They found the control center exactly where he'd predicted, its consoles labeled in a script neither of them could read, and it took Taisen only a handful of minutes of careful trial to bring the lights up around them: long enough for Lyn to privately resent, again, how easily competence came to him in rooms that should by every right have been opaque to both of them equally.
"Now what?" she asked, watching him work.
"Now I invite them in," he said, throwing a switch that lit the station's exterior beacons. "And with any luck, keep their attention away from the Arctic a little longer."
"You're inviting the thing that's hunting us to come find us faster."
"I'm choosing where the conversation happens, rather than letting them choose it for me," Taisen said. "There's a difference, even if it doesn't always feel like one from where you're standing." He checked the charge on the sidearm at his hip out of old habit rather than real doubt. "The equipment bay with the largest doors is toward the port side. We'll meet them there, on ground I've already looked at."
They didn't have long to wait. The bay, when they reached it, proved larger than Lyn had pictured (crowded with idle cranes and spare-part racks, the air still faintly metallic with the smell of stalled machinery), and they'd barely settled near the main port before it began to cycle.
"Here they come," Lyn murmured.
Taisen tilted his head, listening to something Lyn couldn't hear, and then, without explanation, slipped around behind her, reversing their positions so that she stood nearest the door.
"What are you doing?" she demanded, feeling every unprotected inch of her back suddenly.
"They hold their females in high regard, if the archive's right about this species," he said. "It should buy us a few seconds of goodwill we wouldn't otherwise have."
The hatch opened on four figures: purple-skinned, medium height, feathered crests along their skulls, unmistakably kin to the bodies Taisen had pulled from the derelict months earlier. For a long moment neither side spoke, until one of them, hesitant, tried a language neither Lyn nor Taisen recognized.
"Do you speak Cherobogian?" Lyn tried, reaching for the oldest trade tongue she knew that still had any currency out this far.
A pause. Then one of the four (older, or simply more willing to risk being wrong) stepped forward. "I speak this," he said, careful with every syllable. "What business have you here?"
"We are explorers," Taisen said, through Lyn's translation, deliberately withholding rank and title from a species he hadn't yet decided whether to trust. "I am Taisen. She is Lyn."
"Why do you hide behind your female?" the alien asked, something sharp and suspicious threading through the question.
"Tell him I'm using my body to shield you from the two of his kin he sent through the second hatch to take us from behind," Taisen said, low, without any change in his own composed expression.
Lyn's breath caught. "Are you serious?"
"I heard their footsteps the moment they came through," he said. "Clumsy. Whoever trained them didn't finish the job."
She translated, feeling the weight of every word, and watched the alien's posture shift: not toward violence, but toward something closer to shame.
"We abhor violence," he said. "It was precaution only. Your presence here was unexpected, and we feared for our own safety more than we intended you harm."
"Then I apologize for the alarm," Taisen said. "We believed this station abandoned. We came only to study what the Falmeri left behind here."
Something in the alien's coloring shifted, purple lightening by a shade Lyn would have missed entirely if Taisen hadn't already taught her, across weeks of watching him read a room, that the smallest physical tell was usually the only honest thing in it.
"We did not abandon this place," he said. "We were sent from it, by those who claim dominion over the Falmeri and the Monjit both."
"Monjit," Taisen repeated. "That's the name of your world."
"For now," the alien said, something bitter and old in the way he said it. "Our fate belongs to Malkor and his Reza, same as everyone else unlucky enough to be found useful by him."
Lyn felt something cold settle at the base of her spine. She'd never once, in a career spent reading obscure alien records, come across the name Reza attached to anything: not outside wild space, not even at the far edges of the unknown region the Federation still hadn't finished charting. Whoever they were, they were thorough enough about silencing witnesses that the UN's entire archive held nothing on them at all.
"We did not come to this station of our own will," the Monjitari continued. "Nor did we strip the weapons and defenses from the vessel we arrived in. The Reza patrol did not recognize your ship's design when it passed through this system some time ago. They believed this station's sensors might still be logging traffic, and sent us to confirm it."
"Were they right to wonder?" Taisen asked.
"About the sensors specifically? They have been dead for weeks, on Reza orders, before this station was ever abandoned. We obeyed to the letter, with every life beneath us hanging on it."
"That's fortunate for all of us, then," Taisen said, and something in his shoulders eased, fractionally, in a way only Lyn was close enough to catch. "We have no wish to trouble your people further. If you'll allow it, we'll take our leave."
The Monjitari spokesman held up a hand before they could go, and for a moment the whole exchange balanced on a knife's edge Lyn hadn't fully appreciated until she watched his fingers move: first tugging at a ring worn on two joined fingers, then working it free entirely, a slim circlet of black metal joined by fine, flexible mesh.
"I am Uros," he said. "I wish to give you this."
He held it out, palm up, waiting.