Venemis stood a little apart from the others, her own suit fitted awkwardly around a frame the Arctic's stores had never been built to accommodate, patched and adjusted twice already by Swan's own careful hands, and said little, her third eye closed beneath its black film, her attention turned inward, the same careful withdrawal she always showed before any working she judged might cost her something.
"Lyn holds the Arctic at range," Taisen said now, at the ramp, running the plan aloud one final time for everyone's benefit rather than his own. "Alita stays with her, running anything Swan sends back through the archive in real time. If we go quiet for more than thirty minutes without a check in, Lyn moves the ship closer, and whoever's still aboard comes through that door first, not last."
"Understood," Lyn said, over the comm, her voice carrying, even flattened through the small speaker, the particular tightness of a woman who hated every part of this plan and had run out of better ones to offer instead. "I want a check in every fifteen minutes regardless, not thirty. I'll take being told I'm being overly careful over finding out the hard way I wasn't careful enough."
"Fifteen," Taisen agreed. "Noted, and accepted."
"Be careful," Alita added, quieter, the words landing with more weight than their length suggested. "All of you. I mean that plainly, not as a formality. I've been running the math on how many fires this crew's currently carrying at once, and I don't like the number, and I'd rather not add a sixth."
"We will," Taisen said, and meant it, and the shuttle's hatch sealed behind the five of them a moment later, the Arctic's own bright interior light giving way to the shuttle's dimmer working lamps as it broke away from the bay and turned its nose toward the dark, patient shape of Calder's Reach waiting ahead, the vast folded wound of the Forge itself hanging silent and unhurried beyond it, indifferent, as it had always been, to the small craft now crossing the last stretch of dark between itself and the observatory that had spent four decades watching it breathe.
The docking collar Swan had flagged took the shuttle's own umbilical seal with a groan of old metal that made Camaro's hand drift, briefly, to the weapon at her hip, though nothing followed the sound but silence, and the five of them moved through the airlock's slow, arthritic cycle into a station that had clearly not expected visitors in longer than any of them had been alive.
The corridor beyond the airlock was dark except for the narrow beams of their own suit lamps, the air inside thin and bitterly cold, breathable in short stretches according to Swan's readings but not something any of them chose to trust without a helmet seal close at hand, frost furring every metal surface in a fine, undisturbed layer that told its own quiet story: nobody had walked this particular passage in a very long time, whatever had opened that docking collar a few months ago having apparently gone elsewhere once it arrived.
Dust hung suspended in their lamp beams the way it only does in a place with no air currents left to settle it properly, drifting in slow, lazy spirals disturbed by their own passage and then, behind them, settling back into stillness as though the station itself resented being woken. Every footstep landed with an odd, muffled quality in the thin air, sound traveling differently here than any of them were used to, softer at the edges, as though the station itself had learned, over four decades of silence, to swallow noise rather than carry it.
Osei took point without being asked, his suit lamp sweeping each junction methodically before he committed a step past it, the same unhurried thoroughness he brought to any watch, and it was his lamp that found the first branch in the corridor, a maintenance shaft leading down and a wider passage continuing on toward what Swan's borrowed schematic, salvaged from the same outdated Fleet directory that had given them Hollis Station, marked as the station's habitation ring.
They passed a mess hall first, tables still set with the particular careless disorder of a room abandoned mid-shift rather than cleared deliberately: a mug, tipped and frozen where it had fallen, its long dried contents fused permanently to the table's surface; a deck of cards laid out for a game nobody had finished, one card face down where a hand had set it aside and never picked it back up; a jacket, still hanging on the back of a chair, the name stitched above its breast pocket long faded past reading. A child's drawing, done in some now-unidentifiable crayon or marker, hung pinned to a corkboard near the serving line, curled and brittle with cold, a crude rendering of a family standing beneath what might have been meant as a sun, and Camaro's suit lamp lingered on it a moment longer than strict necessity required before she moved past it without comment.
"Somebody brought a family posting out here," she said, finally, quiet. "To a research annex three relay rings past anything that matters. That's either a very trusted assignment or a very unwanted one, and I can't tell which from a crayon drawing."
"Both, maybe," Swan said. "The kind of posting you take because it's steady work and good schools are a lie you tell yourself about the transfer packet, and by the time you realize it isn't either of those things, you've already unpacked."
Swan paused at the jacket longer than the rest of them, his suit lamp holding steady on its faded name, and said nothing for a moment, the particular stillness of a man imagining, against his own will, the exact ordinary morning that had been interrupted here and never resumed.
"Forty one years," he said finally, quiet, more to himself than to anyone listening. "Whatever happened, it happened fast enough that nobody even finished their coffee."
"Or slow enough that finishing coffee stopped mattering to them long before it happened," Venemis said, from behind him, her voice carrying its own careful weight through the suit comm. "Both are possible. I would not assume, standing here, that we already know which."