"It routes to a records annex," she said. "A small one. Hollis Station, out past the third relay ring, the kind of posting nobody requests and nobody fights to leave, mostly staffed by people finishing out a career rather than building one. The department head there is a Chief Warrant Officer. Name's Holt. First name isn't listed, which either means the directory's simply out of date, or means someone with a very particular kind of discretion prefers it that way, and given everything else about this arrangement, I'd wager on the second."
"Holt," Taisen said, turning the name over, tasting the unfamiliar shape of it. "Zhang never mentioned her."
"Zhang never mentioned Fleet Records at all, in anything he ever told you," Alita said. "Which is exactly what you'd expect if the point of this whole arrangement was that nobody was ever supposed to think to look there in the first place. The safest secret is the one that's boring enough nobody bothers to ask about it."
The dispatch arrived the next morning, routed the long way through Vessyr's own aging relay chain rather than any Fleet channel, three days late by the time it finally caught up with a ship that had spent the last two weeks moving faster and less predictably than any courier could reasonably plan around, and it was Alita who read it first, alone in the small compartment that still smelled faintly of the cargo it used to hold, and felt something in her chest go tight and familiar in a way that had nothing to do with Zhang at all.
She had grown up on stories of Kharsat the way other children grew up on fairy tales, half history and half warning, told at the edges of gatherings where the adults thought the children weren't listening closely enough to remember: the Sahir as they had been before the Krell came, matriarchal and proud and slow to anger, and the Sahir as they had been after, scattered and wary and considerably faster to reach for a blade than their grandmothers had ever needed to be. She had always understood her own people's occupation on Avaros, without anyone ever quite saying so, as the same story told a second time in a different key, which was perhaps why she had never been able to read a Kharsat dispatch the way she read any other piece of fleet correspondence: at a professional remove, rather than as something closer to family news.
The Sahir council of Kharsat had convened twice in the weeks since Taisen left for Earth, the dispatch reported, in the flat, formal cadence of a scribe recording something they'd rather not be recording, careful and clipped in the particular way of someone documenting a disagreement they hoped nobody senior to them would ever be asked to explain. Matriarch Ness's Raider fleet, which had been, until recently, a quiet buildup discussed mostly in careful, deniable terms behind closed council doors, had grown bold enough in the second of those two councils that Matriarch Simika had finally done what she had, by every account Alita had ever heard growing up on stories of her own people's occupied cousins, spent a lifetime avoiding: she had stood up in open council and named the buildup for what it was, publicly, to Ness's face, rather than managing it quietly through the old channels the two matriarchs had used for years to disagree without ever quite calling it disagreement.
The homeworld heals slowly and the fleet grows quickly, Simika had said, according to the dispatch's careful transcription, and I have watched slow things lose to quick things before, in this exact council, with this exact silence in the room while it happened. I will not watch it happen twice in one lifetime.
Ness had not answered the challenge directly. She had simply reminded the council, according to the same transcription, that the Krell had not forgotten what they'd taken from Kharsat a hundred years ago, and that a homeworld too busy healing to remember its enemies would heal itself directly into a second occupation, slower this time, and considerably harder to notice arriving.
Alita read it twice, sitting alone in the cold little compartment with the ship's low hum around her, the cargo-scent walls close and quiet, and thought about her own father, still on Avaros as far as she knew, still holding to the same doctrine Simika was holding to now in a council half a galaxy away, refusing violence on principle even when principle cost him his freedom, and felt, not for the first time, the particular ache of loving two positions that could not both be right and refusing, out of some stubbornness she'd never fully examined even to herself, to choose between them out loud.
It kept moving without me watching it, she thought, and did not find the thought comfortable, exactly, but found it necessary, the way a held breath is necessary before you let it go. The whole world kept moving. It always was going to. I think I'd simply forgotten, these last two weeks, standing in the eye of one storm, that other storms were still turning somewhere else entirely, with or without anyone watching them.
She brought it to Taisen that evening, finding him in the corridor outside sickbay rather than his own quarters, and he listened to the whole of it without interrupting, arms folded, his weight braced slightly against the bulkhead in a way she was coming to recognize as a private accommodation for a body that tired faster than it used to, and was quiet a long moment after she'd finished.
"I can't do anything about it from here," he said finally, "and I think you already know that, or you'd have brought it to me with more urgency than you did, more demand in your voice. I want you to say the rest of it anyway. Not because I can fix it. Because I don't want this crew treating Kharsat's politics as background noise simply because we're busy with something louder right now. A galaxy doesn't stop being a galaxy just because our particular corner of it is on fire."
"I don't know what I want you to do about it," Alita admitted. "I think I only wanted someone else to know it was happening. It felt wrong, somehow, to be the only person on this ship carrying it, the way it feels wrong to be the only one awake in a house where everyone else has gone to sleep, even when there's nothing to actually do about whatever's keeping you up."