They reached Hollis Relay two days later, a squat, weathered waystation strung along an old mining lane far enough off any major route that Fleet Command had never bothered maintaining more than a skeleton presence there, its outer hull scarred and patched in a dozen mismatched shades of salvaged plating, its docking arms creaking audibly even through the Arctic's own hull as the cutter settled into the relay's cramped cradle with the particular relief of a crew that had spent the better part of a month running from one crisis directly into the next without a proper hour to catch its own breath.
"Fuel, water, a real diagnostic on the Fold coil before we push it any harder," Camaro reported, reading off the maintenance queue with her good hand while the other, still healing, rested carefully in her lap. "Twelve hours, maybe fourteen if the relay's own techs are as slow as their reputation says. It's not much of a rest, Commander, but it's more than we've had since Calder's Reach."
"Take it," Taisen said. "All of it. I want this crew as rested as twelve hours can make them before we decide what comes next."
The relay's small common deck carried its own quiet gossip the way every outpost this far from anywhere reliable eventually did, traders and skeleton-crew techs trading half-true fragments of news across a bar built from salvaged cargo crating, the air thick with the smell of recycled coolant and somebody's badly ventilated cook fire, and Swan, sent to fetch a specific medical component the ship's own stores had run short of, came back with considerably more than the part he'd been sent for.
"They're talking about you up there," he told Taisen quietly, setting the component down on the mess table between them. "Not by name, not exactly, but close enough. Word's already reached this far out that the Arctic pulled a Fleet Marshal out of a Reza black site somewhere past the belt, and by the third retelling I overheard, the story's already grown a detail nobody on this ship actually lived through. Somebody's telling it that you fought Malkor himself hand to hand on that station and walked away with the Marshal slung over your shoulder."
"That's considerably more heroic than the truth," Taisen said, "and considerably less accurate about who actually did the fighting that night."
"It usually is, by the time a story's traveled this far," Swan said. "I only mention it because it means word's moving faster than we are, Commander, and I don't love what that implies about how quickly the wrong ears might hear a version of it worth acting on."
Zhang, permitted his first real hours out of the sickbay bed under Swan's close and reluctant supervision, sat in the mess hall's quiet corner with a cup of something warm he hadn't yet managed to finish, his hands wrapped around it more for the shape of holding something than for any real interest in drinking it, and it was there that Sorrel found him, drawn by the same restless curiosity that had never once let her leave a stranger's story half heard if she could help it.
"You're the Marshal everyone's whispering about," she said, settling across from him without asking. "I've heard three versions of your rescue in the last hour alone, Marshal, and I'm reasonably confident all three of them are wrong in different, equally flattering directions."
"I've heard one of them myself," Zhang said, dry, some faint ghost of an old, weary humor surfacing despite everything. "I understand I fought Malkor hand to hand. I don't recall doing that. I recall being carried, mostly, by considerably younger people than myself, which is a less flattering story but a more honest one."
Sorrel studied him a moment, something calculating and not unkind behind her scarred, weathered face. "Honest stories rarely travel as far as flattering ones," she said, "which is a lesson worth remembering, Marshal, the next time you're deciding how much of your own truth to hand somebody. The flattering version is the one that survives. The honest one usually just gets you killed a little faster."
"I've built a whole career on that particular arithmetic," Zhang said, quiet. "I'm not certain it's served me as well as I once believed it did."
Camaro's voice cut across the mess hall's low murmur before Sorrel could answer that, sharp with the particular urgency that meant the words behind it weren't going to wait for anyone to finish their conversation first. "Commander," she called, already moving toward the corridor, "Swan's diagnostic flagged something on approach sensors. Relay control's not answering hails. I need you on the bridge."