Taisen. And Alita.
She sent it before she could talk herself into a fourth draft, and sat a moment afterward with her hands still resting on the terminal, feeling, not for the first time this month, the particular weight of having just put words into the dark toward a man she had never met and might never meet, whose entire fate now rested, in some small part, on whether she'd chosen those words carefully enough.
There was one more thing in the old visitor log, smaller, easy to have missed entirely if Alita hadn't kept reading past the entry that mattered most, and she brought it to Taisen the moment the shuttle had docked and the whole party stood, travel worn and quietly shaken, back aboard the Arctic's own bright, familiar corridors.
"A supply request," she said, "logged against this station three weeks ago, routed through a civilian shipping registry rather than anything military. Small quantities. Rations, medical stock, atmosphere scrubbers, the kind of order you'd place for a handful of people holding somewhere quietly for an extended stay, not for a derelict observatory nobody's supposed to be occupying at all. The delivery coordinate isn't Calder's Reach itself. It's a waypoint three systems out, an old mining claim that shows no other activity on any record I can find."
"How many people does an order that size actually feed," Swan asked, working through the practical shape of it with the same patient attention he gave most numbers.
"Hard to say precisely," Alita said, "but the atmosphere scrubber count suggests somewhere between three and six, held for roughly a month at current consumption, which lines up close enough with how long Zhang's actually been missing that I don't think it's coincidence. Three to six people is a small enough number that it isn't a garrison. It's a guard detail and whoever they're guarding."
Taisen went very still, the cold in his ruined hand settling deeper, patient and unhurried, the way it always settled when something in front of him mattered enough to notice.
"Someone's keeping a man alive out there," he said, quiet. "Quietly. Off the books, on a schedule that matches almost exactly how long Zhang's been missing."
"I can't promise you it's him," Alita said. "I want to be honest about that before either of us lets ourselves hope past what the evidence supports. But it's the first concrete coordinate either of us has found in this entire search that isn't a name on a suspect list or a rumor from a broker with something to sell. I'd rather hand you a real place with real uncertainty attached than another rumor dressed up as more than it is."
"Then it's the next thread," Taisen said, "and we've earned, tonight, the right to follow it with considerably less patience than we followed the last one."
Sorrel sat in the Arctic's small holding compartment with the particular unbothered patience of a woman who had been arrested before and expected, this time as every other time, to eventually walk away from it, her wrists still bound in front of her, her scarred face unreadable in the compartment's low light when Taisen came to see her before the ship's course had fully settled toward the waypoint.
"Come to gloat, Commander," she said, mild, not looking up right away.
"Come to ask you something," Taisen said. "You don't have to answer. I'd rather ask plainly and be refused plainly than waste either of our time pretending this is a friendlier conversation than it actually is."
"Ask, then."
"Your buyer," Taisen said. "The one paying well for anything solid on the Forge. Is he Krell proper, or independent, as you described yourself."
Sorrel considered him a long moment, weighing, Taisen judged, not whether to answer but how much of an answer actually cost her anything at all to give. "Independent," she said finally. "Krell proper doesn't deal in rumors this thin yet. Whoever's paying for Forge scraps right now is somebody with money and patience both, willing to buy a little at a time before committing to the whole picture. That's not how the Syndicate proper operates. They wait for a sure thing and then they move all at once. This buyer's still building toward sure."
"Which means he doesn't have it yet," Taisen said. "Whatever it actually is."
"Near as I can tell," Sorrel agreed. "For what that's worth to you, which I suspect is considerably less than you were hoping when you walked in here."
"It's worth something," Taisen said. "I'd rather know the shape of an enemy who's still building toward certainty than one I've mistaken for already having it."
Sorrel studied him a moment longer, something almost like genuine curiosity moving behind her scarred, weathered face. "You're an odd sort of captor, Commander. Most men in your position would have left me to rot in here without another word once the questioning was done. You keep talking like you actually want my opinion of things."
"I find opinions considerably more useful than silence," Taisen said, "even from people I have every reason not to trust. You'll be held aboard this ship until we can hand you to a proper authority that isn't currently compromised by whoever's been feeding your own buyer's rivals information from inside Fleet Command itself. I'd imagine that arrangement suits you better than most of the alternatives available to a woman in your position tonight."
"It does, at that," Sorrel admitted, and said nothing further, and Taisen left her to the quiet, unbothered patience she seemed to carry into every room she was ever likely to find herself locked inside of.
Sickbay held its own particular quiet an hour later, Swan working with careful, deliberate hands to close the cut along Taisen's forearm properly now that the suit had come off and the wound could actually be seen, Alita perched on the edge of the second bed with Venemis beside her, both of them still travel worn from the shuttle crossing, and Camaro leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching the room the way she watched most rooms these days, cataloguing rather than merely occupying.
"You should have let me hit him back," Camaro said, not for the first time since the shuttle had docked, needling gently at an argument she'd clearly already lost and wasn't quite ready to set down. "Sorrel, I mean. One good hit to make the point that this crew doesn't lose fights it's already won."