Yoko returned the smile. "Honestly, I'm mostly here for me. It's been a long time. Not everything has to be work, yeah?" She paused, for a moment, frowning. "Still, if it does go well for the Task Force, that'd be a nice bonus. But don't make any grand statements of allegiance or anything, okay? No matter how we may personally feel, we've gotta maintain a pretty delicate balance. It'd be bad to m-"
Yoko was cut off by Abe's voice breaking through the quiet chatter on the bridge. She sat back to reply. "Understood. We're with you." Her Kusarian was clearly accented, but fluent.
The liner erupted through the edge of the cloud to cut across the deadly gap. The harsh sunlight of Hokkaido shone through blinding and brilliant on the main windows, but only for a moment—their dimming was delayed by age, but not yet lost entirely. Still, the journey across the unshielded space was tense, and that tension did not break until they slipped back into the safety of the Unyo cloud. Soon the small convoy was in Hokkaido and powering its way forward to the hidden base. Unable to dart nimbly around the rocks as the fighters could, the Ichihara slowed their progress, engine reduced to keep from dashing the shields apart on the harsh terrain.
It took time, but eventually the homeship found its way to the legendary base. "Gosh. I've barely been back here since we stripped the Ichihara in the first place. Hard to believe it's really been over a decade." She shook her head as the pilot guided the great vessel in to moor. "Welp. Let's go get changed, then down to the airlock. May as well be ready for our meeting when we get parked." She offered the woman with the breathing mask a hand to lead her to the elevators, issuing instructions even as she walked off the bridge. "Toru, go ahead and get Ocai and Pipilo ready, yeah? Yasou, could you make sure the shipment's ready to offload?" Already the crew in question were in motion, though, rendering the prompting perfunctory at best.
