Taisen's plan required the Arctic to fly close enough alongside the Beluga to vanish inside her sensor shadow: near enough that any patrol scanning for two hulls would only ever find one, right up until the moment the Arctic peeled quietly away and went dark inside the nearest asteroid cluster, letting the Beluga carry every hostile eye in the system onward, alone, toward the planet at its center.
It was, Swan thought, watching the two ships hold formation with an eerie, matched precision that made his stomach do something unpleasant every time either ship so much as breathed wrong, a plan of remarkable elegance.
In theory.
In practice, it required two ships to fly close enough to kiss and far enough apart not to die for it, with no tether cable (Taisen had ruled that out over Swan's vocal objection, on the grounds that any error in either ship's trajectory would put a visible ripple through the cable that a competent sensor operator would spot in an instant, a point Swan had scowled about for a full minute afterward because he was fairly sure he'd been about to say exactly that himself) and no tractor beam, which would have thrown off an energy signature bright enough to be seen from the far side of the system. What remained was the kind of close-formation flying that belonged, by any reasonable standard, to stunt pilots with forty years of experience and nothing left to prove, not to a man who'd never once flown a UN warship before this month.
Taisen flew it himself, hands steady on a console he'd had less than six weeks to learn, and did not once look like a man aware of how little margin he was working with.
"Two hostiles inbound," Alita reported from the sensor station, her voice sharp but level.
"Time to intercept?" Lyn asked.
Taisen didn't answer at first, working the thrust controls with the same unhurried attention he gave a blade mid-duel. "Give me three percent more thrust," he said finally, still not looking away from the display.
"Adjusting by positive three percent."
Both ships tilted upward in the same heartbeat, at the same angle, as if some invisible hand had reached down and turned two separate vessels like a single dial: a coordination between Taisen and Usyk, riding two different bridges a thousand meters apart, that struck Swan as something closer to telepathy than skill, right up until he reminded himself that this was simply what it looked like when two people had each independently decided, privately, that they trusted the other one completely.
"Standby for a turn to port," Taisen said.
The ship banked, a long, wide arc that put a fresh sheen of cold sweat on the back of Swan's neck, because a turn that size at this range was exactly the kind of maneuver that could pop the whole illusion like a soap bubble if either pilot mistimed it by half a second, and yet the two hulls held their spacing as if bolted together, and the moment passed, and Swan allowed himself exactly one slow breath before the next one arrived.
A third hostile joined the pursuit forty seconds later, and it was Camaro, hunched over the sensor board with her jaw set, who caught what was wrong with it first.
"That's not the intercept profile we modeled," she said, low, urgent, the professional calm in her voice fraying at the very edges. "Sir: that third contact isn't reacting to us. It's already on an intercept vector. It was moving before we even dropped out of the Fold."
Taisen's eyes cut to the display for a fraction of a second too long: the only outward sign, Alita would think later, turning the moment over and over in the weeks that followed, that some private calculation of his had just failed to balance. "Confirm," he said.
"Confirmed, sir. Whoever's running this blockade wasn't caught off guard by us showing up. They were already watching this approach vector specifically."
There was no time left to build a better plan, only time to run the one they had a few seconds harder than intended, and Taisen did exactly that: voice flat, already recalculating rather than dwelling on what the recalculation meant. "Beluga, third hostile has advance warning. Repeat, advance warning. You may need more separation than we discussed."
"Copy that, Arctic." Usyk's voice came back through the static with no fear in it at all, only the same unhurried warmth it always carried, a man who'd made peace with the shape of this particular risk long before the mission briefing. "Don't you worry about us. We'll give you the two minutes you need if I have to fly this old girl into the sun to buy it."
"Two minutes was the plan," Taisen said. "Don't spend more than that."
"Wasn't planning to," Usyk said. "But plans change, son. Yours taught me that much just this morning."
The line went quiet. On the tactical display, the Beluga peeled away hard, throwing on a burst of speed that put her well ahead of the profile Taisen had built the whole maneuver around: buying, Swan understood with a cold drop in his stomach, extra seconds nobody had asked Usyk to spend, the old admiral simply deciding, on his own authority, in the privacy of his own cockpit, that a few more seconds of exposure was a fair price for making certain the ruse held.
"Helm, prepare to veer off," Taisen ordered, and his voice, for the first time since the mission began, had lost its certainty.
Using a controlled burst of compressed gas along her starboard flank, the Arctic slipped free of the Beluga's shadow and coasted, engines cold, into the lee of the nearest asteroid, her hull scraping stone hard enough to groan through every deck before a second careful pulse matched her spin to the rock's own slow tumble.
"Full stealth," Taisen said. The bridge lights guttered from white to red to nothing at all.