He went down to one knee, the cold in his hand suddenly, sharply present in a way it had not been a moment before, a dull, useless weight rather than a limb, and it was Camaro, seeing it happen from across the room, who reached him first, driving her own shoulder into the scavenger before he could press the advantage, buying Taisen the half second he needed to get his good hand back under him.
"Get up," Camaro said, sharp, hauling him upright with one arm while her other hand brought her weapon back to bear on the specimen wall, where the third scavenger had already torn a fragment of dark, seamed metal free from its case and was backing toward the corridor with it clutched against his chest. "Swan, cover Venemis. I've got him."
Swan's hands, trembling badly a moment ago, had gone still the instant the shooting actually started, the particular steadiness that only ever arrived for him once the fear had nowhere left to hide from, and he'd already pulled Venemis bodily behind the thick metal frame of the nearest specimen case, angling his own body between her and the suppressing fire without pausing to think about whether that was the wise choice or simply the only one that occurred to him. He found, in the same half second, the small override panel controlling the vault's remaining specimen cases, and slammed his palm against it, locking every case he could reach in a single motion, sealing the third scavenger's stolen fragment inside a chamber it took him three precious seconds to physically force back open, three seconds that bought Camaro exactly the opening she needed to close half the distance toward him.
It wasn't enough, in the end, to stop him entirely. But it was, Taisen would think later, exactly the kind of quiet, useful competence that never made it into anyone's account of a fight afterward, the difference between a clean escape and a costly one, and it had come from the one man aboard who spent every quiet hour beforehand insisting, out loud, that he wasn't built for exactly this.
Taisen forced himself upright, his grey hand hanging useless and numb at his side, and drew his own blade with the other, meeting Sorrel's own advance with a speed that owed nothing to the failed hand and everything to two lifetimes of training in the one that still worked, their blades meeting once, twice, the corridor's narrow confines forcing both of them into a fight closer and uglier than either would have chosen given the room to choose.
He won it, in the end, disarming her with a strike she nearly read in time and didn't quite, but the cost of it sat plain on his face when it was over: a shallow cut along his forearm where her own blade had found him in the exchange his failed hand should have blocked, his ribs aching hard enough to make each breath a deliberate act rather than an automatic one, and the specimen fragment, the one piece of Kade's physical evidence that might have told them something the notes hadn't, gone, carried off down the corridor by the third scavenger while the rest of them had been occupied fighting for their lives instead of guarding the wall.
Sorrel, disarmed and bleeding from a cut along her own shoulder, looked at him a long moment from the floor, something almost like respect moving behind her scarred, weathered face.
"Should've taken the split," she said, and did not resist when Camaro hauled her upright and secured her wrists, the fight, for her at least, plainly, professionally over.
They did not catch the third scavenger. Osei had broken from the maintenance shaft the instant the fight began, moving fast and quiet through the frosted corridor beyond, and had come within sight of the man twice, close enough once to nearly close the gap entirely, but the scavenger had too great a head start and too clear a memory of his own escape route, and by the time Osei reached the docking collar the small craft was already sealing its own hatch, the whine of its engines rising into the thin, cold air a half second before it broke free of the station entirely.
He came back to the vault at a jog, breathing hard, and reported it plainly, without excuse, in the same flat, factual register he reported most things.
"He's clear," Osei said. "Small craft, already accelerating away from the station. I had him in sight twice and couldn't close the last of the distance either time. That's on me, not on anyone else in this room." He glanced toward the comm at his wrist. "Colonel Lyn's confirmed no firing solution that wouldn't risk hitting the station itself, and she's told me not to take the shot regardless. I agree with her."
"She's right not to," Taisen said, sitting now against the vault's cold bulkhead, Swan's hands working quickly and carefully at the cut along his forearm, his ribs still aching hard enough that every word cost him a small, private effort to keep his voice even. "Let him go. We're not trading a fragment of dark metal for a firefight that risks this whole station coming down around what's left in this vault."
"He's got the specimen," Camaro said, checking the restraints on Sorrel's wrists a final time before turning her attention fully back to the room. "Whatever it would have told us, it's gone with him now."
"Then we work with what's still here," Taisen said, "and we call this the cost of tonight rather than pretend it isn't one. We didn't come out of this clean. I'd rather say that plainly than let anyone in this room believe we did."
Sorrel, seated now against the opposite bulkhead under Camaro's watchful eye, made a small, dry sound that might, in a different setting, have been a laugh.
"You're an odd one, Commander," she said. "Most people in your position would be telling this room how well it went, given that you're all still breathing."
"Most people in my position would be lying," Taisen said, "and I've found, across a considerably longer life than you'd guess looking at me, that lying to your own crew about what a fight actually cost is a worse habit than losing the fight in the first place."