The bridge was already tense by the time Taisen reached it, Swan hunched over the sensor board with the particular focused stillness of a man watching a number climb faster than he liked, and Lyn standing at the tactical station with her arms crossed and her jaw set in a way that told him, before either of them said a word, that whatever this was, it had already stopped being a diagnostic anomaly and started being something considerably worse.
"Talk to me," Taisen said.
"Contact, decloaking eight hundred kilometers off the relay's far side," Swan said, fast, the number resolving on the main display even as he spoke it. "Reza hull signature, smaller than the strike group we logged at Calder's Reach, built for speed rather than numbers. A hunter-killer, not a fleet element. It's been sitting there dark this whole time, Commander, waiting on something, and whatever it was waiting on, it just decided the wait was over."
"How did it find us here," Lyn said, low, though the shape of the answer was already sitting plainly enough in the room that nobody needed to say it out loud.
"However it found us," Taisen said, "it found us with the Fold coil half disassembled on a repair rig and half this crew still scattered across a relay deck three minutes from the ship at best. Camaro, general quarters, now. Swan, I want everyone we've got back aboard inside of ninety seconds or I want a clean count of who we're leaving behind and why."
The klaxon's low, insistent wail rolled through the Arctic's hull a heartbeat later, and across the relay's cramped common deck, in the mess hall where Zhang had barely managed three sentences of an honest story to a woman who'd heard nothing but flattering ones her whole professional life, every head came up at once, and Sorrel was on her feet before the sound had finished its first cycle, her scarred face gone flat and professional in a way Zhang hadn't yet seen from her.
"That's not a drill," she said. "Marshal, can you move."
"I can move," Zhang said, already pushing up from the table with considerably more effort than the words suggested, one hand braced hard against its edge, "though I'd appreciate it if the getting there involved rather less running than the last time I was asked to do this."
They made it to the Arctic's ramp with less than a minute to spare, Camaro counting heads at the hatch with the particular flat urgency of a woman who had done this exact headcount too many times this month to trust anyone's memory over her own, and the ramp was already sealing behind Zhang's stumbling final step when the hunter-killer's first volley lit the relay's outer hull, close enough that the shockwave rattled through the Arctic's own frame before the ramp had finished its cycle, the whole ship groaning around them like something waking from an uneasy sleep.
"We're not going to make a clean run for open space," Camaro called from the pilot's seat, already fighting the yoke against the docking cradle's stubborn old clamps, sweat already beading along her hairline despite the bridge's cool recycled air. "Best I can give you is sublight, and not much of it. That coil's still half disassembled, Commander."
"Then we hold here and fight," Taisen said, already moving toward the tactical station, feeling the cold in his ruined hand answer the moment the way it always did now, an old habit becoming something closer to a warning he no longer needed reminding of. "Lyn, get me a read on that hull. I want to know exactly what we're facing before it's close enough that knowing stops mattering."
Lyn's read came back fast and grim, the hunter-killer's profile resolving on the tactical display in sharp, unfriendly lines, its hull stripped of every non-essential system a real warship would carry, built lean and mean the way a scalpel is built lean rather than a broadsword. "Fast, lightly armored, built to punch in hard and get out before anyone can properly answer," she said. "That's not a ship built to trade fire with something our size, Taisen. That's a ship built to board."
"Board for what," Alita said, arriving at the bridge's edge just in time to catch the last of it, breathless from the run.
"For him," Lyn said, with a short, grim nod toward where Zhang stood braced against the aft rail, still catching his breath, his gaunt face pale under the bridge's harsh light, "or for whatever's left in his head that Malkor's people never finished extracting the first time. That ship didn't cross this far off any patrol lane to trade shots with a cutter twice its mass. It came to take something specific, and it's going to try taking it fast, before we can properly organize a defense."
Osei's voice came in over the comm from the lower deck, flat and steady even with the klaxon still wailing behind it, the sound of weapons being checked and racked audible faintly under his words. "I've got eyes on their boarding pattern, Colonel. Three pods, launching in a staggered spread rather than a single wave. That's not standard Reza doctrine, not the pattern we logged at Calder's Reach or the listening post. That's a Fleet breach pattern, near enough to identical that I'd bet my own service record on where they learned it."
The bridge went very quiet for one taut, cold beat, the shape of what that meant settling over all of them at once, the klaxon's wail suddenly the loudest thing in a room that had gone otherwise silent with the same understanding.
"Oyelaran," Alita said, low, her hand tightening around the rail.
"Or whoever's actually behind him," Taisen said, feeling the cold in his hand deepen, an old fear given new and precise shape. "Osei, if they're running our own breach doctrine, they'll expect us to answer it the way our own doctrine says to answer it. Don't. Whatever the manual tells you to do at each of those junctions, do something else instead. I want them walking into a ship that stopped playing by the rules they paid good money to learn."
"Copy that, Commander," Osei said. "I'll pass it to Camaro's fire team on my way down."
The first pod struck the Arctic's port docking collar thirty seconds later, the whole hull ringing with the impact, the lights along the bridge's edge flickering once before the backup relays caught, and Taisen felt the fight arrive the way it always did now, a cold, narrowing focus settling over everything that wasn't immediately useful, and found himself already moving toward the lower corridors before he'd consciously decided to leave the bridge at all, because whatever else the night demanded of him, standing safely above it while his crew met three boarding pods alone was never, not once across two lifetimes, going to be a version of himself he could live with afterward.