When they rush aboard Saffron, Narud immediately demands of Lilly that they take off. “Can’t. Imogen’s not back yet,” Lilly says, taking in the empty control room.
“Why? Who’s Imogen? What, is she the pilot?”
“I’m the pilot,” Lilly tells the scientist.
“If you can fly, then let’s go! The zerg are coming!”
Lilly’s voice takes on a firmer tone. “We’re waiting for Imogen.”
“Why!?” Narud asks frantically.
Lilly is dumbfounded. Stupid scientists. “Because she’s my partner,” she bites out word by word.
“Okay, okay!” Narud throws his hands up defensively. “I didn’t know. I asked who she was and you didn’t tell me,” he points out.
“Do you just leave your friends on planets when zerg are coming?!” she shoots back at him.
“I don’t have many friends left,” he confesses, more somber now. “They were all on a planet when the zerg came.”
“Understood.” As a soldier, Lilly has been through similar things herself, even if she does not fully remember them.
Narud lets out a breath. “So how long do we have until the zerg get here?”
Lilly glances over at the sensor station, where the exterior camera is still streaming just a partially cloudy blue sky. “Unknown unknown, sir,” she reports.
And that is when Narud notices Sheila at the science station. “The zerg are already here! Shoot it! Shoot it!”
“Don’t touch it!” Lilly cautions him, though he has plastered himself against the opposite wall, as far from the mound of zerg matter as he can get. “It’s not alive,” she assures him. Sheila contradicts her by belching out a puff of foul-smelling fumes. Narud continues to panic, and Lilly tells him it is a science experiment, in a vain attempt to shut him up.
Narud keeps talking, but at least it involves less panicked shouting than before. He latches onto the science topic and starts peppering her with questions about what results her experiments have yielded. Lilly pulls up the zerg database she recovered from Tarsonis and gestures for him to make himself comfortable at the computer terminal. He gushes over all the data available. “Who was this Colonel Washington?” he mutters. “They’re brilliant—such deductions!” Lilly smiles to herself, but she does not say anything. “You know, I had read some work by L. Washington, but never got to meet the person…”
With Narud thus occupied, Lilly decides to call Imogen and check on her status. Her partner gasps out a hello, and Lilly asks, “What’s your status?”
Punctuated by puffs of breath, Imogen responds, “Oh, you’re back above ground—that’s great! I got all the things. We can go as soon as I get there.”
Lilly is just waiting around on the ship, bored. If Imogen needs help, she would much rather go do that. However, Imogen’s priority is for Lilly to run a sensor sweep and check on the approaching swarm. Unlike Narud, though, Imogen is hoping their arrival is imminent. “Neiman won’t be taking off anytime soon, so if my brother doesn’t show up, he may come looking for his things,” she tells Lilly.
“Understood.” Lilly follows orders and pulls up the sensors. With the current atmospheric interference, she is not able to get a vector on Aiden’s forces. However, she does pick up an extra terran lifesign that does not bode well. “Neiman’s almost back to his ship,” she warns her partner.
“All right, I’ll pick up the pace,” Imogen gasps out. Her arms are burning from the weight of everything she is lugging, and the effort of it all is not doing her injured head any favors. “If Saffron is secure, come meet me between the ships. This stuff is too heavy for me to carry by myself.”
Lilly is loath to leave Narud unattended at the ship; he might try to take off without them. She orders him to come with her, but he would much rather continue annotating the research papers in her database. “The computer’s going to shut down when I leave, so you might as well come,” she tries, though she does not think her RFID tag needs to be in proximity to the system for it to work.
“Oh, no no, I’ve disabled that. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine here.”
Lilly blinks at him, shocked for a moment that such a system really was in place. Then she reaches out and grabs his arm. “We don’t have time for this.” Distracted as he is by the glorious access to fresh science, Narud does not even think to try to evade her.
As they head back outside, he continues to talk her ear off about being deprived of journals while in prison. His normal focus is on protoss matters, but the zerg are also a fascinating phenomenon. “Do you know this L. Washington?” he asks.
“Yup,” Lilly replies, hand still wrapped around his forearm. She does not slow her pace.
“Is there any chance I could meet them?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, that’d be excellent. I’d love to pick their brain!”
No, no you wouldn’t, Lilly thinks.