Ensign Jonathan Swan met his new commanding officer for the first time at the navigation console, three hours out from the border, on his way to report a discrepancy he'd found in the salvage scans of a derelict transport drifting at the edge of UN space.
He had rehearsed the report twice in his head on the walk over, mostly to keep his hands from shaking, which they were doing anyway.
"Commander," he said, and heard his own voice come out a half-register higher than he'd intended. "Sir. I think (I'm fairly confident, actually) that this wasn't a pirate attack."
"Go on, Ensign."
"The damage pattern. It's all rear-facing, concentrated, no attempt at disabling with minimum force. Pirates board and plunder. This," he pulled the scan up on the nearest display with a hand that only shook a little, "is somebody who wanted the ship gone and didn't care what was left over. I keep looking at it and my stomach won't settle, sir, and I want to be upfront that I don't love being the guy who says that out loud on a bridge full of people who don't get nervous, but there it is. Something about this scares me and I don't fully know why yet."
Taisen studied him for a long moment: the honesty of it, offered without flourish, without a joke wrapped around it to make it smaller. "Good," he said, finally.
"Good, sir?"
"You've told me exactly what you know, exactly what you don't, and exactly how much of it is instinct rather than data. That's the most useful report I've had since I came aboard this ship. Most officers spend their first thirty seconds with a new commander deciding how much confidence to perform. You skipped straight to the truth. I'd like you to keep doing that."
Swan's shoulders came down almost an inch. "Yes, sir," he said, and this time his voice held steadier. "For what it's worth: I'll keep being nervous about things. I don't think that part's going away."
"I'd worry about you if it did."
Alita, watching this from the science station, held onto it: that whatever else this man was, he had just spent thirty seconds being kinder to a frightened junior officer than she'd seen him be to almost anyone since Frank died, and she wasn't yet sure what to do with that, or with the small, unwelcome warmth it left behind.
The wreck, when they closed the distance, told its own story before Swan had finished his second pass of the scans; wrecked consoles, fried storage banks, and bodies, far too many of them, the whole grim range of a life spent in miniature: a child's shoe drifting weightless near a shattered viewport, adults curled protectively around smaller shapes that hadn't been small enough to save. A refugee transport, not a freighter. Whoever had done this had not been sorting cargo from crew.
"This was a diversion," Taisen said, once the images had finished transmitting back to Zhang's office and the reply had come back grim and brief. "The attack on the capital cost three ships and every crew aboard them to buy half an hour of the Senate's undivided attention. That's not a strategic objective. That's a price someone was willing to pay to make sure nobody was looking at this."
"At an empty transport in the middle of nowhere," Swan said. "With respect, sir, that's a very expensive way to hide a very small thing."
"Unless the thing being hidden isn't small. It's simply somewhere else entirely, and this wreck is only the piece of it we happened to trip over." Taisen turned from the display. "Have you identified the attackers' physical characteristics from what they left behind?"
"Working on it now, sir. Give me an hour."
He gave him forty minutes, and came back with a report that made his hands shake for an entirely different reason.
"Purple skin, feathery crests, spindly build: that's the majority of the bodies recovered, sir, no match in any database we've got. But there's one that doesn't match the others. Tall, grey-skinned, heavier joints. A tattoo scar on the temple. Crescent-shaped." He hesitated. "I keep thinking about that shape, sir. I can't tell you why. It's just sitting in my chest like a stone."
Taisen went very still. "Where."
"On Avaros, sir. In the occupation reports from before we ever got there. One of the sentry logs described exactly that mark on a body recovered from a downed enforcer unit. I didn't think anything of it until just now."
"You will think a great deal of it from here forward," Taisen said. "Well done, Ensign. Genuinely."
The swarm found them the moment the Arctic and her five accompanying cruisers dropped out of the Fold above Avaros's cold blue crescent: more than two dozen small, fast fighters breaking from a holding pattern with the coordinated, wheeling precision of something that had drilled this exact maneuver a thousand times before anyone had ever needed to use it in earnest.
"Enemy fighters!" Alita called from the sensor station, her voice sharpening but not cracking. "They're bearing down from every angle at once!"
Swan swore under his breath, low enough that only the console caught it, and did not stop working.
Pale green fire lashed across the Arctic's hull in a rain of impacts, each one individually survivable, none of them individually the point. Taisen watched the pattern on the tactical display with the same attention he'd have given an unfamiliar opponent's stance: not counting hits, but counting rhythm, the interval between one fighter breaking off and the next one sliding into the gap it left, close enough to its neighbors that no single targeting solution ever had a clean line for more than a heartbeat before three more hulls crowded into the same firing cone.
"They're clustering," he said, half to himself, watching it happen in real time on the plot. "Look at the spacing. They never let more than a length open up between wingmen. That's discipline, not chaos."