This entire planet had Lance on edge. It wasn't like that jungle planet that had almost killed him and Shiro not that long ago, not really, but it inspired the same feelings of paranoia in him, of enemies pressing in all sides, the oppressive atmosphere and the hostility in the very air. Of course, the fact that he and Keith were currently sneaking through a cramped prison hallway with the threat of ambush lurking around every corner didn't help with that feeling, but it wasn't the only reason.

This was a swampy planet, for one thing. Not hot and fetid like that jungle, but waterlogged, the ground made of mud, the air clouded with cold, relentless fog. There had been the predictable jokes about Dagobah when they first landed here, of course, but what the place really reminded Lance of was that endless muddy swamp in The Neverending Story where Atreyu lost his precious Artax to the inevitable pull of despair.

The air smelled of dirt. It smelled of mud. It smelled of worms and crustaceans and slippery creatures sliding around just underneath the dirty, opaque surface of the swamp. The water was thick, too, more mud than liquid, viscous and sticky, threatening to pull everything under like bad-smelling quicksand.

It was a nasty place. Lance had put his visor down after only a few minutes of enduring the cool, unpleasant air, but he still felt like he could smell the mud and the dirt and the slime. Even being inside the cold, industrial walls of the Galra prison complex couldn't protect him from that smell.

Keith slid along the wall, sword out and posture balanced forward, braced to leap and spin, while Lance held back a few steps, gun loosely held in both hands ready to swing up the instant a target presented itself. It worked for them, Keith with his short-range expertise and Lance at long range, which is why they'd been teamed up for this mission. This wasn't the first time Team Voltron had had to clean out a facility while facing guerilla-style resistance. It was starting to get almost routine, though that never kept Lance's heart from pounding, his finger from trembling on the trigger. It felt new every single time.

How many prisons had they freed now? Six? Seven? Something like that. The first few planets where they arrived, guns blazing, had tried to fight Voltron off with all the power at their disposal. That invariably led to the annihilation of their entire fleet, though, so eventually the Galra had adopted a new strategy. Now, when Voltron showed up in the system, they scrambled a few fighters and cruisers to keep them at bay while the majority of the Galra forces beat a retreat.

They always left some volunteers behind on the planet, though. The most fierce soldiers, the most loyal, the most violent. These were not robot sentries. They were sentient creatures, flesh-and-blood Galra who served Zarkon with every fiber of their beings. They knew they faced death, choosing to attempt to ambush the most powerful military force currently opposing the Galra Empire, and they did it anyway. They threw their lives away, willingly and completely, on the slightest chance that they might be able to take down a Paladin of Voltron with them. It made Lance think of kamikaze soldiers from Earth's history. Suicide bombers. Those monks who would light themselves on fire in political protest. He wasn't the only one to make those comparisons, but it was unnerving to think about, so mostly Team Voltron just set their collective jaw and did the work they had to do.

And it had to be done. They had all agreed on this course of action. For one thing, this was the only path to finding Matt and Sam Holt, which might have seemed like a small goal in the grand scheme of defeating a universe-wide evil, but it was the one that was highest on the minds of all of the paladins. They had all had their moments of pain and despair, all learned to build themselves and each other up and carry on, but there were moments that broke them, one and all, even so.

After Pidge and Lance risked their lives pulling all of the publicly available information on the Galra prison system from a central communication hub, Pidge had spent days locked in her lab decrypting and analyzing it all. She was certain that she was just this close to finding her family, and the rest of them were all borne along in her optimistic certainty. This was it, the whole enchilada. Prisoners' designations, origins, transfers, current statuses, everything. If Matt and Sam Holt could not be found in this enormous trove of data, the chances of finding them at all dropped to near zero.

Lance remembered pacing outside the door of Pidge's lab, unwilling to go in and interrupt her work but unable to stay away. He kept trying to do other things, like clean Blue or train with Keith or cook with Hunk, but as soon as his mind began to wander, his feet did too, and he found himself back outside that blank, silent door. The others were in a similar state, though Shiro undoubtedly had the worst of it. He looked more and more ragged as the days passed without news, and the bags under his eyes deepened, his sleep interrupted by more and more nightmares no matter how everyone, including Lance, tried to soothe him.

They expected Pidge to emerge at any moment, worn but triumphant, holding aloft a data crystal with her family's location inside. Then they would leap to the command deck, and Allura would open a wormhole, and they would get into the lions and form Voltron and tear apart whatever world they landed in until they found the Holts. It wasn't a great plan, maybe, but Lance liked the pictures it painted in his head. If he couldn't see his own family, not for now, he could at least help Pidge see hers. It was all he wanted, all anyone wanted.

But when Pidge finally emerged from her lab, she was not triumphant.

Lance happened to be there, pacing again, when the door finally opened and Pidge swayed into the hall, then stood there with her hands at her sides, staring straight ahead. Lance leaped to meet her, and his heart sank instantly as soon as he caught a glimpse of her face. There was no beaming joy shining through her exhaustion, no sparkle in her eyes, red and bloodshot from lack of sleep. Instead she looked almost...blank.

"Pidge." A lump rose in Lance's throat, and his voice came out breathy and choked. He reached out and grabbed her shoulders, and she barely reacted, barely blinked. "Pidge... What did you find?"

"Nothing." Pidge's head slowly, slowly tilted to look at him, letting him see the emptiness in her eyes. Her gaze was glassy and distant, numb. "I looked, Lance. I looked so hard. And then I looked again. And...nothing."

"You didn't find anything at all?" Lance whispered. "Not even from when they were captured? They had to have been put in the main database then, didn't they? Shiro... Shiro still was. That's how they caught him and Allura back then."

Pidge nodded slowly. "Back at the beginning... Yeah. I thought I could use Shiro's prisoner number to find them, because their numbers had to be in sequence, right? But no, the numbers had to be randomly assigned, not sequential, so all of my searches of numbers near Shiro's were useless. Then I dug into Shiro's files..." She shuddered and closed her eyes for a moment, then stared at Lance again. "They were encrypted, probably because of Haggar... But I broke it. I broke the cyphers, Lance."

"Of course you did," he said. "You always do." He squeezed her shoulders. "So you found your dad and brother's prisoner numbers in Shiro's first files, right? That has to be where you went."

"Yeah, I did. There was a report about what happened when Matt and Shiro were sent to the arena, and then..."

Lance bit his lip to keep from interrupting her. Pidge stared away, blinking, but she seemed to be working up to something.

"Nothing," she whispered. "After the first few reports, Dad and Matt vanish from the system. There's no record of a transfer, no hint of where they went. They were both sent to a labor colony soon after Shiro won his first fight in the arena. And then it just...stops. There's nothing else. No matter how I tried, no matter how I searched, I couldn't find them."

"Pidge..." Tears pushed against Lance's eyes, but he couldn't let them out, not yet. He jerked forward, almost faster then his mind could process, and pulled her into his arms. He held her tight, maybe too tight, but all he was thinking about was his own dad, his own papá, his brothers both older and younger, and how much this would hurt. How awful this would be, how crippling.

Pidge didn't move at first, limp in his grip, but then she lifted her hands and pressed her palms against Lance's back. He bent his face over her messy head and pressed his nose against the crown of her head, ignoring the funky scent from too many days without a shower.

"But you didn't find a death record, right?" Lance asked, desperate for any shred of hope. "It just...it just stopped. The records just stopped. That's what you said, right?"

Pidge drew in a shuddery breath and nodded against his shoulder. "Yeah. They just stopped. It's...it's the worst."

Lance nodded frantically and rubbed her back with one hand, still holding tight with his other arm. "I know, I know. It's awful not knowing. But also... It means something else could have happened. We know Haggar took an interest in Shiro. Maybe she thought there was something strange about humans. Maybe she had your dad and brother set aside so she could keep an eye on them."

Pidge shivered. Her voice went higher. "That's worse!"

"I know." He squeezed her. "I know. I'm sorry I had to bring it up. But... Maybe Haggar keeps separate records, so they weren't in the databanks we pulled. You thought that might be a possibility, right? When we went on that mission, you said they had to be there, but if not they would have to be in some off-the-grid facility. You started to mention Haggar, but you stopped, because you didn't want to think about it. I get it, I do."

Pidge was still listening.

Lance took a couple of shaky breaths, then stood back. He held her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes. They were full of tears, now, though they hadn't spilled yet. Lance's heart hurt, but he made himself keep going. "Maybe they're alive. Maybe we can find them. You can't...you can't give up, Pidge. Please. Don't give up. Not yet."

Pidge blinked, once. The tears slid down her cheeks, but she met Lance's gaze. "You really... You're really invested in this, aren't you?"

Lance nodded rapidly. "I want you to find your family, Pidge. I want you to be with them. I want..." He bit his lip, then went on. "And I want to help. I want to do...something good for you. Okay? I just do. There doesn't have to be a deep reason. I really, really want you to be okay, and I want your family to be okay, too."

"Lance." A tiny sob burst out of Pidge's mouth, and she surged forward and hid her face against his chest again, wrapping her arms tight around his middle.

He held her tight. As tight as he could. "I love you, Pidge," he murmured.

"Love you too," she mumbled into his chest.

"We're gonna figure this out. We're gonna find a way. I promise."

She chuckled, disbelieving, but squeezed him tighter. He held onto her until they both steadied, and then they went to the command deck to tell everyone else the news.

Everyone was devastated. They had all had such high hopes, even Allura and Coran, who Lance might have expected to be the least connected to this effort. But the paladins had become their family, too, over their time together, all the trials and tribulations and sharing and bonding. Pidge's pain was theirs. All of theirs.

The war was exhausting, draining. Team Voltron was slowly gathering allies, liberating planets where they could, answering distress signals. But they were no closer to their ultimate goal of defeating Zarkon. They could destroy individual fleets and chase away sector commanders, but the Empire was too vast and dispersed for a single force to defeat alone, no matter how powerful. Every small victory only drove that fact home.

So they had all become invested in Pidge's quest. They wanted a victory, a win they could chalk up definitively in the success column. They needed it. Finding that communication hub had seemed like the wildest stroke of luck, and they were all eager to take advantage of the intel. Now that had been taken away.

"We're not giving up," Allura said, teeth gritted, after everyone had a moment to absorb the shock of Pidge's announcement. Her fists were clenched, arms half extended into a boxer's stance, and her legs were spread as if to keep her balance on a tilting ship. "This is not the end."

Everyone looked at her, Pidge with weary blankness, Lance with a spark of hope. Allura nodded to Pidge. "You have all this information, yes? So you know which prisoners were with your father and brother before they disappeared. If they were transferred to Haggar's personal facilities, or somewhere else, there would have been rumors around the prison. You have records for everyone else. We can go to wherever those fellow prisoners are currently being held and rescue them, then ask for any news of your family."

Lance's mouth dropped open. "Princess, that's..."

She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. "Farfetched? Desperate? Likely to take a very, very long time?"

Lance shook his head. "Brilliant. I was going to say brilliant. I mean, yes, it's all of those other things, too. But... I think it has a chance."

Shiro nodded firmly. "I agree. It's our best chance."

Allura looked at Coran, who was currently pulling at his mustache in thought. As the military advisor and the one of their number with the most experience and knowledge, he would be best positioned to point out flaws with the plan. "This will also further our goals in other ways," Allura said. "We have spoken about using classic resistance tactics against the Empire, such as striking at outposts, performing raids on random targets of value then fading back. With our current alliance, we can't risk liberating too many planets because we won't be able to guarantee their protection after the initial battle. But raids on Galra targets we don't intend to control after we strike will take the pressure off of us and put it on them instead."

"The best defense is a good offense," Hunk said, getting into it.

Coran nodded gravely. "It's not a bad plan. Not at all. From what we've learned, much of the Galra Empire's economy is based on the slave labor of the prison system and stripping planets of their resources. Disrupting supply chains is a classic military strategy, too. If we can make raids on enough prisons, rescuing the prisoners and destroying the facilities, we will weaken the Empire as a whole."

Allura looked at Pidge. "The raids will need to seem random. That will force them to disperse their fleets, never knowing where we will strike next. Please compile a list of prisoners who had contact with your family and their current locations, then devise a way of randomly selecting our targets."

Pidge swallowed, eyes shining. "Do you really think this will work?" Her voice was breathy, almost inaudible. Keith, on the opposite of her from Lance, reached out and gripped her shoulder.

Allura looked at her, calm and resolute, the very image of a strong, determined leader. "Yes, I do." It was the tone of someone who did not think that a plan would work because it had to, but because she would make it so.

They all would. Lance closed his eyes and drew a breath, feeling the certainty in his bones. They were going to do it. They were going to find Matt and Sam Holt no matter what it took.

Now, Lance and Keith rounded another corner of the hallway in the prison complex, one step closer to the goal.

"How's it looking?" Lance murmured, keeping his voice low even though no one but Keith would be able to hear him through the helmet comm.

"Clear so far," Keith said, tension in his voice even while his movements were smooth and graceful. "BLIP tech still showing no other bio signatures in this section."

The Galra had jammed their scans before, though. That had been a bad raid. Shiro had almost died. Lance shivered and refused to think about it. His rifle swung up a couple of inches, even so.

One more raid. One more liberation. They were going to stay sharp, they were going to stay ready, and they were going to get through this. It was the only option Lance would allow. For Pidge, and for himself.