"You've run that drill four times today," Camaro said, not quite a question, settling against the bulkhead beside him with two cups of the ship's own bad coffee, setting one down within his reach without comment.
"Five," Swan said, not looking up from the weapon in his hands. "I keep finding a half second I think I could shave off getting Venemis clear of a doorway if it ever comes to that, and then I run it again and find I've only imagined the improvement." He set the reassembled sidearm down and looked at it a moment, as though it might have an opinion of its own to offer. "I keep thinking about what happens if his hand fails at the exact wrong half second, and I've decided the only thing I can actually do about that is make sure my own half second is faster, so it costs less when his isn't there to spend."
"That's not nothing," Camaro said. "I've served with men who spent that same fear drinking instead of drilling. I'll take five reps over a bottle any day of the week."
"Is that what you did," Swan asked, quieter, "before this ship. Before whatever happened that left you with that hand."
Camaro was quiet a long moment, turning her own cup slowly, watching the steam curl and vanish in the bay's cool recycled air, remembering, almost against her will, a very different conversation weeks ago that had opened much the same way.
"For a while," she admitted. "Long enough to be ashamed of it, not long enough to still be doing it. I found out the hard way that a bottle doesn't actually make the next bad decision easier. It just makes it quieter until it isn't anymore." She flexed the healing hand once, slow, deliberate, the old scar tissue pulling faintly, familiar now in its own quiet way. "I drill now instead. Turns out it works considerably better, and nobody has to clean up after me in the morning."
Swan managed something close to a smile at that, thin but real. "I'll take the drilling over the alternative too, then. For what it's worth."
"It's worth something," Camaro said, and they sat a while longer in a silence that had, by now, considerably less distance in it than either of them would have predicted a month ago.
Alita, meanwhile, spent the better part of both days in the small compartment that still smelled faintly of the Beluga's old cargo manifests, working the outdated directory against Vessyr's own archive one cross reference at a time, and it was on the second evening that she finally set the terminal down, rubbed both eyes with the heels of her hands, and allowed herself, for the first time in hours, to simply sit with the strangeness of what they were actually flying toward.
"Do you ever think about how strange this is," she said, to Swan, who had wandered in an hour before to borrow her terminal's processing power for his own scan calibrations and had stayed, largely, because the company was better than the empty intelligence office. "A month ago I was an ensign nobody expected to survive her first real engagement. Now I'm helping plan an expedition to a wounded planet-sized weapon that might also be the only cure for my commanding officer's own dying hand. I don't think there's a Truby structure for that. I don't think there's a structure for any of this."
"Maybe that's the point of a structure," Swan said, surprising her, and himself, with the thought as it left his mouth. "Not that it predicts everything. That it gives you somewhere to stand while you're waiting to find out what actually happens."
Alita looked at him a long moment, something in her face settling into a small, tired warmth. "That's better than anything I've said about it," she admitted. "You should write that down before you forget you thought of it."
"I probably will forget," Swan said, "so you'll have to remember it for both of us."
It was on the evening of the third day, with less than a day left before arrival, that Swan brought word to the bridge of a detection neither he nor Lyn much liked the shape of: a faint, intermittent signature, three relay-hops distant and fading in and out of the Arctic's own passive sensors, moving on a heading that could plausibly be coincidence and could just as plausibly not be.
"It's not tracking us," Swan said, careful, watching the faint blip resolve and then blur again against the Fold's own restless static. "Not obviously. But it's holding a bearing that would put it in range of Calder's Reach roughly the same window we'd arrive in, if it holds its current speed, and I don't like how much of that could be explained by simple bad luck."
"Krell," Lyn said, not quite a question.
"Could be," Swan said. "Could be nothing at all. I don't have the resolution to say for certain from here, and I'd rather tell you honestly that I don't than guess and have you plan around a guess I dressed up as a fact."
Taisen studied the faint, flickering point a long moment, weighing it against everything Holt had told them in that small, cluttered office three relay rings from anywhere. "Holt's broker mentioned independent buyers paying well for anything solid on the Forge," he said. "Six or seven weeks ago, by her own account. If word's been quietly moving through that same network since, it's had considerably longer to reach more than one interested party than we'd like. This might be the same buyer's agent Holt's broker was talking to. It might be a different one entirely, drawn by the same rumor from a different direction. Either way, I'd rather assume the worse version and be wrong than assume the better one and be caught flat-footed by it."
"So we go in expecting company," Camaro said, from the tactical station, arms crossed.
"We go in expecting company," Taisen agreed. "And we plan the landing accordingly. Whatever's waiting in that vault, we don't have it to ourselves for long, however this signature turns out to be. I'd rather move fast and careful both than trust that we've simply beaten everyone else to it by pure luck."