It was also, unbeknownst to her, precisely the window Taisen had built his countermeasures around: a general-spectrum jamming field, keyed to trigger automatically the moment the Arctic dropped within final approach range of the system, on the theory that any traitor with a working memory of the last time this trick had been tried against Reza patrols would wait until the very last safe moment to make her move, the same way any careful person would.
Venemis was careful. She was also frightened in a way three months of watching her own people vanish into Malkor's service had taught her to act on immediately rather than wait out, and so she took her chance an hour earlier than her own plan called for, the moment the guards' attention wandered and a gap opened in the ship's internal patrol pattern that she hadn't expected and wasn't about to waste.
The burst went out clean, short, and a full hour before Taisen's jamming field had any reason to be listening for it.
By the time the Arctic dropped out of the Fold at the mouth of the Cell system, three Reza cruisers that should have been holding a standard patrol distance were already three-quarters of the way through a full intercept burn.
"Contact," Alita called, sharp. "Three hostiles, already closing: this isn't a patrol pattern, Commander, they're already committed."
Taisen's eyes went to the tactical plot and held there half a second longer than Alita liked. "Understood. Accelerate the sequence. We don't have the lead time we planned for."
The plan, built across three careful days, called for a decoy shuttle to burn hard for the inner system while a second, smaller craft slipped free under cover of the confusion, both of them baiting exactly one of the three cruisers into a chase that would separate it from its escort long enough for the Arctic to spring a trap built for a single, isolated target. It had never been built to survive three ships arriving with a head start.
"Launch both shuttles now," Taisen ordered. "Camaro, I need a firing solution on the lead cruiser the instant it commits to the chase: not before."
"Solution's not fully calibrated yet, sir, I need."
"You have until it commits."
The decoy shuttle streaked away on automatic, drawing two of the three cruisers into pursuit exactly as designed; the second craft, smaller, peeled off behind the Arctic's own bulk on a trajectory meant to put it directly in the third cruiser's path at the worst possible moment for that cruiser's pilot. It worked: the lead Reza ship, twisting hard to avoid a collision it hadn't accounted for, clipped its own weapons cluster against the shuttle's hull instead, tumbling out of formation with its port-side batteries wrecked and its engines guttering.
It should have ended there, clean and controlled, the way Taisen had built it to.
Instead, something in the crippled cruiser's dying hull found one last reflexive burst of power: a point-defense turret nobody on the Arctic had accounted for still having a charge, firing blind and short-ranged in whatever direction its targeting scrap of a brain still recognized as a threat, precisely because the Arctic had been forced to close the distance faster and sloppier than the plan called for, with no time left to hold at the safer range Taisen had originally intended.
The shot caught the forward weapons blister low, on the outside edge, and Camaro went down hard against her own console in a spray of sparks and shattered display glass, one hand curled tight and wrong against her chest.
"Ensign!" Alita was out of her seat before the ship finished shuddering.
"I'm," Camaro's voice came out thin, teeth gritted around it, "still here. Hand's bad. Keep working the problem."
Taisen didn't look away from the tactical plot, though something in his jaw tightened at the sound of her voice. "Med team to the bridge, now. Tractor beams, Helm: bring us in over the dorsal ridge, out of line from her remaining batteries." He said it fast, flat, a man triaging two emergencies with the same breath, and Alita understood, watching him, that whatever this cost him privately would have to wait, again, for later.
The tow net went out a half-second sloppier than Taisen would have wanted, the crippler charge running hotter than intended because there hadn't been time to bleed it down to the gentler setting the plan called for: enough to guarantee the Reza crew inside couldn't trigger a self-destruct, and also enough, Taisen understood grimly the moment the readouts came back, to cook clean through what remained of the cruiser's engine section. What they'd captured, when the smoke cleared, was a prize that would need to be towed home at a crawl rather than flown, adding days to a trip that had already cost them a decoy shuttle, a wrecked weapons blister, and one badly burned hand.
It was, Taisen thought, watching the medics carry Camaro past him toward the sick bay, exactly the kind of victory that history would record as clean, and exactly the kind that never once felt like one from the inside of it.
He found Venemis afterward, still seated at her console, her winglets pressed unnaturally flat and still against her cheeks: too still, Taisen noted, and racked it alongside every other physical tell he'd ever caught in a room full of people trying to hide something. A woman genuinely relieved to have survived an ambush didn't sit that quietly.
"You navigated us here precisely," he said, mild, giving nothing of his suspicion away in his voice. "I'm grateful."
"It is what I agreed to do, Commander," Venemis said, and did not meet his eyes.
"So it was," Taisen said, and left it there, because he had learned, across two lifetimes, that the most useful thing you could do with a suspicion you couldn't yet prove was nothing at all, out loud, until the moment it stopped being merely useful and started being necessary.