The listening post's inner corridors ran narrow and low, cable runs exposed along both walls in tangled black ropes that spoke of decades of patchwork maintenance by people who had cared considerably more about function than finish, and the boarding team moved through them in a tight, practiced formation, Camaro on point with Osei covering the rear, Taisen and Venemis holding the center where a Falmeri Third Sight and a commander's judgment could both be brought to bear the instant either was needed.
They found the first guard at the second junction, a lean, hard-eyed man in unmarked tactical gear who came around the corner already firing, and Camaro put him down with two rounds before he'd finished bringing his weapon fully level, her own breathing barely changed by the exchange, the flat competence of a woman who had trained for exactly this and had stopped, somewhere in the last month, being surprised by how well the training held under real fire. Osei's light caught the man's sleeve for only a second as the body settled against the deck, but it was enough: three interlocked hexagons stitched low under a strap, faded from washing, the kind of small private mark a company sews onto its own contract security so its own accountants know who to bill for the trouble.
"Corporate," Osei said, low, already moving past the body toward the next junction. "Somebody's paying these men a wage, Commander, not defending a cause. I've seen that mark before, on manifests, never on a man. Whoever's holding the purse strings on this cell wants it known, at least to the men holding the guns, exactly who they answer to."
"Two more, deeper in," he added a moment later, reading something in the corridor ahead that the rest of them hadn't caught yet, some faint disturbance in the settled dust or the angle of a half open hatch that only two decades of quieter work than this had taught him to notice. "Defensive positions, not patrol. They're holding a room, not searching for us."
"The cell," Taisen said, quiet, and felt the cold in his ruined hand answer the word the way it always did now, an old habit becoming something closer to a warning system. "That's where he is."
They found the room exactly where Osei's read had promised it would be, a reinforced hatch at the corridor's end with two more guards dug in behind a hastily stacked barricade of crates and salvaged plating, the same faded three hexagon mark stitched to both men's shoulders, and Osei's eyes went to the barricade itself for one beat longer than the rest of them had time to spare, crates stacked two deep on the right and only one deep on the left, the kind of asymmetry a man builds in a hurry and never gets the chance to fix. "Left side's thin," he said, fast and low, to Camaro alone. "If either of them wants an angle on you, that's the side he goes."
The fight that followed was fast and ugly and considerably closer than any of them liked, rounds sparking off the corridor's exposed cable runs, one of the two guards shouting something raw and half formed about not letting them past, that she'd have all their names off the manifest by morning if this cell talked, a fear in his voice that had nothing to do with the two strangers currently shooting at him and everything to do with somebody who wasn't in the room at all. Camaro pinned hard behind a support strut, her own return fire keeping the first guard's head down while the second worked his way toward an angle that would put him behind her entirely, exactly the gap Osei had already named.
"Left," Camaro said, already pivoting before the word had finished leaving her own mouth, Osei's warning sitting loaded in her a full breath before Venemis's voice landed on top of it, and it bought her something, a half turn she wouldn't have had in time otherwise, but the strut only gave her one clean line and the guard had two ways to break it.
"Camaro's boxed," Venemis said, sharp, her third eye wide open beneath its black film, seeing, Taisen understood in the half second he had to understand anything at all, considerably more of the room's geometry than his own eyes could offer him from where he stood. "The second one, flanking left, six seconds before he has the angle."
Taisen felt the promise he'd made Lyn sitting heavy in his chest even as his body was already moving past it, the honest smaller promise he'd offered her in the sickbay, that he would stop reaching for the Aether first, that he would ration it the way anything running short deserved to be rationed, and found, in the same breath, that six seconds was not a number that left room for any option that cost less than everything he had left to give it.
He reached for it anyway.
The cold came up fast this time, faster than it ever had before, a pressure behind his sternum that felt, for one disorienting instant, less like the clean narrowing focus he'd learned to trust and more like something straining against a door that had already been asked to open too many times in too short a span, and he pushed through the resistance the same way he always had, by simple stubborn will, because Camaro had six seconds and he did not have the luxury of listening to what his own body was trying, urgently, to tell him about the cost of what he was about to spend.
The Aether did not answer.
Not slowly, not with the familiar creeping numbness he'd learned to read and work around. It simply was not there, a door he reached for out of long habit finding nothing on the other side of it but the same cold, grey absence that had already claimed his ruined hand to the shoulder, and in the half second it took him to understand that the well he'd been drawing from for two lifetimes had, for the first time either of those lifetimes had ever asked of it, run entirely dry, his knees buckled beneath him and the corridor's low light went dim and distant at the edges, and the last thing he registered clearly before the floor came up to meet him was Venemis's voice, sharp with an alarm he had never once heard in it before, calling his name into a fight that had not, in any sense that mattered, stopped happening simply because he had.