"Then finding it matters more than I told the others tonight," he said. "I came in here to tell you about a lead on a missing man. I'm leaving having learned it might also be a lead on my own hand. I don't know yet what to do with both of those things sitting in the same fact, occupying the same search, the same hours. I'd like your word that you'll tell me the moment anything else about this survey reminds you of anything your grandmother ever said, however small it seems, however little sense it makes standing alone."
"You have it," Venemis said, "and Commander: I would have told you regardless of whether you asked. Whatever else stands between us, I have stopped keeping things from you that might actually help you. I decided that on the beach, watching your hand turn grey under a light that asked nothing of either of us, and I haven't changed my mind since, and I don't intend to."
Osei, still standing in the doorway, said nothing at all, but Taisen caught, on his way out, the particular stillness in the big man's face that meant he had heard every word of it and intended to remember all of it, whether or not anyone had asked him to. It was a soldier's attention, not a gossip's: terrain noted rather than a secret hoarded.
"You've been quiet through all of this, Osei," Taisen said, pausing at the door.
"Not my place to have opinions on a queen's old languages, Commander," Osei said. "My place is the door. I keep it. Whatever's said on the other side of it is between the two of you, unless it's the kind of thing that changes what I need to be watching for, and then I'll ask."
"Fair," Taisen said, and left him to it.
Lyn laid out the risk the way she laid out most things she disliked but couldn't argue against: plainly, without softening it, and without pretending she'd have chosen it herself if any better option had existed, standing at the tactical plot with the small model of Hollis Station's rough coordinates already glowing faintly at its edge, a lonely amber point in an otherwise empty stretch of chart, the kind of nothing-system that never earned itself a proper name beyond a catalog number until someone had a reason to care about it.
The rest of the room had gathered around the plot rather than the table this time, an unspoken acknowledgment that this particular conversation was about a place, not a policy, and needed to be looked at rather than merely discussed.
"If we take the Arctic anywhere near Hollis Station," she said, "we're a warship showing up at a records annex nobody's supposed to have any reason to visit, and that's a signature all on its own, whatever cover story we build around it. Ships that size don't detour to backwater annexes for no reason, and anyone watching Fleet traffic closely enough to catch a mole this careful will notice a hull this size making a stop that doesn't fit any pattern they've seen us keep. If we send a shuttle instead, we're still risking whoever's crewing it, on a station we know nothing about, meeting a woman we've never spoken to, based on a two-year-old chit and a theory about a check-in phrase that might mean nothing at all, might simply be a man's habit and not a code at all."
"Both true," Taisen said. "I'd add a third problem you haven't said yet. If this is wrong, if Holt has no idea what we're talking about, or worse, if she reports the contact the moment we're out the door, whether out of duty or out of fear or simply out of the ordinary bureaucratic reflex of covering herself against a stranger's odd questions, we've spent our one real lead and told someone, somewhere, that we're still out here looking, which is precisely the thing we've spent the last two days trying to avoid doing."
"What if she's simply retired, or dead, or transferred somewhere with no forwarding record at all," Swan said, quiet, from his place near the edge of the plot, giving voice to the fear none of them had said out loud yet. "What if we spend two days and a shuttle crossing on a name in a directory that led somewhere that used to matter and doesn't anymore."
"Then we've spent two days and a shuttle crossing," Taisen said, "and we're no worse off than we are standing here right now, arguing about whether to try. The only version of this that actually costs us something we can't get back is the one where we never try at all, and Zhang runs out the clock we don't even know he's on while we were still debating whether the attempt was worth making."
"So why do it," Lyn said, "instead of finding something safer."
"Because there isn't anything safer," Taisen said, "and because a station full of people finishing out quiet careers is exactly the kind of place a careful man builds a door nobody thinks to watch. Zhang told me himself: he'd built one like it for his own use, once, and never had to open it. I don't think he built two of them carelessly, and I don't think a man who spends this much thought hiding a door builds it somewhere obvious. I think this is the one thing left that might actually work, precisely because it's small enough that nobody's thought to guard it, and quiet enough that nobody's thought to ask what it's for."
"Who goes," Camaro said.
"Not the ship," Taisen said. "A shuttle, minimal crew, a cover story thin enough to survive a glance and not thick enough to survive real scrutiny, because real scrutiny means we've already lost regardless of what story we're telling anyone who asks harder questions than a bored dockmaster usually bothers to ask. Myself. You, for security, because if this goes wrong I want someone at my back who's already proven she reads a room faster than I can. Swan, because if this becomes a records problem rather than a conversation, I want someone who can read what we're looking at faster than I can, and because he's earned the chance to be useful somewhere other than a scanner in sickbay. Lyn commands the Arctic in our absence and holds her at a safe remove from the station, close enough to retrieve us fast, far enough not to be the first thing anyone on Hollis notices coming or going. Alita keeps working the archive from here, and keeps an eye on anything else that comes through the relay while we're gone, because the moment we stop watching that traffic is exactly the moment something in it matters."