The Tsla'o drone arrived the next day. It was of the nature-shapes school of design, looking rather like a large, angular metal seed. It had two ion impellers sitting as far outboard as it could, stubby winglets, a gravitic motor tucked away somewhere, and what was the most compact waverider drive Alex had ever seen. The array - the part where gravity met spacetime - was barely longer than his hand, which... well, it would go, but not very fast. Not compared to a Scoutship, or even the Corvin when upgraded.

Given the space limitations inside the Artifact, that was for the best.

Carbon insisted on giving it and all the parts that came with it a thorough once over before putting it into service. Given that someone had tried sneaking stuff in already, no one was taking chances.

Alex, meanwhile, had gotten the go ahead to take the Hokule'a out on its maiden flight, a shakedown run to ensure that it was all the way put back together and ready to be sent into the void deeper in the Artifact's core. Just take it up, give the systems a once over, bring it back.

Williams had invited herself along, as she had some experience with military aircraft and having a copilot sitting in the second seat felt wise, extra eyes and hands wouldn't hurt while they were checking things out.

She also taught Alex that the padding could be taken off the seats so an environment suit can be worn without stacking eight or ten centimeters of suit on top of ten centimeters of conformal gel. It was nice to be able to be comfortable with the extra security the suit provided without feeling like he was sitting in a chair the Tsla'o would find comically small.

This wasn't something he had needed to know until now. Alex had never been issued an e-suit before, and the Scoutship program had the view that if you needed to wear a suit and pilot the spacecraft at the same time, shit was going very badly so long term comfort was not a concern.

"All right. The exterior preflight checklist is all green." Alex said as he stepped up into the Corvin again, tablet in hand. Williams was sitting in the first officer's seat, still backed away from the controls and drinking coffee. Technically he didn't need to do the preflights due to onboard system checks being enough for most instances, but a maiden flight didn't feel like the time to find out something got missed.

"Good. Feel free to take your time with the interior check." Williams also had a danish. The small dispenser in the smaller kitchenette in the back of the Corvin was freshly calibrated and she had offered to test it when she arrived as Alex was inspecting the hydrogen intake.

It looked to Alex like the first time she had just sat somewhere without actively doing work since they had arrived almost two weeks ago. He didn't recall ever seeing her without at least a comm in hand, if not a larger device, working on something. It got set aside while she was eating, usually, but that was not exactly a lot of down time.

Carbon hadn't mentioned it as a point of concern to him, though, and those two had been working together consistently so she would have noticed if Williams was getting overworked. Probably. Carbon's idea of overworked involved an alarming amount of work, but she would certainly recognize burnout.

In others, at least.

He didn't mind, though. She could take half an hour off, it was probably good for her. Trying to do a checklist with two people when one wasn't an instructor just felt like it'd be more trouble than whatever time it might have saved was worth.

The physical inspection was actually quick, and he had the door buttoned up and was running through the software and controls - and making Williams do the check on the first officer's side of the cockpit while he tossed her trash in the recycler, since she was sitting over there anyway.

"All right, all right." Alex mumbled to himself as he attached the Hokule'a to the local Air Traffic Control network - the only ATC in the Artifact, as far as they were aware. "Drones are well clear of here, nothing else in the air for ten clicks all the way to the barrier. Would you notify the ground crew that we're gonna be opening the doors?"

"I certainly can." Williams used her individual comm for that, giving Carbon, Zheng, and Amalu a heads up that it was about to get real cold for a few minutes.

Those three were giving the Tsal'o drone a deep imaging with the scanning equipment. Kavo was working on the controller that it came with, which looked more like a laptop than anything else, ensuring nothing had been installed in that surreptitiously.

They all trusted each other, but somebody out there was clearly trying to send someone in here things in secret, probably to manufacture weapons. That wasn't looked very kindly upon by anybody, even if one or more of them were just pretending to not like it. It wasn't even clear why they wanted to do that. Just to take control of the operation? What was the plan when it was time to head back out through a portal that dropped them at the doorstep of the seat of Human power?

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Or did someone actually think that the people who built a wee little Dyson sphere could be cowed with some Human made weapons? It was hard to find a use case for that didn't involve massive hubris.

He figured that if there was the concern that weapons might be needed should something more dangerous than Rakaro appear, so we're gonna sneak the parts in just in case, someone would just say that out loud after they got found out. Probably wouldn't have set up a secret bypass on his shuttle.

Alex cleared his throat, cleared his mind, and checked the exterior cameras. Everyone was well clear of the hangar doors, so he sent the command to open them. It took two minutes.

Just sitting there.

Waiting.

The light on the doors turned green. Alex fired up the gravitics and eased the shuttle out of the building, the ATC system giving him permission to fly the plan he had submitted that morning. It was just a lazy loop around their geofenced area with several altitude changes and a few maneuvers that bordered on acrobatic. Once clear of the building and a few hundred meters up, he switched to thrusters and eased the throttle up, bringing them to a respectable 900 kph as he continued to ascend.

So far, everything is behaving as expected. Alex banks it gently to starboard, not really pushing the craft yet as they begin the loop. No alarms, nothing fell off. Not even so much as an unusual vibration in the frame.

"Everything look good on your side?" He inquired. They should be seeing the same data. This was the one thing he had an abundance of caution on.

"Yeah. Nothing outside of the expected ranges so far." Williams clicked through the diagnostics screens that Alex wasn't paying attention to at the moment. "Reactor is running a little lean, but still within spec."

"I'm not feeling any lag on the motors and the power distribution system isn't complaining. If it's not causing any issues, I think that'll be fine." Alex was paying more attention to actually flying the thing. He could have fed the flight plan into the onboard systems and let them fly it, but he preferred to actually maintain control of the shuttle himself. "Actually, let's test that out."

It was time for the first elevation change, almost all the way up to the barrier. He pulled the stick back and pushed the throttle up all the way, a much steeper and faster climb than he had originally intended. The onboard systems complained about that deviation, and the ATC sent a warning notification, but not a peep about the shift in power consumption.

Williams did give him a healthy amount of side eye as well.

"Kinetic buffers were keeping up with that, felt like. As long as we're not getting too dependent on the shield systems, I don't foresee it being an issue." Alex paused here, glancing over the instruments. "I hope you'll forgive me for not impact testing the shields."

"That's fine, I'll survive." Her reply was a bit sardonic. "Hey, Sorenson. You've been working with Lan Tshalen for some time now, correct?"

"Yeah. A little over a year, I think." In theory, they were still supposed to be jetting around the Orion arm in the Kshlav'o, out closer to Tsla'o space. Best laid plans, and all that. "Haven't been keeping track of the exact dates, but around there."

She nodded. "That's quite a long time to be working directly with a Tsla'o, in my experience."

"That's what I've heard." He was doing his best to not to look suspicious about where this conversation was going. When he glanced over, Williams appeared focused on the primary flight display in front of her, keeping track of the plethora of sensor data streaming across it. "You and Sergeant Zenshen go back a ways, don't you?"

"Yeah, but we haven't been working together the entire time. Kind of a military thing, you go where you're told... and yes, I know you're working for the Navy, but you're not in the Navy." She had her hand on the control stick on her side of the cockpit, using the hat switch to flip through the diagnostics pages. "Did meet up from time to time, we both got pressed into the role of handling the other race after the general success of the rescue operation on Zeshela."

Alex laughed. "I've heard the story a couple of times now, Zenshen has the retelling of it down to an art. Not something I'd want to have to deal with, though. Perfectly fine just hearing about it."

"Yeah, tkt drops are always bad. Wild how often people think that they can put an outpost or settlement down near a hive and not expect problems." Williams was visibly annoyed by that. "At least some of them do it because they're trying to study the bugs, not just attempting to compete with them for resources."

"Is that... Is that a common problem?" Seriously, how often could something like that happen? Alex banked the shuttle again, preparing for another elevation change - though this one would be nice and gentle.

She exhaled a single sarcastic laugh. "All the damn time on the frontier. tkt hives end up on a lot of semi-habitable planets and they do a lot of mining but not a lot of building - I think some people get the impression that they can be stolen from for 'free' goods. Which, to be fair, they can be if you're careful."

"And they're not careful?"

"Damned if I know." A brief lift of her shoulders. "The folks in charge of those decisions were either the first to die or had managed to hide somewhere while their operation got shredded by bugs and were prepared to take their culpability to the grave."

"Fuck's sake." What else could you say to that? He eased the stick forward, filling the silence after that statement with action. "Beginning descent."

"That's the usual reaction to that information." She said, eyes glued to the altitude indicator as the meters melted off it. "I got off topic there. I meant to ask you if you knew the Lan is related to the Tsla'o Empress?"

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