Lyn was quiet a moment, and something in her carefully held composure, the flat, guarded pragmatism she wore like a coat too heavy for the season but necessary anyway, cracked just enough to let something else through, something closer to plain fear than she usually allowed herself in front of him.
"I need you to understand something," she said, "and I need you to actually hear it, not simply wait politely for me to finish saying it before you go back to deciding what you were already going to do. If this fails you in the field, at the worst possible moment, in front of people who are counting on you to be exactly as capable as you've always been, it doesn't only cost you. It costs whoever's standing next to you when it happens. I've buried people who trusted a resource that failed them without warning. I would rather not bury anyone else that way, least of all you, and I would very much rather you let me plan around this properly than pretend, out of some soldier's pride, that planning around it is an insult to your competence."
"It isn't an insult," Taisen said, quiet. "I should have told you the moment Swan told me the shape of it changed, not waited for the timing to feel convenient. I'm telling you now, plainly. Camaro and Swan will both be watching for it in the field. I want you to know it exists, not because I expect you to talk me out of going, but because you're right that hiding it from you was its own kind of failure, and I'd rather correct it now than let it cost someone else later."
Camaro shifted at the door, and when she spoke, there was less flatness in it than her usual register carried, something closer to the plain, unadorned honesty she reserved for the people she'd decided, somewhere in the last month, actually mattered to her.
"For what it's worth, Colonel," she said, "I already had my own answer to what happens if it fails him mid-fight, before either of you asked me for one. I've had it since the vault at Hollis Station, watching him hold that hand like it was made of something breakable. I don't need reminding to watch for it. I've been watching for it the whole crossing."
"I know you have," Lyn said, something in her voice easing, fractionally, at that. "I'm not doubting you, Ensign. I'm making certain it's said out loud, in this room, where all three of us can hold each other to it later, rather than trusted to memory and good intentions."
"Fair," Camaro said.
"I need you to actually understand the cost of what you're asking me to sign off on," Lyn went on, turning back to Taisen, "not just hear the words of it. You're the reason this crew has survived a month that should have killed all of us twice over by now. If you go down in that vault and there's no plan for it beyond hoping Camaro's fast enough, I'm not just losing a commander. I'm losing the only person aboard this ship who's consistently seen three moves further than whatever's trying to kill us. That's not sentiment, Taisen. That's tactics, and I'd be failing my own job if I let it slide past without saying so plainly."
"You're not wrong about any of that," Taisen said, "and I don't intend to argue with a single word of it. I only have the one plan to offer in return, and it isn't a clean one. Camaro and Swan watch the hand. If it fails, they pull me back and hold the line without me until it passes or doesn't. I'd rather build the mission around the honest shape of my own limits than pretend, in front of either of you, that the limits don't exist. I've watched too many good officers die believing their own competence was a fixed quantity rather than a number that changes day to day. I don't intend to make that mistake about myself, however much easier it would be to keep believing otherwise."
Lyn held his eyes a long moment, something unresolved and considerable passing behind her own careful composure, and then, finally, nodded, once, the particular concession of a woman setting down an argument she hadn't finished having only because there wasn't time left to finish it properly.
"Fine," she said. "Camaro. If it fails him in there, mid-fight, I want you making the call to pull him out, not asking him first. Are we clear."
"Clear," Camaro said, from the door, and there was nothing flat in it at all this time.
"And Taisen." Lyn's voice had gone quieter now, the last of the argument's edge worn away into something plainer. "The next time something changes, tell me the hour you learn it. Not the hour it becomes convenient. I'd rather be woken at three in the morning by bad news than be handed good manners instead of the truth."
"Understood," Taisen said, and meant it, and something in the small, cramped quarters, crowded now with three people and one hard fact none of them could fix, settled, at least for the moment, into something a little more like trust than it had held when Swan first knocked on the door.
The remaining two days of the crossing passed the way the previous ones had, work filling the hours that fear would otherwise have filled instead: Alita and Swan cross referencing Fleet's own outdated directory against everything the Vessyr archive still held on the region around Calder's Reach, Camaro running the small landing party through a boarding drill twice a day in the shuttle bay until every one of them could find every exit blind, Osei standing his rounds along the Arctic's hull with the same patient, unhurried thoroughness he'd shown since the courier's visit, and Venemis, alone in her quarters, sitting cross legged in the pale worn patch on her own deck plating with her third eye closed, turning over, again and again, every fragment of her grandmother's half taught rite she could still remember, trying to decide which of them might matter once they finally stood somewhere the answer could be tested.
Camaro found Swan at the shuttle bay's edge on the second of those two days, between drills, methodically stripping and reassembling a sidearm he had no reason to distrust, the particular restless habit of a man who needed his hands doing something precise while his mind ran somewhere considerably less precise underneath it.