"Neither did the briefing that got us here," Taisen said.
Camaro said nothing at all for a long moment, her arms still crossed, her eyes fixed on the slow, patient pulse of light traveling along one distant seam, and when she finally spoke, there was none of her usual flatness in it, only a kind of plain, unguarded honesty that surprised even her.
"It looks like it's waiting for something," she said. "I don't know how a rock the size of three planets manages to look like it's waiting, but it does."
Venemis, who had come to stand at the edge of the bridge without anyone summoning her, Osei a silent step behind her at the hatch, said nothing at all for a long moment, her third eye opening slowly beneath its black film, the whole of her stillness deepening into something that looked, to Taisen, less like fear and more like recognition arriving at last after a lifetime of only ever hearing the shape of a story secondhand.
"My grandmother never told me it was this large," she said finally. "I don't think she knew. I don't think anyone still living has ever actually seen it, not with their own eyes, only heard the word for it passed down carefully enough that nobody quite believed the word was describing something real. I have spent my whole life treating the Forge as a phrase from an old story, the kind of word a grandmother uses to frighten a child into respecting powers she isn't ready to touch. I did not expect, standing here, to feel the particular vertigo of discovering the story was never a story at all."
"It's real," Taisen said, quiet, feeling the cold in his own hand settle deeper, as it always seemed to when something in front of him mattered enough to notice. "And it's been sitting here the whole time, patient, exactly as Holt's records said it would be, waiting for someone to finally come and ask it the right question."
He watched it a while longer, the slow, unhurried pulse of pale light crawling along one vast folded seam, and felt something in his own chest tighten in a way he did not immediately have a name for, some mixture of dread and an old, half-forgotten reverence he had not felt in either of his two lives, not standing before any weapon, any fleet, any enemy he had ever faced. It did not feel like looking at a tool waiting to be used. It felt, absurdly, like looking at something patient enough to have been waiting considerably longer than his own two lifetimes combined, and considerably more tired of the waiting than anyone still alive had ever bothered to ask it.
The old observatory did not answer hails, which surprised no one, and Lyn brought the Arctic to a careful, deliberate stop at a range she judged safe from whatever passive defenses forty one years of abandonment might or might not have left functioning, while Swan ran every passive scan the ship carried across both the station and, at a much more cautious remove, the vast folded thing hanging beyond it.
"No active power signature from the Forge itself," he reported, reading the numbers twice before he trusted them enough to say them aloud. "Which matches what the file called it. Idling. Whatever's keeping those light-pulses moving along the seams isn't drawing power the way a working system draws power. It's more like watching a coal bank itself overnight, holding heat without needing anything fed to it to keep holding. The station's a different story. There's a residual power trace, faint, old, patched together out of what looks like a self-sustaining collector array that's kept limping along on its own for decades without anyone tending it. Enough for lights in a few sections. Enough, maybe, for records to have survived somewhere dry and cold enough not to have rotted through by now."
"Any other traffic," Taisen said.
"None active," Swan said, "which doesn't mean none recent. There's outgassing along one of the station's docking collars that reads newer than the rest of the corrosion pattern around it. Somebody's opened an airlock there within the last few months, maybe less. I can't tell you who."
"Krell," Camaro said, flat, echoing Holt's own broker without needing to be told the shape of the guess twice.
"Possibly," Taisen said. "Possibly someone else entirely. Either way, we go in assuming we're not the first visitors this year, and we go in quiet."
The landing party assembled in the shuttle bay an hour later, suited against a hull that had not held reliable atmosphere in forty one years: Taisen, Camaro, Swan, and Venemis, with Osei standing at the shuttle's ramp in full kit, having made his case to Taisen plainly the evening before, the same unhurried economy he brought to most things.
"Krell don't send one man to test a door anymore," Osei had said. "Not after Hollis Station taught them we notice. If they're already inside that station, I'd rather be the second set of hands at your back than the only set of eyes left watching an empty hull out here."
"Who holds the Arctic's hull, then," Taisen had asked, "if you're not standing on it."
"Nobody's coming for an empty ship sitting at a safe range with her weapons live and a Colonel who reads a targeting header better than most of us read a menu," Osei had said. "Somebody might come for five people alone in a derelict with Krell already circling it. I'd rather be wrong about the ship and right about the vault than the other way around."
Taisen had looked at him a long moment and found, weighing it, that he agreed. "Camaro," he'd added, "any objection to a sixth pair of hands."
"None," Camaro had said. "More hands means less of my own attention split between watching the door and watching Venemis. I'll take Osei over an empty corridor any day."
That decided, the shuttle bay that morning carried the particular hushed, focused energy of a crew going through the last motions of a ritual they'd rather not need but had learned, this last month, to trust anyway: suit seals checked twice, weapons checked twice more, Swan's small recovery kit strapped tight against his hip alongside a second kit nobody had needed to ask him to pack, the kind a man brings when he's already decided someone might come back hurt.