Osei was already running before Camaro finished the sentence, cutting through the narrow service corridor toward the aft shaft with the particular fast, economical stride of a man who had understood, a full breath before anyone else, exactly what was actually at stake if that second boarding party reached the coil bay unopposed, his boots hammering hard against the deck plating, and he reached the shaft's junction alone, three full seconds ahead of the nearest backup, in time to meet the second breach charge's aftermath with nothing behind him but his own weapon and his own read of the ground.
"Two hostiles, aft shaft, I have the junction," he reported, flat and steady even as the first shots cracked past him, close enough that one grazed the bulkhead a hand's width from his shoulder in a shower of sparks. "Colonel, that coil bay cannot take a firefight inside it, not with the rig still open. I need this sealed behind me, not held open for me."
"Osei, fall back," Lyn's voice came over the comm, sharp with sudden fear. "We can hold that junction with more than one body in it, don't you dare tell me to seal you out there alone."
"There isn't time for more than one body to reach it, Colonel," Osei said, and something in his voice had gone very calm, the particular calm of a man who had already run the arithmetic and arrived, honestly, at the only answer the numbers actually supported. He fired twice, fast, forcing the nearest boarder back behind cover, buying himself a half second he spent immediately on his own words. "If that charge goes off inside an open coil rig, this ship doesn't have a Fold drive left to argue about who's inside it when it happens. Seal the bulkhead. That's an order I'm giving you, not one I'm asking permission for."
"You don't outrank me," Lyn said, her voice cracking on the last word despite everything, her hand already hovering over the bulkhead control though she hadn't yet let it fall.
"No," Osei agreed, "but I'm the one standing here, and you're not, and that means tonight, just this once, I get to decide what this ship can afford to lose." A burst of gunfire cracked hard and close over the open channel, and his voice, when it came again, had gone tight but steady still, almost gentle underneath the strain of it. "Seal it, Colonel. I mean it. Now. Tell Alita I said the desert keeps its own count. She'll understand it eventually, even if it takes her a while."
Lyn's hand hovered over the bulkhead control for one raw, unbearable second, the whole bridge holding its breath around her, and it was Taisen, arriving at a dead run with Alita a half step behind him, who reached the control panel first and found, looking at the readout, that there was no version of the next five seconds that let them reach Osei in time without also losing the coil bay, the ship, and every life still aboard it.
"Seal it," he said, the words costing him more than almost anything he'd said across two lifetimes, and Lyn's hand came down on the control before he'd finished speaking, the heavy bulkhead grinding shut with a hiss of failing hydraulics, cutting the comm feed dead mid-syllable, and the last sound any of them heard from the other side of it was not a cry of pain or a curse of fear, but something that sounded, impossibly, almost like satisfaction, a job finished the way he'd meant to finish it.
The silence on the other side of that bulkhead stretched on for three full seconds before Taisen forced himself to move, hitting the comm again with a hand that had gone cold in a way that had nothing to do with the Aether at all. "Osei. Report."
Nothing answered but the low hum of the sealed corridor's own dead air.
"Osei," he said again, and heard, in his own voice, an edge he hadn't allowed himself in longer than he could remember. Still nothing.
Camaro's voice cut in a moment later, tight and fast, from the coil bay's own secondary sensor feed, one hand braced against the console while the other, still bandaged, hung useless at her side. "I've got partial visual through the maintenance camera, Commander. It's damaged, feed's cutting in and out, but I can see the junction." A pause, longer than she meant it to be, her voice dropping when she finally continued. "He's not there. Neither are the two hostiles who breached with him. There's a struggle mark on the deck plating, blood, not much, and his sidearm, left behind on the deck like he set it down on purpose rather than dropped it. Commander, I don't think he's dead. I think they took him."
The bridge went very still, the particular stillness that arrives after a fear finally resolves into a fact, and Taisen stood with his hand still braced against the cold bulkhead, feeling the shape of the last several seconds settle into something he was going to have to live with for considerably longer than tonight.
"Threll's channel," he said, finally, his voice flat with an effort that cost him. "Is it still open."
"Still open, Commander," Swan reported, from the sensor board, his own voice thin with the same shock everyone else was fighting to hold behind their teeth.
Threll's voice came through a moment later, colder now, and satisfied in a way that landed like a physical blow. "Tell your Commander," she said, addressing no one and everyone at once, the words clearly meant to be relayed rather than answered, "that this crew fought considerably better than my own intelligence promised he'd manage on short notice, and that I'm leaving with one live body instead of two only because the Marshal's own security proved better than I budgeted for. Tell him also that Malkor sends his regards, and that he looks forward, genuinely, to seeing whether the Commander finds this trade worth the price he's about to discover it cost."
The channel went dead, and a heartbeat later the hunter-killer's engines flared bright against the relay's outer hull, breaking away hard and fast toward open space, carrying with it, into the dark, a man who had chosen, with his own last clear breath, to be the price of everyone else still standing on this ship.