Five months and three weeks after Nix Dross had been pulled off a damaged freighter at the edge of Compact space, Sera Vane told him he was ready.
She said it the same way she said most things. Directly, without ceremony, in the training room at the end of a session, while marking something on her datapad. Like it was a data point rather than a conclusion six months in the making. He'd learned enough about her by now to know that was exactly how she intended it and that it meant more coming that way than it would have with any amount of weight put around it.
"Ready for reconnaissance approach," she said. "Not full engagement. Not a solution. Approach and return with data." She looked up. "The flow is reliable at rank four input. Shaping is precise enough for directed release at rank three output in flow state. Capacity awareness is solid. The simultaneous work is as developed as it's going to get in a controlled environment." She paused. "The rest has to be learned in the field."
"How long ago did you decide this," he said.
A beat. "Three weeks ago."
He looked at her. "You waited three weeks."
"I wanted to be sure," she said. "And I wanted the hard stops to be airtight before I said it out loud." She met his eyes. "They are. You hit any of the threshold readings we've established and you pull back regardless of what's happening around you. That's not a guideline. It's the condition under which I'm saying you're ready."
"I know," he said.
"Say it back to me."
"I hit the thresholds, I pull back. Regardless of what's happening."
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she nodded and went back to her datapad and that was that.
He told Fen first because Fen was the easiest to tell and because he was sitting in the corridor outside the training room as usual, datapad in hand, with the expression of someone who already knew and was waiting to be officially informed.
"Three weeks ago I estimated two to four weeks," Fen said. "So that tracks."
"You knew three weeks ago."
"I had a strong working hypothesis," Fen said. "There's a difference." He fell into step beside Nix. "How do you feel."
Nix thought about it. The honest version. "Like I've been building toward something for six months and now that it's here I'm aware that the building was the part I understood."
Fen nodded. "That's a reasonable response to unknown odds."
"Maren's phrase."
"It's a good phrase." Fen glanced at him. "For what it's worth I've run every model I can build with the data we have. The flow capability genuinely changes the risk profile in ways that are difficult to quantify but clearly meaningful. You're not Carro Denn walking into Heth. The situation isn't the same."
"I know," Nix said.
"I'm saying it because I think it's true," Fen said. "Not to make you feel better."
"I know that too," Nix said. "That's why it helps."
Fen went back to his datapad and Nix went to find Varek.
Varek was in his office, which was small and relentlessly organized in the way that suggested the organization was doing real work rather than performing it. He was looking at the star map when Nix came in, the one with the dimmed lights, and he didn't seem surprised to see him.
"Sera told you," Nix said.
"She told me this morning," Varek said. "I've been waiting to see if you'd come find me or wait for a briefing."
"Is that a test."
"Everything is information," Varek said, which wasn't quite an answer. He gestured at the chair across from his desk. Nix sat.
The star map on the wall had more dimmed lights than the last time Nix had looked at it carefully. He counted without meaning to. Nine. Two more since the briefing two months ago. Farren and a small outer station called Relay Seven. The gap between contacts had shrunk again. Eight days now, down from eleven.
"Callan Station," Nix said.
"At current rate, five to seven weeks," Varek said. "We've begun quiet evacuation planning. The Council is still managing public information carefully." He paused in a way that meant he had opinions about that which he wasn't going to voice right now. "The approach window we're looking at is ten days from now. Close enough to the current contact zone to get meaningful data, far enough that we have some margin."
"What does the team look like for this."
"You, Sera, Maren," Varek said. "Small and fast. The Ashfront drops you at a safe distance and holds position. You take a scout ship in." He looked at Nix. "Sera and Maren don't cross the threshold we've established. They're there for extraction and support up to that point. What happens beyond the threshold is you."
Nix thought about that. Sera and Maren at the edge and him going the rest of the way alone. Into whatever the probe data had measured and not come back from. Into the thing that had taken nine worlds and shown no sign of slowing.
"Sera agreed to that," he said.
"She proposed it," Varek said.
He hadn't expected that. He thought about her in the training room three weeks ago, deciding to wait until the hard stops were airtight. Deciding to be sure.
"What am I looking for," Nix said. "Specifically."
Varek pulled up a secondary display. "Anything that tells us how they operate. Movement patterns, whether they respond to non-frequency presence, whether the invisibility theory holds at close range, whether there's any structure to what they do or whether it's entirely instinctive." He paused. "And if possible, what happened to the worlds they took. Whether there's anything left."
The last one sat in the room differently from the others.
Six hundred thousand people across nine worlds. The number that was too large to feel real. Nix had stopped trying to make it feel real and started just carrying it instead, as a weight rather than a concept, because that was the only way he'd found to keep it from becoming abstract.
"Okay," he said.
Varek looked at him. "You're not going to ask for more time."
"Would more time change anything."
"No," Varek said. "But people often ask anyway."
"I'm ready," Nix said. "That's what Sera said and she doesn't say things she doesn't mean." He paused. "Ten days to prepare. I want real time communication with Fen during the approach. Whatever he can read from the outside I want to hear it."
"Already planned," Varek said.
"And I want to talk to my crew again before we go."
Varek nodded. "I'll arrange it."
Nix stood up.
"Nix," Varek said.
He stopped.
Varek looked at him across the desk with the unreadable careful attention he'd had since the beginning, except something had shifted in it. Something that had been purely calculating when they first met had something else in it now, not quite what Nix would have called personal, but adjacent to it.
"The Compact made a mistake with Carro Denn," Varek said. "Not just in how they trained him or how fast they pushed him. In how they thought about him. He was a resource before he was a person and that shaped every decision they made." He paused. "I want you to know that's not what this is."
Nix held his gaze.
"I know," he said. And he mostly meant it, which after six months of careful observation was more than he'd expected to be able to say.
He went back to his quarters and sat on his cot and looked at the viewport. Ten days. The long dark outside doing what it always did, which was nothing, patient and enormous and indifferent.
He thought about Mura's message from three months ago. Sounds about right. Don't die. He'd gotten two more since then, short and practical in the way all of Mura's communication was, and one from Yeva that had been longer and said more than she'd probably intended. Pol had sent him a voice message that was mostly background noise and then thirty seconds of Pol clearly having forgotten he'd started recording. Nix had listened to it twice.
He thought about a cargo hold that smelled like burnt coolant. A life that had been small and quiet and limited and his, in the way that small quiet things could be yours in a way that larger things sometimes weren't.
He thought about nine dimmed lights on a map and the number too large to feel real.
He opened his datapad and started writing a message to Mura. Not about what was coming, she didn't need that. Just a message. The ordinary kind, the kind that said nothing important and therefore said everything.
He wrote it slowly and carefully.
Then he sent it and put the datapad down and got some sleep.