Lyn picked her tablet back up, more out of a need to do something with her hands than any hope the numbers would have changed since the last time she'd read them. The system at the edge of the Chaos Region (a cell system, the old charts called it, for the way its own storms sealed it off from the rest of the galaxy) was walled in by a solar wind and an electromagnetic tempest violent enough to scramble every clean navigational solution a modern ship could generate. Even Vessyr's centuries-old charts, thorough as they were about nearly everything else, gave the odds of a clean vector through it at well under a tenth of a percentage point: not a warning so much as a shrug encoded in the numbers themselves. And every entry route into the system sat under watch from armored hulls of a design no UN database had ever catalogued, ships positioned less like a blockade in the strict sense and more like an interdiction: there to control passage, not merely repel it.
Unreliable navigation. Heavy protection. An isolated system on the strength of unconfirmed intelligence. Taken together, it read less like a mission plan and more like a list of reasons not to attempt one.
"How exactly do you plan to navigate a storm that eats sensor returns for breakfast?" Lyn asked.
Taisen's hand went, briefly, to the eyepatch: a small, unconscious gesture Alita had watched him make a dozen times now without ever once getting a straight answer to go with it. This time, when he answered, there was something in his voice that suggested he'd decided, finally, that a crew flying blind into a storm with him had earned better than a shrug of his own.
"The current runs through that storm the same way it runs through everything else that carries a charge," he said. "Most of what I've lost from this eye, I lost in a way that left the nerve behind it strange rather than simply dead. It answers to disturbance in the current now: badly, unreliably, nothing I'd stake a ship's hull on by itself. Paired with what instruments we do have, though, it should be enough to feel a path through where the sensors alone would only see static."
"That's not nothing," Usyk said slowly. "It's also not an answer I'd have guessed at in a hundred years of guessing."
"It isn't precognition," Taisen added, before the wrong conclusion could take root in the room. "It isn't the Falmeri's Third Sight, and I haven't borrowed it from anyone who'd miss it. It's a debt my own body is still paying off from a mistake I made months ago, that happens, against every reasonable expectation, to be useful for something. I'd advise no one build a strategy around the assumption that it works perfectly. I don't."
Alita kept that one close, with the particular care she'd started giving everything he said about the cost of his own power, ever since the derelict: the numbness that came and went in his fingertips, the grey she sometimes caught at the edge of his eyes that he never once mentioned unprompted. She'd stopped thinking of it as a party trick a long time before this conversation. She still hadn't found the nerve to ask him, directly, how much of himself he was quietly spending on things he never told anyone about until the bill came due.
"There is one part of this I want examined more carefully before anyone signs off on it," Swan said, from his seat near the door (invited, at Taisen's own insistence), because a mission that lived or died on navigational precision was a mission Swan had earned a voice in. He'd rehearsed the objection twice already on the walk over, mostly to keep the shake out of his hands, and it hadn't worked either time. "The patrol data we're building this whole approach around is old, sir. It's Vessyr's: centuries old, filtered through Ashera's memory of a mining station nobody's set foot on in longer than that. We're assuming the interdiction pattern at the Cell system hasn't changed since then. If it has (if Malkor's people have reinforced that chokepoint even slightly since we started pulling threads near Avaros and that derelict), we'll be flying a plan built for a threat that isn't the one actually waiting for us."
It was, Alita thought, exactly the kind of thing Swan had gotten good at saying since his first week on this bridge: not confidence performed, but doubt offered honestly, without apology and without hiding behind a joke to make it smaller.
Taisen considered it longer than he considered most things brought to him in this room, which Alita noted, because it meant he'd already weighed this one privately and wanted to be seen doing it again, out loud, for the room's benefit.
"You're not wrong to raise it," he said. "I've weighed the same risk. Every study I've made of the Reza (through Vessyr's archive, through Ashera's own memory of Malkor) describes an occupying power that runs on rigid, top-down decision-making. Species conquered wholesale rarely improvise well; it isn't in the nature of what conquest does to an institution's reflexes. I'm gambling that a chokepoint this remote, this low-priority by their own accounting, wouldn't see reinforcement inside the narrow window since our activity near Avaros drew any attention at all. It's a calculated risk, Ensign, not a blind one. I'd be lying if I told you it was zero."
"Understood, sir," Swan said, and did not look reassured, and said nothing further, because he had said what he'd come to say and trusted, the way he'd learned to trust exactly one thing about this Commander, that being heard and being overruled weren't the same insult.
Camaro, beside him, said nothing at all, which (Alita would think later, turning the whole meeting over afterward the way she turned over everything now) was its own kind of answer.
The Arctic and the Beluga dropped from the Fold in tight, practiced tandem three hours later, close enough that Swan, peering up through the bridge canopy at the older cutter's running lights, could have counted rivets if he'd had the nerve to look for that long.