Sorrel sat exactly where they'd left her, wrists still bound, scarred face unreadable in the holding compartment's low light, and something in the set of her shoulders when Taisen came to stand in the open hatch suggested she had been waiting, with the same unbothered patience she seemed to carry into every locked room she was ever likely to find herself inside of, for precisely this conversation.
"You're offering to help us," Taisen said, "which is either generosity I have no reason to trust from you, or a price I haven't heard the shape of yet."
"Little of both," Sorrel said. "I don't do generosity for free, Commander, you've read me clearly enough by now to know that much. But I also don't relish the idea of a Reza hull finding this ship before I've had the chance to be handed off to whatever authority you've promised me instead. Whatever they're hunting out here, I'd rather not be aboard the vessel they catch doing it." She considered him a moment longer, weighing, he judged, exactly how much the next sentence actually cost her to hand over for free. "That destination your ensign pulled off the terminal. I know it. Not the coordinate itself, but the kind of place it is. An old listening post, predates the Forge's discovery by decades, built back when this whole sector was still being surveyed for mineral rights instead of monsters. Half the independent brokers I've dealt with over the years know it exists, even if none of them talk about it openly. It's neutral ground, Commander. Nobody claims it, because everybody who's ever tried has found it easier to simply use it and leave."
"Neutral to whom," Taisen said.
"To anyone with the patience not to make trouble there," Sorrel said. "Krell proper avoids it on principle, some old agreement predating my own time in this business. Independent brokers use it for exactly what it sounds like your Marshal's captors were using it for. A quiet place to hold something, or someone, without drawing the kind of attention a station with an actual name would draw." She let that settle a moment before continuing, her voice dropping into something almost, though not quite, gentler. "I'll tell you the approach vectors I know, the ones that won't announce you to whoever's already holding position there. I'll tell you for free, this once, because I meant what I said standing in that vault about preferring an odd captor who asks my opinion over one who doesn't. Consider it a debt paid forward against whatever authority you eventually hand me to."
Taisen studied her a long moment, weighing the offer the same careful way he weighed most things Sorrel handed him, and found, on balance, that refusing free intelligence out of pure suspicion was its own kind of foolishness he could no longer afford tonight.
"I'll take it," he said. "And I won't forget you offered it without asking for anything in return first."
"See that you don't," Sorrel said, something almost like satisfaction moving behind her scarred, weathered face, and gave him, in the next several minutes, in the same flat, transactional cadence she used for everything, a set of approach headings and blind spots that Swan, when Taisen relayed them to the bridge, confirmed matched cleanly against everything the Arctic's own sensors had logged of the listening post's outer defenses from three hundred thousand kilometers out.
The Arctic came in low and quiet along the vector Sorrel had given them, running dark, every non-essential system dimmed the way Osei had learned to dim a hull's own signature during two decades of quieter work than this, and it was Alita, watching the old listening post grow slowly on the main display, a squat, ugly, functional structure that had clearly never once in its long service life been built for anything as gentle as comfort, who spoke first into the bridge's held quiet.
"Life signs," she said, reading off Swan's own board with the careful, deliberate attention she gave every number that might matter. "Four, maybe five. One of them's weaker than the others. Fainter. Barely registering at all against the background."
"That could be him," Lyn said, low, not quite hope, not quite fear, something caught tight between the two.
"It could be," Taisen said, and did not let himself finish the thought any further than that, because the fleet behind them had not stopped moving, and the debt in his arm had not stopped climbing, and somewhere ahead of them, in a structure that had spent decades being nobody's business in particular, a man who might or might not still be breathing was about to become, for the second time in the same long month, the only thing that mattered.
The hatch cycled. The boarding team moved. And whatever answer waited on the other side of that faint, weakening life sign was, at last, close enough to touch.