"Status report," she said to Frank.
"We're doing great. Better than great. Whoever these people are, they know how to put a ship back together." Frank practically preened over his readouts. "We'll make Avaros with time to spare."
"And the mission?" she asked. "Do we trust him?"
"Straightforward enough, isn't it? We help him dig up some old relics, he helps us find Thorium to keep the lights on back home. Sounds like a fair trade to me."
"Fine. I'll allow it."
"Weren't you impressed by the Skyforge, Colonel?" Link put in. "Fully operational. In active use, from the readings I took."
"You noticed the extra planets in this system, then," Lyn said.
"Ten worlds where the star charts list seven," Link confirmed.
"Wait, seriously?" Frank's head snapped up. "Only seven listed?"
"Don't you check your star charts before takeoff, Captain?" Lyn asked. "Should I be finding a new pilot?"
"Find one you trust more than me and I'll happily retire early. Until then, baby, you're stuck with me."
"And I'm satisfied with you. Most of the time."
"Link, you seeing this? This is how women operate. Stay well clear of them, while you still can." Frank grinned at his own joke.
Lyn let out a mock laugh, mimed a yawn, and left the cockpit to them.
At the back of the cabin, Alita studied the reclined, sleeping shape of the dark-skinned Sahir passenger. Lean muscle. An easy authority to him even asleep. Something about the whole arrangement of him kept dragging her attention back, and she let her mind wander somewhere it had no business going.
"You're wondering what our children would look like," Taisen said, without opening his eyes. "Blue and black, most likely. Might come out purple, at the right angle."
She went rigid, mortified, and turned hard toward the seatback in front of her as if it had suddenly become the most interesting object in the galaxy.
"Aren't you going to try to get anything useful out of me?" he added, coy. "Your Colonel will be back this way shortly. Wouldn't want her disappointed in you."
Alita startled again (how had he known that was exactly her assignment) and opened her mouth to demand an answer.
"By the way," he said, before she could, "you pee very loudly."
She sank back into her seat and said nothing at all for the rest of the flight.
When Lyn returned and raised an eyebrow in silent question, Alita only drew a flat line across her throat with one finger. Nothing to report.
Later that night, ship-time meaningless against a planet's actual clock, Taisen found Link standing alone near the open cargo ramp, looking out at the dark line of the Kharsat horizon where the desert finally gave way to stars.
"You should be resting," Taisen said.
"I don't sleep the way I used to. Small mercy of the parts they replaced." Link didn't turn around. "There's something I never said to you properly. Not once, in all the years since. I said thank you. I never told you what I actually did to earn needing to."
"You don't owe me the telling."
"I owe myself the telling," Link said. "You'll indulge an old machine his one indulgence, my Lord."
Taisen said nothing, which was as close to permission as he ever gave anyone, and Link took it.
"I flew targeting relay on an Akkadian strike cruiser during the war. Third seat, nothing glamorous: I read coordinates off a screen and confirmed clearance to fire, over and over, faster than any sane mind should confirm anything that matters that much. Triskelion came up on my board the same as every other rock we'd been ordered to soften before the ground assault went in. I didn't check the surface scans past the strategic layer. Command told me the layer beneath that was somebody else's job to worry about, and I believed them, because believing them was easier than doing the extra work of caring."
He was quiet a moment, the wind pulling at the ramp's edge lighting.
"I confirmed the strike. I found out afterward (long afterward, once I'd already run from that war and every version of myself that fought in it) exactly whose home stood in that strike radius. A boy named Bora Shrie. His mother. His father." His voice caught somewhere in the machinery that stood in for a throat now. "I didn't know their names when I fired. I've known nothing else since."
"I know," Taisen said, quietly enough that it barely carried past the ramp.
"You found me. Years later. Different uniform, different war, same coward wearing it. You had me on my knees in the mud outside a supply depot on the edge of nowhere, blade already drawn, and every reason in the universe to finish what you started. I remember waiting for it. I remember wanting it, a little, just to have it be over." He finally turned to look at Taisen directly. "You didn't do it. You told me later that killing me had felt like it would cost you something you'd never get back, and that you were tired of paying that particular price for other men's wars. You let me live with what I'd done instead. I've spent every year since deciding whether that was mercy or the crueller sentence of the two."
"Which have you decided?"
"Mercy," Link said, without hesitation. "Every single day, mercy. Some days I only decide it about an hour before I decide it again."
Taisen let that sit between them a while before he spoke again.
"You've paid that debt a hundred times over since. I don't keep a ledger on it anymore, and neither should you."
"You always were terrible at holding a grudge, for a man they called a butcher." Something that might have been a laugh, or might have been the closest thing his voice box could manage to one, escaped him. "Thank you. For letting me say it out loud, finally, to the only person who was ever owed hearing it."