For a moment, in the dark, it looked like it had worked.
"We appear to have arrived undetected," Taisen said, quiet enough that the words barely carried past the command chair, and there were a few subdued, disbelieving sounds of relief around the bridge: the kind of relief that comes right before the world proves it was premature.
Swan was still running his final systems check, the words "so it would seem" half out of his mouth, when the two remaining hostiles finally caught the Beluga's extra seconds of exposure and closed the distance the old cutter's borrowed time had cost her.
The proton torpedoes hit in a spread too wide and too fast for anything the Beluga carried to answer.
The bridge watched it happen in total silence: a bloom of white-orange fire against the black, swallowing the shape of a ship that had, ninety seconds earlier, been telling jokes over an open channel.
Nobody moved.
Alita's hand, halfway to the console in front of her, simply stopped, fingers curled in midair as though the rest of the gesture had lost its reason for existing. Swan's mouth stayed open on a word he never finished. Even Lyn, who had buried more crew than anyone else on this bridge and had, by her own account, run out of new ways to grieve them years ago, sat with both hands flat on the arms of her chair and did not reach for a single control.
Taisen did not move either.
He stood at the center of the command deck with his eyes on the space where the Beluga had been a full ten seconds after there was nothing left there to look at, and something in his face (some old, careful architecture Alita had never once seen crack in the weeks she'd known him) simply stopped holding its shape. It wasn't grief exactly, not the kind that showed on an ordinary face; it was closer to a man discovering, all at once, that a wall he'd been leaning his whole weight against for a very long time had just quietly given way behind him.
"Sir," Swan said, once, very carefully, and then didn't finish that either, because there was nothing in the sentence worth completing yet.
Nobody gave an order. Nobody asked for one. For the length of ten more slow, terrible seconds, the whole of the UNS Arctic simply sat still inside the shadow of an asteroid, doing nothing at all, while a man who had spent two lifetimes being three moves ahead of everyone in every room he'd ever stood in discovered that he had, this time, been exactly one move behind.
When Taisen finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual certainty in it.
"He wasn't supposed to buy us more than two minutes," he said, to no one in particular, or perhaps to all of them at once. "I built this plan around two minutes."
"He gave us what we needed," Lyn said, quietly, because someone had to say something and she had decided, in the moment, that it should be true rather than merely kind.
"He gave us what I miscalculated we needed," Taisen said, and something in the flatness of it made Alita's chest go tight, because she recognized, underneath the words, the sound of a man arguing with himself in a language he thought he'd buried a lifetime ago. "I read their reaction time wrong. I told this crew, an hour ago, that a conquered people don't improvise. I built a war plan on the assumption that whoever runs that blockade thinks the way every occupier I studied in Vessyr's archive thought: slow, rigid, incapable of adjusting inside a narrow window. I was wrong, and Usyk is dead because I was wrong, and I would like, for exactly one moment, to simply sit with that fact before I do anything else useful with it."
Nobody answered him. Alita understood, watching him, that he hadn't been asking anyone to.
He stood there a while longer: not the practiced stillness he wore like armor in every room she'd ever watched him walk into, but something rawer, older, a boy standing over bodies on a planet none of them had ever heard the name of yet. She thought, distantly, of every time she'd pressed him about Boettia and watched him close the conversation like a door (never mind, that's the last time you do that to me, I don't care about my reputation) and understood, without being told, that this was the crack in that door she'd been asking for all along, arriving from a direction she'd never once thought to look.
Taisen opened his mouth on the joke he always reached for when a room got too heavy to stand upright in, and nothing came out. His hand, resting on the arm of the command chair, closed slowly into a fist and stayed that way long after there was any reason for it to.
"Taisen." Alita said his name, not his rank, deliberately, and watched something in his shoulders register it.
He looked at her for a long moment (long enough that she thought, for one unguarded second, that he might actually let her in the rest of the way, might finally say the word Boettia out loud in front of someone instead of around it), and then she watched him find the door again, quietly, and close it, gentler than usual but closed all the same.
"Later," he said. "Right now I have a ship to fly quietly enough that his death buys us something." He straightened, and the old certainty came back over his face like a tide returning, though Alita noted, and would go on noting for a long time after, that it didn't quite reach all the way to his eyes this time. "Helm. Confirm we're still dark. I want a full report on our position the moment it's safe to move."
The bridge, slowly, began breathing again.
Taisen and Lyn made the crossing to the mining station alone, in a shuttle barely large enough for the two of them and their gear, threading a six-hour path through drifting rock and debris with the maneuvering jets alone: thrusters would have left contrails any patrol worth its uniform could read from three systems away, and neither of them was interested in finding out whether the blockade had a fourth ship in reserve.