Not unless one of you has the Pleiades in your back pocket."

Katie rolled her eyes, but no one else seemed to understand. "NASA's supercomputer," she explained.

Alura sighed, "The bayards work on the same encryption, they can track those too." She said, "I guess our only choice is to abandon them both. That leaves us defenceless."