"I have spent the better part of two lifetimes being the smartest person in most rooms I've stood in," he told them, "which is a dangerous habit for a commander to carry, because it teaches you to trust your own read of a situation more than the situation has earned."
He looked out over the assembled faces.
"I read the Reza wrong. I built a plan on an assumption about how an occupying power thinks, and the assumption was wrong, and Herman Usyk is dead because I was too confident in my own analysis to leave enough margin for being mistaken. I intend to carry that. I don't intend to hide it from any of you, going forward, the way I hid it this past week, which was a mistake of a different kind, and one I'm equally sorry for."
Camaro, in the second row, sat very still through all of it, her bandaged hand resting on the table in front of her. When he finished, and the room held its breath waiting to see if anyone would say anything, she was the one who broke it.
"Why Triskelion?" she asked. Not hostile. Genuinely asking.
"Because it's the place I buried the only family I've ever had," Taisen said.
The room went very quiet in a different way than before.
"In a life most of you know almost nothing about, and Malkor has just invited me back to it, and I no longer believe that's a coincidence, whatever it costs me to find out otherwise. I'm not asking any of you to carry that grief alongside me. I'm asking you to trust that a man doesn't walk willingly back into the place his family died without a reason worth the walking."
Nobody answered that directly. But Swan, near the front, straightened in his seat. Alita watched something pass silently around the room, crew to crew. A kind of settling rather than agreement. The sort of thing that happened when people decided, without saying so out loud, that they were staying regardless of what came next.
They put in at a scarred, half-abandoned refueling depot on the fringe of Kharsat space three days later. A rock of a station kept alive by a skeleton crew and stubbornness in roughly equal measure, to offload the crippled Reza cruiser into the custody of a garrison commander Taisen trusted with the particular, hard-won trust of a man who had fought alongside her twice already and never once caught her lying to him.
Camaro argued, briefly and with real heat, against being left behind for further medical care, and won the argument the way she usually won arguments with Taisen: by refusing to lower her voice until he agreed it wasn't worth the fight. Her hand would heal well enough aboard the Arctic, she informed him, and she had no intention of finishing this particular chapter of her life from a hospital cot three systems away from wherever it actually happened.
Venemis, when the shuttle roster was drawn up for the handful of crew and cargo staying behind at the depot, was not on it.
She noticed the omission before anyone told her about it directly. The particular attentiveness of a woman who had spent three months learning to read every list, every schedule, every offhand remark aboard a ship she didn't fully trust and didn't fully believe trusted her either.
She found Taisen in the narrow observation gallery above the shuttle bay, watching the transfer of the crippled cruiser through the thick viewport glass, and asked him outright.
"I expected to be returned home from here, Commander," she said. "Arkania Prime is not far from this depot, by the charts I've seen."
"It isn't," Taisen agreed, without turning from the glass.
"Then why am I still aboard your ship?"
He turned to look at her then. Something in his face, careful and unreadable in the particular way she'd learned to fear a little over the weeks, made her wish, immediately and uselessly, that she hadn't asked the question quite so directly.
"Because I have a use for you yet," he said, "and because I'm not finished deciding what else I have a use for you for. You'll have your answer soon enough, Queen Venemis. I'd advise patience in the meantime. It's served you well so far."
She held his gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, searching it for the shape of whatever he wasn't saying, and found nothing there she could name. Only the same patient, unhurried stillness she'd first mistaken, weeks ago, for the manner of a young man who hadn't yet learned to be afraid of anything.
She understood, watching him now, exactly how wrong that first read had been. The understanding sat in her chest like a stone the whole walk back to her quarters.
The Arctic broke orbit from the depot with a lighter hold and a heavier silence. Settled, three hours later, into the long dark hum of the Fold, bound for coordinates that existed, so far as any chart aboard could confirm, at the very edge of the region Vessyr's centuries-old archive marked only with a symbol Ashera's borrowed memory read as something closer to grave than destination.
It was on the second day of that crossing that Swan, running a routine diagnostic on the ship's comm array after a minor power fluctuation had tripped three separate alarms in the space of an hour, found the anomaly he hadn't gone looking for.
He brought it to Alita first, because bringing things to Alita first had become simply what a person did aboard this ship when they found something they weren't yet certain how to say out loud to the Commander directly.
"There's a transmission logged in the short-range burst array," he said, low, in the corner of the bridge where the duty rotation had thinned out enough to talk without an audience. "Timestamped from the Cell system approach. Before the jamming field engaged. It's small, it's encrypted in something our systems don't recognize, and it originated from a terminal inside the navigation bay."