Lilly and Durian return to Saffron about an hour after Imogen’s call. Lilly figures that is long enough for whatever her partner needed to do, like maybe another call to Aiden. She opens the ship, and they walk right up the ramp. They find Imogen sitting on a crate fixing her braid and some strange marine leaning against the wall by the science station.
“Hey, Imogen. Oh! Hey, sorry!” Durian blurts out.
“Do you need more time?” Lilly asks, taking in the situation. Imogen shakes her head.
“Is that your zerg?” Durian whispers to Lilly.
She turns to Imogen and mouths, “Snowball?” The marine is looking around much like the curious young changeling does.
Imogen joins them over by the entryway and says to Lilly, “Frank’s here related to the thing that we’re going to do for Kate.” She hopes Lilly will understand that she is talking about the adjutant with anti-Mengsk information on it. Durian was not part of that earlier discussion, and Imogen does not know how he would handle such news.
“Okay, well, uh, goodnight,” Durian says. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”
Lilly gives him a kiss. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yes, shipping out 0700,” he says to confirm, then heads off.
Once the door is closed, Imogen says, “Heading out at 0700?”
At this point, Lilly realizes she probably did not tell Imogen anything about her mission planning with Durian. “Oh! Didn’t I tell you? We’re going to go down to the planet tomorrow at seven.”
“Durian’s coming?” Imogen thought he was just going to arrange clearance for Saffron.
“Yeah,” Lilly confirms.
“I thought you wouldn’t want him to know about the adjutant.”
“He knows about the adjutant,” Lilly admits.
“And what does Mr. Pro-Dominion think of it?!” Imogen is not sure Durian could handle a recording of Mengsk saying he would let the whole sector burn.
“He’s going to help,” Lilly says with a small smile. Durian was so understanding about her Confederate past.
“Wow. Okay. I guess you two are pretty close now, then.” Lilly answers with a broad grin. Imogen glances over her shoulder to check on Frank and then tells Lilly, “Frank’s the one who found it, the one I was telling you and Kate about yesterday.”
“He found it?” Lilly asks, alarmed that her secrets may have already been spread.
“Aye! I told you I heard the recording.”
“Well? What was on it?!”
“It’s a recording of Mengsk ordering the abandonment of Sarah Kerrigan and her regiment and admitting to setting the zerg on Tarsonis.”
“Oh! That adjutant.” Lilly now realizes they are talking about two different things. “I forgot about that one. No, Durian doesn’t know about that one.”
“What adjutant does he know about then?”
“Mine.”
“Ooooh. Okay. So Durian’s helping you look for that one. Well, good news: they’re both almost in the same place. The one that Frank found is in a train a little ways up the tracks, and it’s stuck under a bit of a landslide. It sounds like it’s probably under guard by Captain Hawke’s folks. It would be easy to accomplish both things at the same time, except for the fact that Durian’s not going to be onboard with this.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Lilly says. He handled her past very well, which really surprised her.
“You think Durian would be willing to do an action against Dominion troops? Or that it could be framed in a way that would make it more palatable to him?”
Lilly shrugs. “I told him about Snowball.”
“Oh, well if he’s okay with your pet…”
“He thinks we should let him loose when we get down planetside. It’s worth a try, I guess.”
“That’s what we did before,” Imogen points out. “Snowball always comes back. He knows where his candy is stored.”
“Durian took it all pretty well. I think he’ll be cool,” Lilly insists.
“Okay, well, I have more than just this adjutant, though,” Imogen says. “Frank’s kind of… unstable right now.”
“I’m fine!” Frank blurts out. His eyes settle on Lilly. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“Unstable? Did he hurt you?”
“No. No, no, no.” Imogen hems and haws a bit and then decides to just come out and say this bluntly. “He was put through resocialization processing last night.”
Lilly’s memories of what she was like fresh off the resoc block are hazy. She cracks her neck and heads over to the fridge. This Frank guy looks anxious, jumping at the slightest noise.
“And I’ve taken some steps towards trying to undo it,” Imogen admits. “So, aye. It’s going very well,” she adds glumly. “Not as well as I had hoped.”
Lilly pulls out two beers. She cracks one open for herself and holds the other out to Frank. “I’m Lilly,” she says.
Frank snatches the beer. “I think I’m Frank,” he replies, but then corrects himself, “I think I’m Frankincense.” Then a torrent of words flows forth. “I have to stop Captain Hawke. From whatever. She can’t… she can’t be trusted. She does bad things. But I do bad things sometimes, too.”
Lilly nods. “Yeah, we all do.” It’s why we get resocialized, Lilly thinks, but she does not say it. Rather, she trots out Durian’s words from earlier. “It doesn’t matter who you were, it’s who you are now.” She finishes her beer and looks over at Imogen. “You good?”
“Aye, we’re fine,” Imogen says, and Lilly heads to bed.
Imogen keeps vigil with Frank, unwilling to let him stay up all night alone. She does not want to risk him leaving the ship or having some delayed and even worse reaction to the terrazine. It is a long, sleepless night, not the best way to spend the eve of a mission against a ghost on a zerg-infested world.
Fin