"That's the shape of it," Camaro said. "You almost handed them a signature with our fingerprints on it, dressed up as a routine supply pull. I'm not blaming you for missing it, Swan, so don't sit there looking like I am. I almost missed it too, and I've spent four years learning to read a targeting header before I trust what's underneath it, and this one still nearly slipped past me because the query itself was good work. That's exactly the problem. Good work gets you caught just as fast as bad work does, if it's good work built on a bad foundation."
Swan deleted the query, hand not quite steady, watching the little confirmation blink out of existence with something that felt closer to grief than relief, and sat back from the console with the particular pale, silent stillness of a man who had just watched, in real time, exactly how close a careful plan could come to becoming the thing that got someone killed. He pressed the heel of his palm briefly against one eye, a habit Camaro had noticed before and never once commented on.
"Thank you," he said finally.
"Don't thank me," Camaro said. "Build the next one slower. That's the only thanks I want, and I mean that, Swan, I'm not being flat with you for the sake of being flat. Slow is the only currency that's kept me alive on three different ships. I'd rather you resent me for making you slow down than mourn you for letting you speed up."
They reported it to Taisen together, standing at something close to parade rest without either of them quite meaning to, and he took the news standing very still, absorbing it fully before he let himself react to any single piece of it, his grey hand, as always now, tucked out of easy sight.
"Then the Beluga-era credentials are done," he said. "All of them. Effective now, this hour, no exceptions for convenience. If Fleet Command is watching that flag closely enough that even a clean query would have registered as a signature, we assume every credential this crew has ever touched is compromised the moment it's used, and we don't use any of them again until we have a better way in. I'd rather lose the convenience entirely than lose it selectively and convince myself the exception was safe."
"We don't have a better way in," Swan said, quiet, the admission costing him something visible.
"Not yet," Taisen said. "We'll find one. We have time to find one, because the alternative was finding out the hard way that we didn't, which is a considerably worse way to learn the same lesson. I'd rather spend a day feeling stuck than an hour feeling clever and being wrong about it, Ensign. That particular trade has never once gone well for anyone I've served with, in either of my lives."
Swan nodded, and looked, for a moment, like he wanted to say something further and thought better of it, and Taisen, watching him decide against it, decided not to press. Some fears, he had learned, needed room to sit unspoken for a while before a person was ready to hand them over, and Swan had already handed over more of his own that week than most men handed over in a year.
"Get some rest," Taisen said instead. "Both of you. Whatever the next thread turns out to be, it won't find itself faster for either of you working past the point your judgment's still sharp."
It was Swan, three hours later, hunched over the comm station with a cup of cooling tea he hadn't touched, the steam long since given up rising from it, who caught the piece of chatter that made the whole room go quiet a second time that day, though for an entirely different reason than the last.
Fleet-wide traffic ran in wide, indifferent bursts through every relay a ship this size was cleared to receive, general orders and weather advisories and supply notices meant for a thousand different crews at once, most of it noise, all of it, technically, public, the kind of low background static that any duty officer learned to let wash past without really hearing it, the way a person stops hearing their own ship's engine hum after the first week aboard. Swan had taken to skimming it out of habit more than purpose, the way a man checks a mirror he doesn't expect to show him anything new, scrolling with half his attention while the rest of it stayed on the archive work he and Alita had been building all morning.
Most of it was exactly as dull as it always was: a quarterly resupply rotation for the outer patrol wings, three lines about a rescheduled muster at a shipyard none of them had ever heard of, a note reminding all commanding officers that cold-weather ration substitutions would remain in effect for another cycle pending a supply-chain review that had, by the look of the phrasing, been pending for considerably longer than a single cycle already. It was the kind of traffic that made Swan feel, oddly, better rather than worse: an entire fleet still grinding through its ordinary, unglamorous business, mustering and resupplying and rescheduling, utterly unaware that five people on an Arctic-class cutter were hunting for their own Fleet Marshal somewhere in the same wide dark those supply notices traveled through.
It was in the middle of an entirely routine morale bulletin, three lines buried in a longer digest of "notable engagements" meant to bolster flagging fleet spirits with tales of distant, unconfirmed heroics, that he found something that made him set the tea down entirely and read it a second time to be sure his own tired eyes weren't inventing it.
Unconfirmed reports continue to circulate regarding the Arctic-class cutter formerly attached to the Beluga's command staff, now operating independently under a commander whose exact status remains disputed at multiple levels of the chain. Accounts describe a single-handed boarding action against a Reza dreadnought, the destruction of an entire raider fleet above a contested world, and a confrontation with a Falmeri war-queen resolved without a shot fired. Command has neither confirmed nor denied these accounts.
"That's not what happened," Swan said, out loud, to no one in particular, and read it again to be sure he hadn't misremembered his own recent life, the events of the last month rearranging themselves briefly in his head against this strange, distorted mirror of them. "None of that is what happened. It was one boarding party, not one man. Camaro nearly died getting that airlock open, I watched it happen, that's not in here anywhere. It was a fighter swarm, not a raider fleet, twenty six ships, not whatever number 'entire fleet' is supposed to imply. And Simika didn't surrender without a shot fired. She fought him for real. He nearly lost. I was on the bridge for that too, I have the sensor logs, I could pull them right now and none of it would match a single word of this."