The Arctic ran without a heading for the first six hours, and that fact alone told Alita more about the shape of the problem in front of them than anything anyone said out loud in the ready room.
A ship could run toward something. A ship could run from something. What the Arctic was doing, bow swung wide off the last known bearing to Corvid's Rest and holding steady into open Fold at a velocity Swan had picked mostly because it felt better than sitting still, was neither. It was simply putting distance between itself and the last place anyone hostile might expect to find it, and distance, Alita had learned this month, was the cheapest kind of safety and the least useful kind of progress.
The bridge itself still carried the particular charge of the last hour, the kind that didn't dissipate simply because the alarm had stopped sounding. Swan hadn't left the comm station since the automated message finished playing, hunched forward with both hands still resting near controls he wasn't actively using, as though letting go of them entirely would somehow make the thing they'd just heard more real than it already was. Lyn had not sat down. Alita had not stopped watching Taisen, not obviously, not in any way he'd have called her on, but closely enough that she would have noticed, had she known to look for it, the exact moment his grey hand curled, briefly, into a fist at his side and then, deliberately, uncurled again.
She didn't know yet what had happened in that fist a few minutes ago. Nobody on the bridge did. He hadn't told them, and the corridor's small viewport, indifferent as ever, gave no more away than it ever did.
She stood at the science station longer than her actual duties required, watching the Fold slide past the forward viewport in its slow silver churn, indifferent the way it was always indifferent, giving no sign at all that anything anywhere had changed in the last six hours. She had grown, over the last month, almost fond of that indifference. Tonight it felt less like a comfort and more like an accusation: the universe simply did not care that a good man might already be dead somewhere out past the edge of what any of them could see, and it was not going to slow down or speed up on their account either way.
The ready room, when the alert finally called them all to it two hours before the shift change, still smelled faintly of the coffee nobody had properly cleaned up after the last meeting, and the low overhead light gave everyone's face the same flat, tired cast, the kind of light that made a room feel smaller than it was and every decision inside it heavier.
Somewhere below them, through two decks of hull plating and conduit, the ship's small reactor hummed on at the same patient, unbothered pitch it had held since they'd left Corvid's Rest, indifferent, in its own mechanical way, to whatever the five of them decided in this room. Alita found herself listening to it more than she meant to, the way a person listens to their own heartbeat during a fever, reassured and unsettled by the same steady sound in the same breath. It did not care that a man might be dying somewhere out past the edge of what any sensor aboard this ship could reach. It simply ran, the way it had run yesterday, the way it would run tomorrow whether or not any of them were still aboard to hear it.
"We need a heading," Lyn said, for the third time in an hour, standing at the tactical plot with her arms folded and her voice pitched at the particular flatness she used when she was more worried than she wanted the room to see. "Not a direction. A heading. Somewhere with a name on it."
"I'm aware," Taisen said.
He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way he said most things now, evenly, a fact laid beside another fact, and Alita watched him say it and thought, not for the first time since sickbay, that there was a new kind of stillness in him since the message had come through, one that did not look like calm so much as it looked like a man holding something shut with both hands and hoping nobody noticed the effort it took.
"Aware isn't a heading either," Lyn said.
"No," Taisen agreed. "It isn't."
He stood at the head of the small table with his grey hand flat against the surface, deliberately, the way he'd taken to holding it lately, still and unmoving where anyone could see it, and looked at the four of them in turn: Lyn, arms folded, jaw set, the particular stillness of a woman who had already run every version of this conversation in her own head and hated that none of them had produced anything better than what they had now. Alita, upright, waiting, feeling the small ship-issue chair too stiff beneath her and not caring enough to shift her weight off it. Swan, pale, a stylus turning over and over between his fingers with the particular restless motion of a man who needed his hands doing something or his mind would do it for him instead, faster and worse. Camaro, arms crossed at the far end of the table, watching Taisen the way she watched most things now, evaluating rather than trusting, patient enough to wait for the evaluation to finish before she said anything at all, her healing hand resting flat against her thigh where she could feel, Alita suspected, the pull of the new scar tissue every time she shifted.
"Here is what we actually have," Taisen said. "We have three names Zhang gave us, none of them proven. We have an automated failsafe telling us he missed two check-ins, which tells us something happened and tells us nothing at all about what. We have a ship that is, as of the moment we broke away from that relay, not where Fleet Command believes it to be, on a mission Fleet Command does not know we're running, hunting a man Fleet Command has not yet publicly acknowledged is missing. We have no authority to investigate anyone in that uniform. We have no proof against anyone in it either. And we have, by my count, considerably less time than any of us would like, because whoever did this to Zhang did it carefully enough to leave no trace at all, which means they're patient, and patient people don't stop the moment they've succeeded once."