"No one has answered our distress call because our long-range systems array was destroyed in our crash. We've done extensive incident reports on what happened — none of which I'm going to make an outsider privy to, before you ask," she adds, her tone quite dry, "which cleared all our personnel from any wrongdoing. We got hit by an electrical disturbance in space, it killed our systems, we got roped in by the gravity well of an uncharted planet." It was textbook, and she's still fucking mad about it. There were a thousand things they could have done differently, but they had no way of knowing. The disturbance didn't show up on any of their instruments. She isn't going to fault her people for not looking for something they had no idea existed in the first place.

"If you think you can get the Adamant back into space without ultraluminal thrusters to get eighty hundred and nine metric tonnes off the ground, without enough of an engineering corps to rebuild it before the acid rain eats what progress you've made, and with barely enough supplies to keep ourselves fit, you can be my guest. I'll gladly sing your accolades after you've got us all back to Earth." She speaks coolly, but there's real anger simmering under there that this upstart boy would come in and start interrogating her in ways that question the skill and smarts of a group just trying to survive. "The Adamant is a tilted wreck, getting worse every time the acid rain comes around. It's also a mass grave for nearly twenty-five thousand souls. We had our reasons for leaving."