"It's acceptable," Taisen said. "I'd have offered you the same arrangement myself, Commander, if you hadn't gotten to it first."
"Good," Zhang said, already reaching for the next item on his desk, the conversation closed as cleanly as a door. "Torvald will have your orders within the hour. Colonel, you're dismissed with them. Commander," this last without looking up, "try not to disappoint me in a way that costs me anything I can't explain away in committee."
They were three steps into the corridor outside, the door not yet fully shut behind them, when Link fell into step beside Taisen rather than following Lyn and Alita ahead.
"I won't be coming with you," he said, quietly, before Taisen could ask.
"Zhang's reassigned you."
"No. I asked." Link's organic eye held steady on the corridor ahead rather than on Taisen's face, which was, Taisen had learned, how Link chose to deliver anything that cost him something to say. "The corrupted capture from the Hermes is still decrypting. Six more days, the technician tells me, maybe eight. I don't trust anyone else in this building to sit with it and actually care whether it finishes clean instead of getting flagged, filed, and forgotten the moment someone decides the mole isn't this decade's priority. Someone tried to kill this crew from the inside twice already. I intend to know their face before there's a third time, and I can't do that from the bridge of a ship three systems away."
"You could do both, potentially. I could use you."
"You could. You'd manage without me better than you're willing to admit, which is either flattering or insulting depending on how tired I am when I think about it." A small, mechanical sound that stood in, on Link, for something closer to a laugh. "I'm not vanishing on you, Commander. I'm choosing the fight that's actually mine to finish. Whoever scrubbed those comm logs and cut that antenna wire by hand knew exactly what they were doing and exactly who they were protecting themselves from finding out. That's not Alita's fight, and it isn't really yours either, not the way it's mine. Let me have this one."
Taisen was quiet a moment. "Find them," he said, finally. "And Link, when you do. Don't do anything about it alone. Whatever mercy I owe you, I'd rather not spend the rest of this life discovering I owed someone else the same debt and never got the chance to pay it."
"Understood, Commander." Link inclined his head, the closest thing to a salute he'd ever offered anyone, and turned back down the corridor toward the technical wing, already gone in every way that mattered before he was fully out of sight.
"Don't you see?" Alita demanded, once they'd found a corner of the corridor with no one close enough to overhear, her voice pitched low but no less furious for it, her hands doing most of the arguing her words hadn't caught up to yet. "If you keep ignoring these episodes, they only get worse. I felt the shape of the last one. It isn't only pain, Taisen. It's grief wearing pain's coat so it doesn't have to answer for itself."
"I'd rather my head split cleanly in two than have you go rummaging through my mind to find out why."
"You're impossible."
"I've been called worse, and usually by people with better evidence."
Lyn found them mid-argument and stood there a moment, arms folded, reading the two of them with the flat, tired patience of a woman who had already decided this particular fight wasn't hers to referee. "You're damned lucky Zhang's taken a liking to you," she said finally. "Though for the life of me I can't work out why." She studied Taisen: the hand still pressed briefly to his temple, quickly lowered the moment he noticed her noticing. "What's wrong with him?"
"Migraine, ma'am," Alita said, before Taisen could decide how much of the truth to spend on the answer. "Just a migraine."
"Lieutenant Alita." Lyn's eyes cut to her, and something in the new rank sat strangely in her mouth still, three minutes old and already load-bearing. "You've been assigned to give him a working orientation in Navy procedure, protocol, and equipment. Normally that's a two-year posting. You have until his commission is formalized, which by Zhang's own timeline is considerably less than two years."
"Understood, ma'am."
"For what it's worth," Lyn added, quieter, almost gentle, "for what it's worth, Lieutenant: you earned this. Whatever strings got pulled to get you here faster than you should have arrived, the work underneath them was still yours."
Alita didn't trust her own voice enough to answer that out loud, and simply nodded, and let it be enough.
The bridge of the UNS Arctic swallowed sound the way Whitehall's corridors had swallowed curiosity: efficiently, and without any apparent effort. It was a heavy cutter, lead ship of its own class, built along clean predatory lines that told Taisen, before anyone explained a single system to him, exactly what kind of fights this vessel had been designed to win.
"I don't understand," Taisen said, standing at the center of a bridge that was, as of eleven hundred hours that morning, legally his, and looking, for possibly the first time since Alita had known him, genuinely lost. "Captain Reginald commanded this ship competently. He acquitted himself well in the attack on the capital. Why remove a man who performed his duty adequately to install one who's never worn the uniform at all?"
"Naval politics," Alita said. "Captain Reginald backed a faction that opposes Zhang. That's the whole of it. It isn't about performance. It's rarely about performance."
"That flies in the face of tactics and reason."
"The communique says he was permitted to retire, if that helps."
"Does it?"
"No."
"Then it doesn't help. I'll have to work twice as hard to win over a crew that watched a competent man lose his ship to make room for me." He said it without bitterness, chalking the fact up the same clipped way he chalked up every other piece of useful information about a fight before it started: because that was, Alita understood, watching him, exactly what this was to him. A fight, already underway, that most of the people around him hadn't yet noticed had begun.