"And Venemis," Alita said.
"Stays exactly where she is," Taisen said, "under exactly the guard she's under now. This isn't the moment to change that arrangement, whatever she's told me tonight, and I suspect she'd tell you herself she doesn't expect it to change yet either."
Osei, who had said almost nothing through the entire planning session, stood near the back of the room, arms loose at his sides, the way he stood near most rooms he was technically not required to be in. He spoke up for the first time, quiet, even, each word coming slowly, as though it had been considered and set in order before it was allowed out.
"I'll hold this ship's exterior while you're gone," he said. "Not just her door. The whole hull. If someone tried once to reach Zhang through the people closest to him, I'd rather not assume this crew's the only one they'd try it on, or that the front door's the only one worth watching."
Taisen looked at him a moment, and something in his face eased, fractionally, the particular quiet approval he reserved for competence offered without being asked for.
"Good instinct," he said. "Take it, and take it seriously. I mean that."
"I always do," Osei said, and there was nothing in it that could have been mistaken for a boast.
The shuttle ran dark and quiet through the last stretch of open Fold before Hollis Station's beacon resolved out of the grey churn ahead, a squat, unlovely structure hanging at the edge of a system nobody had bothered naming for anything grander than its catalog number, and Taisen sat through the last twenty minutes of the approach with his grey hand folded inside his coat, out of sight, and said nothing about the particular cold that had settled into it an hour ago and had not, since, let go, watching instead the station grow slowly larger in the forward viewport, grey and pitted and entirely unremarkable, exactly the kind of place a person's eye slid past without registering.
The shuttle itself was small and spare, built for utility rather than comfort, the kind of craft the Arctic carried more out of necessity than any particular pride in it: bare metal bulkheads, three narrow jump seats bolted along the aft wall, a forward console barely wide enough for two people to work at once. It smelled faintly of recycled air and the ozone tang of instruments run too long without proper maintenance, and every small vibration of the hull under Swan's hands carried through the deck plating and up into the soles of Taisen's boots, a constant, low-grade reminder of exactly how little stood between them and the open dark outside.
He had chosen this craft over the Arctic's larger launch deliberately, precisely because it was the kind of vessel nobody bothered logging carefully at a station like this one: too small to be worth a customs inspector's full attention, too anonymous to be remembered five minutes after it had docked and gone again.
Swan noticed anyway. Swan noticed most things now.
"You're doing the thing," he said, quiet, from the shuttle's small forward console, not looking up from his instruments, his hands moving over the small craft's minimal controls with the particular competence he only ever showed once the fear had already arrived and there was, finally, nothing left to do but work through it. "Holding it still. The way you were holding it in sickbay, before Camaro made you sit down and actually look at it."
"I'm aware of what I'm doing," Taisen said.
"I didn't ask if you were aware," Swan said, and there was something almost wry in it, an echo of Camaro's own flatness that made Taisen glance at him, briefly, with something that might have been the beginning of a smile if either of them had had the room for one just then. "I'm telling you I noticed, sir, because you asked me to notice, and because a records officer who's spent thirty years reading the smallest tells in a person's paperwork is exactly the kind of woman who'll notice a commander holding his own hand like it's made of something breakable the moment he walks through her door. If it's climbing again under the stress of this approach, I'd rather know now, while we've still got twenty minutes to decide what to do about it, than find out when it matters and there's no more time left to plan around it."
"It's not climbing faster," Taisen said, after a moment, honestly, turning the question over the way Swan had learned he turned over most things he didn't want to answer carelessly. "It's simply cold. Colder than usual. I don't know if that's the hand or the nerves of walking into a room I know nothing about, banking a man's dead lead on a phrase that might mean nothing, and I've decided, for the next twenty minutes at least, not to spend the energy working out which. I'll have the rest of the flight home to sit with the answer either way."
"Fair," Swan said, and let it go, watching the station's docking beacon resolve into a steady, patient pulse against the dark, close enough now that its individual running lights had begun to separate out of the general grey smear it had been a minute ago into distinct, tired points, the visible signs of a place built for function rather than any pretense of welcome.
Camaro, strapped into the shuttle's rear jump seat, said nothing at all through the whole approach, her weapon checked twice already and holstered a third time, watching the station grow with the flat, patient attention of a woman who had learned, on some other ship in some other year, to save her worrying for the moment it would actually be useful rather than spend it early on a fear that hadn't earned itself yet. She had run this same mental drill before every uncertain docking she'd ever flown into: exits first, cover second, the fastest route back to the shuttle third, all of it laid out and memorized before her boots ever touched a deck she didn't already know, so that if the worst happened there'd be nothing left to think about, only things left to do.