"You talk about them like they're already waiting for you at the door."
"Only way I get through a week like this one, Colonel." He didn't look up from the shutdown sequence. "I picture the door. Small thing, blue paint, needs a new coat. My boy's height chart penciled right onto the frame, because his mother refuses to paint over it even though we've moved twice. I picture that door, and whatever's happening out here stops being the whole of the world for about ten seconds at a time."
"You've never once told me his name," Lyn said. "Six years flying with you and I don't know your own son's name."
"Because the second I say it out loud on a ship with a monster living in the walls, you'll ask me a follow-up question, and I will burst into tears in front of our Sahir royal here, and neither of us wants that on my record." He allowed himself half a smile, thin and quick, gone almost before it landed. "Ask me again once we're somewhere boring. I'll tell you everything. The name, the height chart, the terrible drawings he does of spaceships with too many wings."
"Deal."
"Deal." He flipped the last switch. The lights guttered, held, and died. "There. Ship's dark. Somebody go tell the thing in the walls dinner's cancelled."
They searched in exo-suits, breath fogging their visors, mining lamps throwing thin cones of white through a ship gone weightless and silent around them. Every handhold groaned faintly under a grip, every panel they drifted past threw its own small shadow that had to be checked and dismissed before anyone's pulse would settle back down. Alita kept close enough to Link that their tethers tangled twice, and neither of them undid the knot as fast as they might have. Taisen went last, quiet, blade drawn, watching the dark behind them as much as the dark ahead, the numbness in his fingertips a low, familiar hum he'd stopped bothering to track precisely.
An hour in, they'd found nothing. Not a claw mark, not a smear, not so much as a dislodged panel to say something living had passed this way at all, which frightened Lyn, listening over the comm from the sealed bridge, rather more than a trail of wreckage would have.
Then a warm, slow thread of something wet touched the back of Alita's suit, and she screamed before her mind had caught up with what her skin already knew.
It came at them from the front of the ship in a straight, terrible line, drifting free in the zero gravity: blood, too much of it, and at the end of the thread, lit up finally by Link's lamp, Frank's face. Untouched. Slack. His visor whole and clean while something had opened the whole of his torso beneath it, whatever had done this uninterested in his throat, his skull, anything a blaster or blade would have gone for first: it had wanted what was underneath his ribs and had taken its time getting there.
Taisen moved before he'd finished understanding what he was looking at. He had Alita and Lyn by the arms and into the storage locker before either of them had drawn a second breath, sealed the hatch, killed Link's lamp with one hand and shoved the cyborg bodily toward the aft bulkhead with the other, plunging the corridor into total dark.
Three slow breaths. Then he drew his blade, and the current answered before he'd finished asking it to, the numbness already climbing his sword arm from a debt he hadn't come close to settling from the sentries hours earlier.
The shadow came at his chest without a sound.
He'd never fought in zero gravity. He learned in the first three seconds that a kick meant to plant him and drive an attacker back instead sent him tumbling, weightless, past where his target had been a heartbeat before, and he barely got his blade up in time to open a long gash along something that screamed like wet metal tearing. Ink-black fluid bloomed into the dark between them, beading into slow, obscene little spheres that drifted past his visor.
It came again, tentacles this time, more of them than he'd accounted for, and he took one clean across the ribs Simika had already cracked for him: the suit tore, oxygen hissing out into the vacuum in a spinning jet that sent him corkscrewing sideways, out of control, his own exhaled air fogging his visor white for one horrifying half-second where he couldn't see anything at all. He heard himself make a sound he didn't recognize as his own voice, more animal than words, and forced his free hand flat against the tear to slow the leak while his other arm kept swinging on nothing but memory of where the last tentacle had come from.
Another lash caught his boot and hauled him half a meter closer before he cut it free, and in the brief tumbling spin that followed he caught, for less than a heartbeat, the pale shape of Frank's body still drifting where they'd left it, turning slow and gentle end over end in the dark like something that had simply decided to stop being in a hurry about anything ever again. He put it out of his mind because he had to, stowed it alongside the fight itself for later, and kept moving.
The current guttered as he reached for it again. He felt it happen: the well under his sternum coming up short, the borrowed strength arriving thin and unreliable instead of full and certain, his fingers gone entirely numb past the second knuckle now, no feeling left to lose. Not now, he thought, with something that in a calmer moment he might have recognized as fear. Not here, weightless, blind, bleeding air into the dark.
He looked instead. Not for the creature, for the window.
An asteroid, small, tumbling, lit for a bare second by the light bleeding off a sensor panel behind him, closing on the hull at a speed the ship's dead instruments would never have flagged in time even if anyone had been watching.