The shuttle crossing back to the Arctic ran faster and rougher than the crossing out had been, Camaro at the yoke with Zhang strapped into the rear compartment under a thin emergency blanket and Taisen laid flat across the two remaining seats with Venemis's good hand pressed hard against the pulse at his throat, counting it aloud, low and steady, the way a woman counts something she is afraid to stop counting, while Osei watched the aft sensor feed with the particular grim attention of a man measuring exactly how much time they actually had left against how much time the situation was pretending to give them.
"Reza contact's inside twelve minutes now," he reported, flat. "They'll have the listening post's outer hull in sensor range before we clear the belt if we don't push this shuttle harder than it wants to be pushed."
"Then push it," Camaro said, and did, the whole frame groaning under the strain of a burn well past what the shuttle's own manual would have called advisable, the belt's scattered debris field blurring past the canopy in streaks of rust colored shadow.
Swan met them at the Arctic's docking bay with a full trauma team already staged, and the next several minutes dissolved into the particular controlled chaos of a ship's medical crew doing the work they'd trained for, Zhang taken first, gaunt and barely conscious but breathing steady, Taisen a half step behind him on a second gurney, his ruined arm now grey past the shoulder and creeping, visibly, along the side of his neck toward his jaw, a tide that had, in the space of a single night, finally found room enough to keep climbing.
"Get the door sealed the second we're clear," Lyn's voice cut across the bay's own noise, sharp with command, already moving toward the command deck at a pace that left no room for anyone to mistake it for anything but urgency. "Swan, whatever you need to do for either of them, do it fast, because the moment that Reza hull gets a lock on this position, we're gone into the Fold whether we're ready for it or not."
The Fold drive spun up eleven minutes later, the Arctic's whole hull thrumming with the particular deep vibration that preceded a jump, and the last clean sensor return before the amber churn swallowed the display whole showed the Reza contact close enough, at last, that its own hull registered as more than a smear of light against the dark, close enough that whoever crewed it might, in the last half second before the Fold took the Arctic somewhere it couldn't follow, have caught the barest flicker of a hull it had spent the whole night hunting.
And then the Fold closed behind them, and the belt, and the listening post, and whatever was left of the fight that had nearly cost the ship its commander, fell away into the dark, and the only sound left on the bridge was the low, patient hum of a ship running for its life at the only speed it had left to give.