"So we go," Camaro said. It wasn't quite a question.
"We go," Taisen said, "carefully, exactly as we've done everything else that's actually worked this month, and we go knowing we're not the only ones with a reason to be curious about what's waiting there. Set a course, Swan. Quietly. Nothing that looks like urgency from the outside, whatever it costs us in patience on the inside. I'd rather arrive as a rumor than an announcement, given how well announcing ourselves has worked out for us so far this month."
"And Holt," Alita said. "The soil, the seed, the promise about her clerk. We can't forget any of that simply because there's a bigger fire in front of us now."
"We won't," Taisen said. "I gave my word in that office, and I intend to keep every piece of it, starting with the soil, which I want arranged before we're a day out from Hollis Station, through a channel quiet enough that nobody watching Fleet traffic thinks twice about a small supply transfer to a records annex nobody's supposed to care about. The rest of it, the clerk, the question I promised to ask, that waits until we're standing somewhere the answer might actually exist. But it doesn't get forgotten. I don't forget the people who help me for nothing more than the promise of a kept word. I've learned, the hard way, exactly what it costs everyone else when I do."
Swan was already at the small terminal, laying in the new heading, his hands steadier now than they'd been at any point during the whole shuttle run, the particular steadiness of a man who finally had something concrete to point the ship toward instead of an open question with no shape to it at all.
"Course laid in," he said, after a few minutes' quiet work. "Four days, if we hold this pace and don't run into anything that makes us slow down further."
"Then we hold this pace," Taisen said, "and we hope, for once, that nothing makes us slow down further."
He found Venemis alone in her quarters again that night, before the ship's course had fully settled onto its new heading, the low hum of the engines still shifting subtly underfoot as Swan fine-tuned the approach vector, and told her the name before he told anyone else, because he judged, rightly, that it would mean more to her than to any of them.
"Calder's Reach," he said. "That's where the trail leads. An old observatory, on the edge of your own contested space, holding whatever's left of a survey that used the same word your grandmother used for the rite she never finished teaching you."
Venemis was quiet a long moment, her third eye closed again beneath its black film, her hands loose and still in her lap the way they always sat when she was turning something over that mattered more than her face was willing to show anyone watching it.
"Then I would like to be there when you open whatever's waiting inside it," she said finally. "Not as a captive brought along because you don't trust me alone on this ship while you're gone. As someone who might actually recognize what she's looking at, if the fragments are real fragments and not simply Fleet Command's clumsy guess at a word they never understood in the first place. I know I have not earned the right to ask for that plainly, given everything that still sits unresolved between us. I'm asking anyway, because I think it might matter more than either of our pride standing in the way of it, and because I've grown tired, these last weeks, of watching things that matter happen somewhere I'm not permitted to be useful."
Taisen studied her a long moment, grey climbing steady and cold along a hand he had stopped bothering to hide from her days ago, and found, weighing it, that he did not have to think as hard about the answer as he'd expected to when he'd walked in.
"When we arrive," he said, "you'll be there. Not because I've decided to trust you completely, Venemis. Because I've decided this particular door is worth opening with every set of eyes aboard this ship that might actually recognize what's on the other side of it, and yours are the only ones that might. Trust and usefulness aren't the same currency. I'm spending the second one tonight, not the first."
"That's a fair answer," Venemis said. "It's more than I expected, and considerably less than I'd hoped for, and I find, sitting with both of those things at once, that I'm satisfied regardless, which surprises me more than it probably should."
He stood alone in his own quarters a while after, later than he meant to, turning his grey hand slowly under the low working light, watching the ash settle beneath the skin the way sediment settles in still water long after whatever disturbed it has gone quiet again, the whole hand, from wrist to fingertip, a landscape he had learned, against his will, to read the way another man might read a familiar coastline from the deck of an approaching ship.
Weeks, Swan had told him. Not months.
Somewhere ahead of the Arctic's new heading, a vault sat waiting that might hold the only door left standing between that number and whatever came after it, and somewhere behind that same door, if Venemis was right about the oldest words her people had ever built around the concept, sat the reason a Fleet Marshal had come alone, three times, to stand in front of a sealed file he never once tried to open, a man too careful to touch the thing he was already circling.
He did not know yet which of those two things he was actually chasing harder: the man, or the cure. He suspected, turning the question over the way he turned most things over, unhurried and honest with himself in a way he rarely let himself be honest with anyone else, that the honest answer was both, and that he did not yet know what it meant about him that he could no longer fully separate the two, that somewhere in the last few days the search for Zhang and the search for his own survival had stopped being two errands run in parallel and become, instead, a single road with two names.