Serena was never one to believe in a higher power, or fate, or causality, or anything of the sort. This did nothing to prevent her from seeing the way her timing shook out as nothing short of a cosmic insult. For two months she’d been crawling around the galaxy in her little freighter, Petrichor, delivering shipments, relaying secret communications, transporting personnel. Not a day—perhaps not an hour, were one to ignore her time spent asleep—had gone by in which she hadn’t fret over her absent partner. Kenzie wasn’t supposed to have stayed behind. If she hadn’t fallen ill only days before Serena was sent out on her supply run, they could have ditched their crew, taken Petrichor and made a break for it together. Their tenure on Neptune’s Tempest, their service under the rebellion, they could have left it all in the past. Instead, Kenzie had stayed behind, remaining aboard Neptune’s Tempest in quarantine. All their plans had been postponed. And now, none of it mattered. Now, Serena could only watch helplessly from a distance as Neptune’s Tempest was slowly encased in colossal vines, soon to be swallowed whole by an affini warship. 

From her viewing port, the heavy gunship looked like little more than a model toy in the grasp of those tangling, crushing vines. Too slow, Serena had been far too slow. She could have made it back to the Tempest days, maybe even a week sooner. The ultimate irony was she’d taken the long way around to avoid attracting an affini tail; it would have done her no good to lead those plant bastards right to such a juicy target. In hindsight, that sort of rationale seemed utterly purposeless, idiotic. The whole point was to get out as soon as possible. The writing had been on the wall for months: if she and Kenzie stayed in the rebellion, capture, followed by whatever unenviable fate the affini subjected dissenters to, was inevitable. For a moment, Serena considered running. She had a crew to think about, cargo in tow, responsibilities and obligations and none of that fucking mattered. Right now, her girlfriend was on that ship, her girlfriend was being captured by sadistic imperialist plants. Her crew would manage without her. They could have her ship, take it and run if that’s what they wanted. She wasn’t abandoning Kenzie. 

With a start, Serena lurched from her captain’s chair, and strode purposefully toward Petrichor’s tiny hangar bay, ignoring the sudden outcry from the crew around her. She took the stairs two at a time, daring anyone she passed to get in her way. The door to the hangar bay slid open, revealing the small one-manned fighter within. A new prototype, loaded with nearly as much firepower as a typical light-frigate, and far more nimble. It wasn’t hers to take, but she was supposed to deliver it to the Tempest somehow, wasn’t she? She swiped her override key across the little reader on the wall, locking the door behind her, it wouldn’t do to have the crew trying to interfere with her little heist. What, exactly, she intended to do with the ship wasn’t something Serena had actually thought out yet. That didn’t slow her down as she raided the hangar’s weapons locker, donned the ship’s flight interface helmet, and climbed inside. 

Pulse pounding, Serena strapped in, powered up the engine, opened the bay doors, and rocketed into open space. Admittedly, Serena had never flown a craft this small, let alone something this… new. She had no time to figure out what each button and dial meant. At the very least ‘shoot’ and ‘go’ were well delineated enough. Besides, it would be fine, she was the best pilot in the whole rebellion. Or, at the very least, she was an above average pilot in the rebellion, an above average pilot slowly creeping more and more toward the best pilot in the rebellion as more and more ships were captured by the long arm—vine?—of the Affini Accord. Either way, such things didn’t concern Serena in the moment, instead, she took off at full speed toward the Tempest, which drew ever closer to that gaping, vegetal maw. 

Logically, Serena knew the affini warship was massive. Logically, she understood that Neptune’s Tempest was a Terran Heavy Gunship with a crew of thousands. And, logically, she understood that since the affini ship looked as though it could easily house a hundred Neptune’s Tempests, she was attacking something which dwarfed many Terran cities, let alone ships. The truth was, however, given the state Serena was in, the sheer desperation she felt when faced with the encroaching reality of losing Kenize, logic was hardly something Serena had taken into consideration. Drawing closer and closer, the reality of just how futile her struggle truly was became all the more clear as the affini ship’s unfathomable scale became more and more apparent with each passing moment. Yet, somehow, Serena didn’t care. She had no time for awe, no time for doubt, the clock was ticking and if she didn’t do something Kenzie would be gone forever. Things like odds, scale, power meant nothing to her; Serena’s reality was boiled down to one simple truth: she was going to save Kenzie. She would find a way to win. That's how it happened in old flicks, wasn't it? Against all odds, the hero won. There wasn’t an alternative, not even death. It was this, or null, nothing, unreality. 

Fueled by that single-minded determination, she hurled the little fighter toward her target, accelerating to blistering speed, and firing off a barrage of rail-cannon warheads at the underside of the ship, just to be sure she actually knew what she was doing. Serena cackled in immense satisfaction as explosion after explosion rocked the ship’s hull. This was happening, she could do this, she was going to do this. 

With almost instinctive ease, Serena pointed her craft toward the massive of vines which ensnared Neptune’s Tempest, and surged ahead into ripper-gun range. She waited for the auto-lock systems to accept her target, and unleashed her ship’s full range of firepower on the nearest vine, pulling up only a split second before crashing into the vines at full speed. Laughing triumphantly, she whipped the fighter around, dodging a lumbering column of plant matter as she readied for a second attack run. It was then, as her original target swung back into view, that her entire world shattered. She’d hardly even singed it. A fucking vine, Serena was shooting literal plant matter with weapons that could tear through six feet of steel like tissue paper. Serena was never one to believe in a higher power, but then and there she understood, she might as well be picking a fight with god.

Before she could so much as cry out in despair, another vine, smaller than the others, but still impossibly large lashed outward with blinding speed and accuracy, plucking her ship out of space as though she were nothing more than a troublesome little puppy nipping at her owner’s ankles. Her whole ship lurched as it came to a sudden stop. Serena’s safety harness snapped against the force. The last thing going through Serena’s head before she flew face first into the dashboard was annoyance that even in their most cutting edge prototype ships, the rebel fleet still couldn’t bother to invest in proper harnesses.