"Sit down," Swan said, quiet, the anxious edge that usually ran under his voice folded away somewhere Taisen had rarely seen him fold it before, replaced with the flat, careful competence of a man who had decided, somewhere between the corridor and the door, that today was not a day for hedging. "Actually. You're already sitting. Good. Don't get up."
Taisen said nothing to that, and let the small, dry attempt at levity pass between them without comment, a friend's nervous joke allowed to land softly rather than corrected for its timing.
"Tell me what happened," Swan said. "All of it. Not the version you'd give me if you were still deciding how much of it I needed to hear. I've had enough of that version from you these last weeks to recognize it coming before you've finished the first sentence."
"I dropped a training blade," Taisen said. "Reverse grip, six-count turn, a pattern I've run more times than I could count in either life. I didn't feel it leave my hand. Not stiffness. Not slowness. The hand simply stopped reporting anything at all for the half second it mattered, and then it was on the deck, and I was standing there looking at my own open palm like a man who's just discovered a door has no hinges left holding it."
Swan ran the scan in a silence that stretched longer than any of the previous scans had, the small unit's soft chime sounding, to Taisen's ear, almost apologetic, and read the results twice before he set the unit down and did not turn the display away this time, angling it instead so Taisen could see the numbers himself, a small, deliberate courtesy that did not go unnoticed.
"It's not just cold anymore," Swan said. "Cold I can explain to you as circulation, nerve response slowing under something we don't fully understand. I've been telling myself that story for eleven days because it let me keep giving you a number you could plan a mission around. This is different. There are patches now, small ones, at the base of two fingers, where the signal isn't degraded. It's gone. Not slower. Absent. If that pattern holds and spreads the way the ash itself has been spreading, you're not looking at a hand that gets colder and weaker in a straight line toward the palm. You're looking at a hand that starts failing you in pieces before it ever fully goes, which is worse for planning around, not better, because you won't always know in advance which piece is about to fail you, or when."
"How long," Taisen said, and there was no performance of calm in it this time, simply the plain, tired asking of a man who had stopped pretending, even to himself, that the answer wouldn't cost him something to hear.
"I don't know," Swan said. "I told you that in sickbay after the beach and it's still true, and I'd rather keep telling you the truth even when the truth is thin than dress up a guess as something sturdier because it would be kinder to say out loud. What I can tell you is this. It's not linear anymore, if it ever was. The rate along the finger held steady for eleven days, and I let myself believe, because it was steady, that steady meant predictable. This is a new kind of failure showing up faster than the visible ash itself, which means the visible grey may not be the whole clock. There might be a second one running underneath it that we can't see at all until it's already cost you something, the way the fastest fire in a building is never the one you can see from the street."
Taisen sat with that a long moment, turning his own hand slowly in the sickbay's clean overhead light, watching it with the same clinical distance he'd trained himself into these last weeks, an inventory rather than a wound, though the distinction, he privately admitted, was growing harder to hold onto with each new thing the hand refused to tell him.
"Camaro needs to hear this," he said finally. "And Lyn."
Swan looked at him a moment, something in his face easing, not with relief exactly, but with the particular loosening of a man who had spent the last hour rehearsing an argument he'd now been spared having to make.
"I was going to say the same thing," Swan said, "and I'm glad I don't have to talk you into it. I had three separate versions of that argument ready, sir. One reasonable, one considerably less reasonable, and one that mostly involved me refusing to leave this room until you agreed."
"Which version would you have used first," Taisen asked, something faint and dry moving at the corner of his mouth despite everything.
"The reasonable one," Swan admitted. "I always start reasonable. It's the other two I keep in reserve for when reasonable doesn't work fast enough."
Lyn took the number the way she took most things she couldn't fix by force of will alone, standing very straight at the small fold-out table in Taisen's quarters with her arms folded and her jaw set, listening to the whole of it without once interrupting, Swan's numbers laid out plainly between them on the small display and Camaro standing at the door with her own arms crossed, having already heard the shape of it once from Swan in the corridor on the way here and finding, this second time, that it landed no easier for the repetition.
"Weeks," Lyn said, when Swan had finished, the word coming out flatter than she'd clearly meant it to, as though saying it plainly cost her something she hadn't budgeted for. "You've known that word since before Hollis Station."
"Yes," Taisen said.
"And you were going to let me command a landing party into a derelict observatory that might have Krell already crawling through it, without telling me the man leading it might lose the use of his own hand mid fight, with no warning, at whatever moment happens to be worst."
"I was going to tell you before we landed," Taisen said. "I hadn't decided yet exactly when, which I recognize now was its own kind of dishonesty, the sort that lets a man believe he still has time to choose the comfortable version of a hard conversation. Swan made the decision for me an hour ago. I'm grateful he did."