Camaro heard Venemis's voice break across the corridor's noise and did not have the luxury of turning to look, the flanking guard's angle closing faster now with nothing left standing between him and a clean shot at her back, and it was Osei, moving with the same unhurried economy he brought to every room he'd ever entered, who closed the gap instead, his own weapon finding the flanking guard's exposed shoulder at a range close enough that the shot could not have missed if he'd tried, dropping the man hard against the corridor's exposed cable runs in a tangle of limbs that did not move again.
"Taisen's down," Venemis called, already moving toward him, one hand pressed hard against the wound opening along her own forearm where a stray round had caught her in the scramble, her voice carrying none of its usual careful stillness now, raw with something closer to fear than Taisen had ever heard from her in the whole hard month he'd known her. "He reached for the Aether and it did not answer him. I do not know if that has ever happened to him before. I do not know what it means that it happened now."
"It means we finish this without him," Camaro said, sharp, already moving on the last guard, whose own nerve had broken the instant he'd watched two of his own men drop inside of ten seconds, hands coming up in a gesture that asked, wordlessly and far too late, for a mercy the room had stopped being willing to offer the moment the first shot was fired. Camaro put him down with a single round to the leg rather than the killing shot she could just as easily have taken, some instinct older than the fight itself insisting there might be value yet in a man who could talk, and turned, immediately, back toward where Taisen lay crumpled against the corridor's deck plating, his ruined arm splayed at an angle no conscious man would have chosen, grey to the shoulder now and past it, a faint ashen cast climbing visibly along the side of his neck.
"Swan," she said, into the comm, her voice tight with an urgency she made no effort to hide. "I need you cutting a path to us the second this hatch opens. Taisen's down. Aether failure, not a wound, but I don't like how he's breathing and I don't like what I'm seeing on his neck."
"On my way," Swan said, already moving, his voice carrying its own thread of barely contained alarm. "Keep him elevated if you can, don't let that arm hang lower than his heart, I'll explain why later, just do it."
Osei knelt at Taisen's other side, working the reinforced hatch's final barricade aside with the same unhurried thoroughness he brought to every task, and it was his voice, quiet and level even now, that cut through the ragged edge of the room's fear and gave it somewhere useful to go.
"The cell's behind this hatch," he said. "Whatever we came here for is still on the other side of it. I don't think Taisen would want us standing here debating what to do about him instead of finishing what he came to finish. I think he'd want us moving."
Camaro looked down at Taisen's slack, unconscious face a moment longer, something tight and unwilling to be spoken moving behind her own eyes, and then nodded, once, and rose.
"Osei, get that hatch open. Venemis, stay with him, keep pressure on that arm of yours while you're at it, you're bleeding worse than you're letting on. I'll cover the door." She said it fast, flat, the voice of a woman choosing to trust her own crew with a decision she didn't have time to make any more carefully than that, and none of them argued it, because there was, in that moment, nothing left to argue.
The hatch gave way under Osei's hands a moment later, old hinges shrieking in protest, and the room beyond it held, at last, what the whole long month had been circling toward without any of them quite believing, until this exact second, that they would actually find it.
A man lay on a narrow cot against the far wall, wrists still marked with the raw, healing evidence of restraints recently broken, his uniform reduced to little more than rags, his face gaunt in a way that spoke of weeks of deliberate deprivation rather than mere hardship, and when Osei's light swept across him, his eyes opened, slow and unfocused, finding the shape of an armed stranger standing in his doorway with the particular flat, exhausted wariness of a man who had learned, the hard way, not to trust the first face that came looking for him.
"Fleet Marshal Zhang," Osei said, quiet, lowering his weapon slowly so the gesture could not be mistaken for anything but what it was. "We're with the Arctic. Colonel Lyn sent us. You're safe now."
Zhang's cracked lips moved, and for a long moment no sound came at all, his whole body trembling with the effort of simply staying conscious long enough to answer, and when the words finally came, they came thin and hoarse and utterly unlike the voice of command Camaro had expected from a man three levels above her own rank.
"Lyn," he said. "She's alive. Good. Good." His eyes drifted past Osei toward the corridor beyond, toward the ragged sound of Venemis's voice still working to hold Taisen's breathing steady, and something in his gaunt face sharpened, briefly, with an alertness the rest of him plainly did not have the strength to sustain. "Who's down. Who did they hurt."
"Our commander," Osei said. "He'll live. We need to move, Marshal, there's a hostile fleet closing on this position and we don't have long to clear it."
Zhang's head fell back against the cot, some last reserve of strength spent on the effort of asking, and his eyes had already begun to slide shut again by the time he answered, his voice dropping to something barely above a breath.
"Get us out," he said. "And when he wakes. Tell him. Tell him I need to speak with him. Before anyone else does. There's something he needs to hear from me, and only me, before this goes any further."