Swan had the last stitch of a different kind of work laid out on the sickbay's second bed by the time the shuttle had cleared the belt and the Arctic's own Fold drive had begun spinning back up toward a heading none of them had chosen so much as inherited from a stranger's coordinate three days stale, a slim medical scanner tracing slow, careful passes along the full length of Taisen's ruined arm while he sat, wincing only faintly, and let the man work.
"I'm not going to dress this up for you," Swan said finally, setting the scanner down with the particular deliberate care of a man who'd rather deliver bad news plainly than let it curdle into something worse by dressing it up first. "The grey's past your elbow now. It wasn't, a week ago. I don't have a clean model for how fast this debt accrues under real strain, because nobody's ever handed me a patient carrying this particular cost before, but if I extrapolate from what I'm seeing tonight against what I logged after the vault, you're looking at maybe another two hard uses, three if you're careful and lucky both, before this reaches your shoulder."
"And after the shoulder," Taisen said, quiet, watching his own hand where it lay pale and unresponsive against the sickbay's clean white sheet.
"I don't know," Swan said, honestly. "I don't know if it stops there. I don't know if it's reversible past a certain point, or if what we're watching is a debt that eventually stops being metaphorical and starts being permanent. I'd rather tell you the truth of what I don't know than hand you a comfortable guess dressed up as medicine. What I do know is that tonight, in that shuttle, your good hand went unresponsive for close to a full second at the exact moment you needed it most, and Camaro had to take the yoke to keep all three of you from becoming a debris field against that rig's own hull. That's not a future risk anymore, Commander. That already happened once."
Lyn stood near the hatch, arms crossed, her face carrying none of its usual careful composure, and when she spoke, her voice was low and taut in a way Taisen had learned, this last month, meant she was holding something back with real effort rather than not feeling it at all.
"You told me, on the bridge, that you were sitting with what almost happened in that vault," she said. "I want to know if you're sitting with this too, or if you've already decided the answer is to keep spending it anyway because Zhang's clock is still running."
"Both," Taisen said, honest, because there seemed little point offering her anything less with the grey climbing visibly toward his shoulder and a Reza fleet now hunting the same coordinate they'd just left. "I'm sitting with it, Lyn. I understand exactly what Swan just told me, and I understand what it means that my good hand failed me once already tonight. I also understand that the fleet at that waypoint means Zhang's captors moved him somewhere new less than a day before we arrived, and that whoever's now converging on that empty rig behind us is not going to stop looking simply because we've stopped being there to find. I don't have a version of the next several days that doesn't ask more of this arm before it's finished. I wish I did. I'd take it if it were offered."
"Then find a version that doesn't ask everything of it at once," Lyn said. "That's not me asking you to stop. I've already told you I don't think I could ask that of you and mean it. I'm asking you to ration it the way you'd ration anything else that's running short on this ship, because right now you're spending it like a man who still believes he has more of it left than Swan just told you that you do."
Taisen was quiet a long moment, looking at his own hand, grey to the elbow now and climbing, and found, weighing her words against the honest shape of the night, that he did not have a ready argument against them.
"Understood," he said, finally. "I'll ration it. I can't promise you I won't spend what's left when the moment demands it, because I don't believe either of us actually wants a version of me that hesitates at the exact second it matters most. But I'll stop reaching for it first, when there's another way through that costs less. That's the honest promise I can make you tonight, and I'd rather give you an honest smaller promise than a comfortable large one I already know I can't keep."
Lyn held his eyes a moment longer, something in her face easing, fractionally, at that, the particular small mercy of a promise offered honestly rather than dressed up past what it could actually deliver, and it was Sorrel's voice, dry and carrying easily from the holding compartment two bulkheads over where the hatch had been left cracked for exactly this kind of eavesdropping, that broke the moment before either of them could say anything further.
"For what it's worth, Commander," she called, unbothered, "if you're hunting a coordinate that Krell's own scavengers already know about, you're going to want considerably more than rationed miracles to get there ahead of a Reza hull. I don't suppose anyone's thought to ask the one person aboard this ship who's actually seen that fleet's patrol patterns up close and lived to sell the information."