They were three days into towing their prize home at a crawl, Camaro's hand healing slow and ugly under a medical wrap two decks below, when two transmissions arrived within the same hour, and Taisen understood immediately, reading the timing of it, that neither one was a coincidence.
The first came from Earth, terse and deliberately thin on detail: the same careful, information-starved phrasing he remembered from the last time a message like this had found him, twenty years and one entire life ago, summoning him home to answer for a decision made in good faith and paid for by someone else's blood. He read it twice and did not need a third pass to understand its shape.
The second came from Malkor.
It requested, in a tone Taisen recognized instantly from Ashera's own memory of the man (reasonable, unhurried, entirely without malice and entirely without mercy either), a peaceful meeting on the planet Triskelion, and the return of the cruiser they'd just spent a man's life and an ensign's hand capturing.
Triskelion.
He sat with the name a long moment before he let himself feel anything about it at all. Triskelion was where Bora Shrie had knelt beside three bodies that used to be his family, in a life so far behind him now that some days he could almost convince himself it belonged to someone else entirely. Malkor could not possibly know that. There was no record anywhere in the galaxy, not in Vessyr's archive, not in Ashera's memory, not in any UN file that had ever crossed a desk with Herman Wrath's name on it, that connected a war criminal's death and an alien child's tragedy to the same buried grief. It was coincidence. It had to be coincidence.
He noticed, turning the name over, that some old and careful part of him didn't entirely believe that, and set the feeling aside in the same crowded place he set everything else he wasn't ready to examine before he had to.
"We should take both the Arctic and the prize to Earth for study," Lyn said, reading over his shoulder, "and let the Senate decide what they want to do with either of us."
"They already want your head for the Beluga," Alita said, quieter. "If we return the ship to the Reza and accept the meeting, that's one fewer charge hanging over you when this is finished."
"We," Lyn said. "Some of us aren't facing a noose over Usyk. Only one of us is."
"That's Commander Taisen," Alita reminded her, sharper than she meant to.
"Not for much longer, I suspect," Lyn said, not unkindly. "It was a good run while it lasted."
"If we hand the ship back," Alita pressed on, turning fully to Taisen now, "there's no act-of-war charge left for a tribunal to hang on you. That's one less thing."
"There's no version of this where Taisen walks away clean," Lyn said. "The only reason anyone recalls a command mid-mission is to finish that officer's career quietly, before it gets any louder. Whatever we do with that ship, he's already paying for this."
Taisen let the two of them argue past him a while longer, watching the ring in his breast pocket without touching it, feeling the old, familiar numbness that hadn't fully left his fingertips since the Cell system settle into something closer to a permanent tenant than a passing debt. He thought of Usyk's voice on the comm, unbothered, telling him plans change, son, and of Camaro's teeth gritted around still here, keep working the problem, and of every ledger he still owed an answer to: Ness's fleet, the Skyforge's silence, Masako's unnamed master, Link somewhere behind him hunting a saboteur neither of them had a face for yet.
"I've done this before," he said, finally, and both women stopped talking to look at him. "Answered a summons this thin, on a mission that cost more than it should have, expecting a judgment that had already been decided before I walked into the room. I don't intend to do it the same way twice."
"Meaning what, exactly," Lyn said.
"Meaning I'm not delivering the ship to Earth, and I'm not delivering it back to the people who'd use it against the next crew unlucky enough to cross their path either." He closed his hand, briefly, around the shape of the ring through the fabric of his pocket (Uros's voice arriving with it, unbidden, so that the Monjitari will not be forgotten) and let it go again before either of them noticed the gesture for more than a heartbeat. "There's a third option. I go to Triskelion. I find proof (real proof, the kind a tribunal can't argue away in committee) that Malkor ordered the attack on Earth and the destruction of the Beluga. And then I kill him."
Alita's breath caught audibly. Lyn said nothing at all, which, from her, was its own kind of answer.
"And if it's a trap," Alita said finally. "If he's chosen that planet on purpose, for reasons we don't understand yet."
"Then it will be the second time in my life someone's tried to end me on that ground," Taisen said, "and I intend to make it go rather worse for him than it did the first time."
He did not tell either of them what he'd almost let himself think, alone, reading the coordinates a second time: that a man patient enough to plan every conquest three moves ahead, thorough enough to keep files on every species he'd ever harvested, careful enough to notice a Falmeri queen's stillness before she'd finished betraying him, might also, somehow, impossibly, already know exactly whose grave he was inviting back to the surface.
He told himself, as the Arctic came about and pointed her scarred nose toward the long dark road back into the Fold, that it didn't matter either way. He was going. The only question left worth asking was what would be waiting for him when he got there, and whether, this time, he'd see it coming before it was close enough to matter.