Just as the group was entering the woods, Pidge was brought awake by an insistent blip on Castle Control sensors. He blinked rapidly to get his bearings, pushing himself off the console that he had dozed off on top of.
Because of the trip to Erheil, Pidge had needed to take over the early morning shift in Castle Control, a shift regularly assigned to either Keith or Lance and one he had not been expecting to get. He had spent half the night before playing chess with Hunk in the rec room and betting their future desserts against one another. Since Hunk was impossible to wake in mornings, it was out of the question for him to take the shift - so Pidge had been drafted for the job.
He groaned as the beginnings of a headache echoed inside his head. Evidently, he wasn’t any better than Hunk at taking on early morning shifts. How long had he been out? Luckily, something had awakened him…
Suddenly remembering the reason he woke up, he took off his glasses and wiped them off on his sleeve before putting them back on and focusing on the screen. The blipping still continued, and he saw that the corresponding point was coming from the area right above the woods at the foot of the Mount Valor, just above the trail the Princess and her company would be taking to ascend the mountain until the pass into Erheil…
Uh-oh, this could mean trouble, he told himself, quickly tapping a series of commands into the computer to contact Keith and tell him about the blip. How long had the disturbance been there? When there was no response to his signal, he tapped another series of commands calling up the present coordinates of the party, only to find that the trackers’ signals were also not responding.
He suddenly remembered that the woods were occasionally a dead spot because of interference caused by the density and height of the overhead canopy. Damn. That meant that the party was cut off from all Castle communication until they reached the pass, which was above the woods.
And by then, it might already be too late, if
that blip is up to no good. A chill of foreboding ran through Pidge.
If anything happened to the Princess… Biting his lip in alarm, he
ran as fast as he could to find Coran and ask him to send out a back-up
team just in case.
The Worst Enemy -- Woodland Illusions