Taisen was on his feet in an instant, Swan already helping Venemis upright despite her legs still unsteady beneath her, and the five of them arranged themselves without needing to discuss it, muscle memory from two days of drills in the Arctic's shuttle bay taking over where conscious thought would have cost them precious seconds: Camaro at the doorway, Taisen a step behind her, Swan and Venemis further back near the desk, Osei moving without a word to cover the vault's one other exit, a narrow maintenance shaft he'd noted and quietly marked on the way in, precisely for a moment like this one.
The three figures that resolved out of the corridor's dark a moment later wore mismatched suits, salvage-patched and clearly scavenged from more than one source, weapons held with the particular loose, practiced ease of people who had used them before and expected to again, and the one in front, a broad, scarred woman with a voice that carried, even through a suit comm, the flat, unbothered confidence of someone used to being the most dangerous person in any room she walked into, stopped short at the sight of them, weapon rising a fraction rather than dropping.
"Well," she said. "That's inconvenient. We were told this vault was still sealed."
"You're Krell," Taisen said. It wasn't a question.
"Independent," the woman said, mild, as though the distinction mattered a great deal to her personally. "Broker's agent, if the word means anything to you. Name's Sorrel. We're not here for a fight, Commander, whoever you are. We're here for whatever's actually worth carrying out of this cold, ugly little station, same as you, near as I can tell, and I'd much rather split what's here two ways than lose good people finding out the hard way which of us walks out with all of it."
"There's nothing here to split," Camaro said, flat, weapon steady. "It's research notes and a dead woman's recordings. Not salvage."
Sorrel's eyes moved, once, past Camaro's shoulder, toward the specimen wall and its fragments of dark, seamed metal, and something in her scarred, weathered face sharpened, briefly, into genuine interest.
"That," she said, "is worth more to the right buyer than half this ship's crew will earn in a lifetime, and we both know it. I'm not asking you to hand over the whole vault, Commander. I'm asking for a reasonable split of what's actually here, quietly, before either of us decides this needs to get louder than it currently is."
"You said you were told this vault was sealed," Taisen said, watching her closely, weighing the shape of the sentence rather than simply its content. "Told by whom."
Sorrel's mouth curved, faintly, something that might have been genuine amusement or might have been the particular caution of a professional who had just heard exactly the kind of question she'd hoped nobody would think to ask. "That's not part of the split I'm offering, Commander. A woman in my line of work keeps her sources the way you're keeping whatever's actually in that vault. I'll trade you an answer to that for half of what's in the specimen wall. Otherwise we're both just standing here wasting the little patience either of us has left."
"No trade," Camaro said.
"Then we're at an impasse," Sorrel said, and something in her weight shifted, subtle, a fractional lowering of her stance that Taisen had seen before in enough opponents to recognize for what it actually was, the last small tell before a decision already made finished arriving at the muscles that would carry it out.
"You're not going to take the split," Taisen said, quiet, reading the same shift she'd just betrayed.
"No," Sorrel agreed, almost gently, almost regretful. "I don't think I am. I'll be honest with you, Commander, since we're apparently being honest tonight. My buyer wants this badly enough that walking away with nothing isn't really an option I've been given. I'd rather have taken the easy version of tonight. I've got considerably less patience for the hard one, but I've got it, if that's what you're offering me instead."
Sorrel studied him a moment longer, weighing something Taisen couldn't yet fully see the shape of, and then, almost regretfully, shrugged, the particular loose, unbothered shrug of someone who had genuinely hoped this would go the easier way and had already begun planning for the harder one before the hope had fully died.
"Shame," she said, and moved.
It happened fast, the way real fights always happened faster than the mind wanted to process them, Camaro's first shot going wide as Sorrel dropped low and to the side with the practiced ease of someone who had survived considerably more firefights than any of them had faced together, one of her two companions breaking right for the specimen wall while the other laid down a suppressing burst that forced Swan and Venemis back hard against the desk, cracked glass from a specimen case showering down around them in the low gravity's strange, slow-drifting arcs.
Taisen saw the shape of it a half second before it fully happened, the way he always saw a fight's shape a half second before anyone else in the room, and understood, watching it, that Sorrel had planned this exact split from the moment she'd walked in: one body to threaten the doorway, one to strip the specimen wall, one to keep the rest of them pinned down long enough for the theft to finish before anyone could stop it. It was a good plan, built by someone who had clearly run this exact play before, in some other cold, contested room, against some other crew that hadn't seen it coming in time.
He moved without fully deciding to, closing the distance to the second Krell scavenger before the man could bring his own weapon fully to bear, meaning to take the man's wrist and redirect the strike as he'd redirected a hundred strikes before it across two different lives, and it was there, in the half second his grey hand should have closed around that wrist, that it happened.
Nothing.
His hand simply did not close. The fingers, curled toward the grip he'd meant to take, met flesh and slid past it, the strength that should have been there absent entirely, a rope gone slack the instant it's cut rather than fraying slowly toward failure, and the scavenger's own strike, unredirected, caught him hard across the ribs, driving the air from his lungs in a single ragged burst.