"It's also exactly why our guns keep missing," said the woman at the forward weapons station, not turning from her console (Ensign Camaro, new enough to this bridge that Taisen hadn't yet learned the particular shape of her voice), sharp now with the specific frustration of someone watching her own equipment fail to do what she knew, technically, it ought to be capable of doing. "Targeting can't commit to a solution before the formation's already shifted past it. I've run three firing algorithms in the last ninety seconds and none of them are holding a lock longer than half a second. Whoever trained these pilots understood exactly how our tracking works and built a formation specifically to break it."
"Then they've built something with a cost attached to it, the same as everything else," Taisen said, and watched the plot a moment longer, the shape of it resolving in front of him the way Simika's footwork had once resolved in front of him a lifetime and a body ago: not as a mystery to be explained afterward, but as a pattern with a seam in it, waiting to be found while the fight was still live. "They stay close because close is what breaks our tracking. But close also means that if they ever commit to one heading, together, at the same time, they stop being two dozen separate problems and become one very large, very slow target that can't scatter fast enough to matter."
"You want to bait a formation that's built around never overcommitting into overcommitting," Camaro said, and there was no admiration in her voice yet, only the flat, professional skepticism of someone doing the math out loud before she let herself believe it. "That's a fine theory, Commander, but I've served under an officer who bet a formation on a fine theory once, and I watched eleven people die finding out the theory was wrong. I'd like a little more than confidence before I retune every gun on this ship to a firing solution that only works if you're right."
"Fair," Taisen said, and meant it: no offense in his voice at all, only the flat acknowledgment of a point well made. "Then watch the plot with me for the next ten seconds instead of trusting my word for it, and tell me if you see anything different."
She watched. Ten seconds passed, the swarm wheeling and re-forming in its tight, disciplined knot, hugging the Arctic's blind quarter exactly as it had for the last minute.
"They're not adapting to formation shape," Camaro said slowly, something shifting in her voice as the pattern clicked into place under her own scrutiny rather than his. "They're only adapting to targeting angle. If we stop presenting an angle worth clustering against."
"They'll cluster anyway, out of habit, because it's the only maneuver they've drilled," Taisen finished. "Yaw ninety degrees to port. Expose the starboard batteries and hold. Ensign Camaro, retune for a wide-arc solution the moment they commit, not before: I don't want the computer trying to track two dozen individual hulls when it should be tracking one shape."
"Belay that order," Alita said, sharp with alarm rather than doubt, watching the same plot from a different angle. "Turning exposes our unshielded flank to the rest of the formation."
"For eleven seconds," Taisen said. "Hold course. Fire on my command, not the computer's."
The ship turned. Green fire hammered the newly exposed flank in a punishing wash of heat that made the whole hull groan under Taisen's boots, and for eleven long seconds it looked, from where Swan sat white-knuckled at his console, exactly like the kind of mistake that got captains relieved and crews buried.
Then the swarm did exactly what two dozen hulls trained never to overcommit had been trained to do the instant a single fat, undefended target presented itself: they clustered tighter, wheeling as one body toward the exposed flank, closing the gaps between wingmen down to nothing at all, because that was the only maneuver any of them had ever drilled for.
"Fire," Taisen said.
The starboard batteries answered as one, no longer twenty-four separate impossible shots but a single wide-arc wall of blue light thrown directly into the heart of a formation that had, for one final heartbeat, forgotten it was allowed to be more than one shape. Camaro's retuned solution held the lock clean through the whole volley, and when the light faded there were four fighters left where twenty-six had been, scattering wide and ragged in every direction, the discipline that had kept them alive finally, uselessly, breaking apart a full second too late to matter.
"Belay my earlier objection," Camaro said, into the sudden quiet, not quite looking at him. "Sir."
"Noted, Ensign," Taisen said. "For what it's worth: I'd have wanted the same proof, in your position."
Alita let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding since the turn began, and said nothing at all: just carried the whole exchange with her, next to everything else she was slowly, reluctantly, learning to admit about the man she now called Commander.
The planet below, once the last fighter had fled or fallen, gave up nothing at all to the Arctic's sensors: no energy signatures, no refined metal, no life signs of any register.
"That's not right," Swan said, running the scan a second time as if the numbers might apologize for themselves on review. "Sir, there's nothing down there. Not dead. Just gone. Whatever was on that surface a month ago isn't there now."
"Taken," Taisen said, before Swan could finish reaching the same conclusion out loud, the memory of a row of blue-skinned prisoners in a dim tower he'd stood in weeks and a different life ago surfacing whole and unwelcome. "Not killed. Moved."
He was right, and it cost the landing parties three days of hard, grim searching through the same dark rock-shelf cities Taisen had walked through once already, to prove it. What they found, buried in a maintenance level below the same tower where he'd once watched a gray-haired man defuse an armed sentry with nothing but his own stillness, was a holding compound the invaders had built in a hurry to consolidate the entire planet's captive population into one guarded facility once their sentries stopped being enough to police thirty-six cantons individually: a wider, uglier version of the same cage, built for efficiency rather than cruelty for its own sake, which somehow made it worse to look at, not better.