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The notion that she trusts him to see this ship relocated to allied territory comes across as convenient and perhaps insulting to him. He'd stood his ground and held his post even when duty seemed like the most thankless notion of the many available. All the Royalty truly seemed to care about was preserving their titles and pretending to be productive, usually with a military officer such as himself burdened by the real brunt of getting work done. All the same, he'd been asked a simple question. "Acting-Captain of the Royal Navy destroyer Belisama and Warden of Orleanais, Eyran Annis." He answered in a fairly rehearsed and unenthusiastic manner. When she finally did leave the bridge with whatever pride she had left, it gave him momentary peace.

"Duchess on deck." He announced for the rest of the bridge crew purely out of respect for tradition and formality. They all took note of Claire's presence and entitled her to the briefest possible display of respect by way of a salute. Once the sentiment and adherence to the discipline required of their postings had been honored, he answered Claire. "The ship is ready to move, the only thing it can do. We are not in fighting shape given the fact that we are short of the men necessary for sustained combat. Desperate self-defense is the limit of our abilities for the time being. With a course plotted, we have continued to tirelessly monitor traffic while you were away. According to signal intelligence a lull in traffic and patrols occurs an hour from now. That is when we move." To the freshly promoted Captain's credit and despite his horrible situation, he seemed to be fairly competent at his job and loyal, perhaps even to a fault and yet all the same his grim demeanor had not changed despite the days that had fleeted by.

Claire listened, taking a second to process the information the captain had just given her. She was pleasantly surprised with the attention to detail, and was even more thrilled to hear that there's a very solid plan in place. The situation could have been better, but it seemed like the man was using all the resources available to him to make sure the trip was a success.

"Very good, capitaine. Your attention to detail is commendable," she eventually answered, praising the officer, almost forcefully. There was a tinge of fakeness in her voice as she tried to be uplifting, hoping to keep motivations high.

"Are we lacking in any materials? Were the goods enough to get us to our destination?" she followed up with another question.

The lack of sincerity in her commendation does not go unnoticed, but all the same it does not prompt a sarcastic retaliation in return. That would be unbecoming for a captain of a warship, expected to adhere to strict standards and an even stricter level of efficiency. He nods, not a single trace of a smile as he does so, it almost seems like he cannot wait to get this over with. "The supplies will have to be enough, we can't hold this position forever, every day spent here is an invitation to be detected and boarded by opportunists." There was an element of anxiousness to that response, as if he had concerns of the safety and success of this operation, though he did not seem the type to care for personal consequences, he had a crew to safeguard. And when the hour struck, there was nothing left to do but give the order.

"Full power to the engines." He instructed the helmsman who was at his station on this occasion. A slow groan rattled through the hull as the ship began to move and devote power and precious fuel to the engines as they engaged cruise. There was a moment where the crew seemed tense, right about the same time that the engines made a series of whines, almost as if about to fail or backfire. The Captain remained expressionless and soon the mechanical error, or whatever it might have been ceased for the moment. With their nerves relatively calmed, the ship held it's course for the anomaly in the system.

That is until the communications array is bombarded by a mostly garbled distress signal. The communications officer glances to her Captain for instructions, and he nods in response, knowing what that means she tries to better clean up the message before playing it over the bridge speakers. "This is the IDFSV Loire, we are under attack and require immediate assistance! Triangulate the location of this distress signal, please! We cannot-." As soon as the recorded distress message had played, the officers on the bridge turn to their Captain for orders. A Captain who appears quite torn between the safety of his crew and countrymen being assailed. They would have to turn around and fly away from their current course in order to assist, and with the engines already producing a cacophony of protests, it was unlikely that the cruise engines would be so cooperative if forced to restart post-intervention.

He had a few seconds to think, time he tried to use wisely. And a window that Claire could voice her own thoughts into if she felt compelled.

Claire was as anxious as everyone in the room about the sudden development. She looked up to Annis to see what he would decide, but the only thing she noticed was his hesitation and a distinct lack of orders. Despite her lack of awareness of the severity of the engine's issues, she was confident that they would hold, as they seem to be functioning now - even if they did have their hiccups.

Taking the opportunity of the silence before the captain's decision, she intervened with her own opinion.

"Capitaine, IDF Shipping is nearly exclusively owned by my family - vessels belonging to that corporation are our supporters, and support is what we need the most right now. We can't in good conscience leave them to whatever they're being attacked by - we simply cannot turn our backs on our own countrymen." she explained, suggesting what is, for her, the obvious course of action.

The engines rumbled with the occasional disruptions in the background, as if to protest Claire's advice. Ignoring the very obvious hints that she may be leading them to certain doom, she looked expectantly at the captain for his word.

A pained sigh came before he could voice any actual response or orders to his crew, this clearly wasn't an easy decision to make given the potential ramifications it could have for the entire ship and its crew. But it seemed as if he'd made up his mind despite the situation being overwhelmingly tense. "Helmsman, turn us about and maintain full burn towards the distress signal. Communications officer, try to reconnect with the cargo ship and inform it of our intentions." After issuing these orders rapidly and with all the confidence necessary of his station, he looked at Claire nervously, but with the smallest amount of appreciation and respect for her urging him to make the right decision.

The destroyer's approach back through the field was rapid, necessarily so given the situation at hand. Having already expressed that protracted combat would doom the ship, it was unclear how exactly the Captain intended to bypass such a severe hurdle without crippling the vessel or sending the crew to early graves. "Helmsman, kill engines at six points and start dumping power into shields and weapons. Gunnery, prime main cannon and await my order." It was only a matter of seconds before these orders came to pass, the engines protested violently as they were killed so that the ship could drift in with a minimal heat signature. Even for an individual ignorant to the finer points of warship protocol, this approach vector would begin to seem extremely aggressive, even to Claire.

The Captain took a breath and did some much needed split second thinking as they rapidly approached gun range, still undetected by the assailants and the shipping vessel. "Helmsman, fire retro, slow us down by half. Bring the gun to bear, roll and then brace for impact. Gunnery prepare to fire." A strange sensation whipped through the deck as the ship was rapidly rotated after cutting off half its speed. A low guttural sound came from the belly of the destroyer as the Captain tirelessly monitored all the screens at his disposal, before his eyes sharpened in focus and he shouted.

"Fire!"

From the perspective of the shipping vessel, this was perhaps the gambit of a madman, a weapon of planetary destruction fired at one of the Maquis gunships that had done well so far to chase it away from patrols and stations alike. It didn't matter to those panicked crewmen how inelegant the destroyer's maneuvers were or how brutal the absolute vaporizing of a gunship must have been, they had used the last of their shield batteries to put up one last barrier of defiance before the hull gave out. And just as they had done so, one of the hostile contacts simple disappeared from the radar, soon followed by the next.

The destroyer had lined up, and fired at one gunship, and then rolled back over to present its side while bracing for impact. There was no other way they could have eliminated both gunships, without exposing the ship and crew to dire consequences. The beam discharged once, for merely a second and then shut off to prevent critical heat levels, the howl of its firing mechanism soon replaced by a collision between the destroyer and the second gunship, which destroyed the latter outright but had torn away much of the former's left railing and nearly set off a chain reaction that might have resulted in ship-wide decompression if the Captain had not ordered the crew to brace. In doing so, they were ready for such an eventuality and acted immediately, practically overloading a reactor to reinforce the shield system prior to the collision. In doing so, much of the damage that might have been sustained was averted, but to say this had taken a minor toll on the ship would be a grave understatement.

The shipping vessel, though presently on fire was still holding together and its engines were intact, it would be able to extinguish the flames and limp to safety thanks to this daring intervention. Seconds before collision, the personnel aboard the destroyer's bridge would strap themselves in, Claire would watch them do this until finding herself somewhat rudely thrown into what was the Captain's seat and then forcibly strapped in by the man himself. In doing so, he would be thrown across the room instead of her. Given how violent the impact was, he was sent straight over the holographic display table and across the floor, rolling until his back thumped against a wall. It didn't look good, and the crew likely suspected that such a degree of physical trauma would be sufficient to kill him.

To their surprise, he scraped himself off the floor and returned to the table, the occasional droplet of blood on the pristine white surface suggesting he was not alright despite his resilience. Yet all the same, he resumed command. "Helmsman, put us back on course to leave the system." The officer nodded and did so, beginning the tedious process of coaxing the engines to accept having their cruise drives restarted. An action which would work, albeit with limited success, as the excess strain fried one of the main drives and cause the engine to blow out and die, while the other groaned to life properly, this would mean the ship, while able to continue the journey to Aquitaine, would be slowed down significantly and much more vulnerable.

A price they had to pay to protect their own people.

Claire observed with morbid anxiety as the events unfolded in front of her. She was utterly confused as she was forcefully grabbed and strapped into the captain's chair, but figured why that happened as soon as the ship impacted. The noble saw the captain soar through the bridge just as soon as he finished with the straps, It took her a few seconds to recover and realise what happened, seeing the rest of the personnel on the bridge get off from their brace position and assess the situation.

Many of the monitors on the bridge were blinking warnings and red statuses - the impact had clearly taken its toll on the ship, and their shield only managed to slightly soften the impact. One of them in particular, a momintor displaying the ship from the top-down perspective, had the entire right side of the ship's brace, and its supporting structures, marked as red with the information "Unknown Status" - little did they know that it was nearly completely crushed, including the weapon platforms situated there - the trebuchet support weapons.

The noble unstrapped herself in a rush after witnessing the captain stand up and noticing the blood trailing behind him. "Mon dieu, are you alright?" she asked as she rushed towards him.

It was strange to watch him simply move his head in a few directions before only just vaguely being able to look in Claire's direction, and yet still not quite directly at her, his eyes even seemed glazed over and there was an expression of fear on his face. "I can't see.." He muttered timidly, not wanting the rest of the crew to hear of that fact lest it distract them from their presently monumental task of carrying a battered, but not yet broken, destroyer to friendly territory.

The rest of the crew was no less rattled than him, and it seemed that his facade of discipline and strength was the only thing compelling them to hold to their duties. That must have been the only reason that the Captain didn't resign himself to the medbay for urgently needed medical attention. "Don't tell them, because it doesn't change anything. Protocol dictates that I man my post along with them for the duration of this journey, a command presence is required for anything as dire as this. Even if said presence is on the brink of incapacitation." He seemed serious about that fact, and the ship groaned as if to second his request. The initial estimate, with engine systems functioning at optimal levels put time of arrival at just under a day if the ship flew day and night with no rest for the bridge staff. With the engine systems degraded far below optimal levels, that estimate now seemed akin to naivety.

It would be well over a day, perhaps even two before the ship could reach Orkney. And there was no guarantee that it could even reach it at all in its current state. The best they could all do was hope and not tell the rest of the crew about the current dire straits that the ship was in. With enough luck, perhaps the hours would fleet by uneventfully, if fortunes could be so merciful.

What he couldn't see was Claire's shocked expression as he announced to her what was wrong with him. This really wasn't the news anyone needed to hear. Her voice sounded even more concerned and stressed as she replied.

"You're insane. We need to get you to the infirmary immediately. You are in no condition to be on the bridge." she said as she walked up to his side and gently nudged him forward, but not before looking at the trail of blood droplets behind him that was sure to raise a lot of questions from the rest of the shocked officers on the bridge.

"I'll return to the bridge once you're there and try to calm everyone down. We shouldn't have issues now." she explained in an effort to convince him, obviously way too hopeful for how dire the situation with the ship was. The ship's internals groaned once more, and she was partially glad that he couldn't see her expression.

"Come on, let's move." the woman muttered as she nudged him forward once more.

He stood his ground, so at best Claire's efforts to get him to move would only result in minor twists of his torso. The Captain seemed entirely dead set on staying in his post and simply would not budge. "I appreciate your concern, Duchess. I do. A servant can only hope to have the genuine attention of their superiors. But I have to refuse." His tone defaulted back to being stern and seemingly rehearsed.

There was a moment of silence in which he seemed to think, looking away as if to look at something even though he'd see nothing and then looking back in Claire's general direction. "I'd rather die on my feet than on a table. The thing I will absolutely never do is abandon my post in a time like this, when the ship could fall apart from a stray sneeze. No, we didn't come this far for that. And even if it does end here, it ends with me in my post. It's what Father would want." When it was put like that it seemed like there was very little which could be said or done to convince him otherwise.

His body language and conduct seemed to suggest that he viewed the avenue of conversation regarding the medical bay concluded. This was reinforced by a change of topic as if his stance on things was final. "I don't trust these people we're linking up with. They're much too brash and ignorant to be the same men I served with under in the King's navy. Experience tells me this is a case of despotic military rule. The kind of people who would care little for someone like you and our values and obligations. Do you trust these people?" He had no trouble operating the table and pulling up the ships NavMap, the problem was that he couldn't see how many way points they had left until their destination was reached. He was hoping Claire would do him the favor of reading the information currently available.

The noble let out a sigh, clearly not happy with the captain's response or attitude. Nevertheless, where he may have expected her to interrupt, she did not, letting him have the final input on the matter. Just like everyone else on the ship, she was still under effects of the incident that just transpired. The rest of the crewmen had returned to their stations, seemingly encouraged by the fact that none of them seemed to have sustain heavy injuries. That, or they were hiding them just like the captain.

"They're under the Roi, as are the DeFrance, and so are the rest of the people on this ship. Who else is there?" she replied, as if lecturing him. The situation almost felt unreal - he was ignoring both his wounds and the situation as if nothing serious ever happened, which threw her off quite a bit. For Claire, it was incredibly difficult to read him.

The nav map showed a few checkpoints left until they'd reach Tau-37, and from there to Tau-23. It's relatively uninhabited space, and the massive asteroid field of Tau-23 would help them remain undiscovered as they would continue on their route.

"30K until the next waypoint." she said, reviewing the data that the man brought up, before taking a step back and looking around the bridge.

Everything not nailed to the consoles and floor were thrown about - a complete mess, which made her wonder how the rest of the ship looked like. The systems alerts were concerning, but what of the crew? She approached one of the officers on the bridge and asked him to organise a situation report from the entire ship, so that at least they knew in what state they were flying in.

The only thing left for them is to pray that neither life support nor engines critically malfunctioned...

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