He used the last of what the current would give him not to fight, but to move: kicked off the bulkhead hard enough to send himself tumbling toward the cockpit, let the thruster still hissing from his torn suit carry him the rest of the way, and turned in the air just in time to watch the rock strike the Hermes's flank and send the whole hull shuddering sideways on its axis. The creature, weightless and unanchored the same as he was, went spinning helplessly across the cabin into the bulkhead, and Taisen's blade, thrown rather than swung, caught it through the bulbous mass of its head before it had finished the fall.
It stopped moving. He didn't, not for a long moment after, hanging in the dark with torn oxygen still hissing out around him, watching black blood turn slowly, lazily, into little drifting planets of its own.
They put down hard on Boettia (no time left to choose a better world, the Hermes dying around them the whole way in), and when the dust of the crash finally settled, five bodies lay motionless on a bare gray plateau under a morning sun that had nothing gentle about it. Behind them, the wreck sent a thin column of black smoke straight up into a colourless sky, no wind at all to bend it, as if the planet itself had gone still on purpose to watch. Leafless trees stood in ranks across the plain in every direction, grey-barked and identical, the ash underfoot fine enough to rise in little clouds around every footstep and settle again with no hurry whatsoever.
Alita was the first to stir, and the first thing she did, once she'd confirmed her own bones were where they should be, was crawl to where Frank's body had been laid, wrapped in what remained of a flight blanket, near the smoking wreck.
She didn't touch him. She only knelt there, hands loose in her lap, and let the stillness happen: the way, she understood distantly, you were supposed to let it happen, the way her father had taught her a hundred times without ever once needing the words for it. Don't rush past this. Don't make it small so it fits somewhere convenient.
Link, three meters away, dragged himself into a sitting position on servos that no longer trusted his left leg, and said nothing at all for a long while either. When he finally spoke, his voice caught somewhere in the machinery that did most of his talking for him now.
"He asked me once," Link said, "what I did before the war. I told him I flew relay. He never asked what that meant. Some men don't need the whole of a story to decide they like you anyway." A pause, longer than the sentence needed. "I don't know how to grieve properly. This body wasn't built with the parts for it. I only know that something in me wants to stop moving for a while, and I intend to let it."
Taisen, propped against the wreck with his ribs screaming and his sword arm still half-numb, said nothing either. He'd meant to. He'd opened his mouth twice already to say the thing he usually said in a moment like this one (nothing to be done about it now, we move forward), and both times the words had simply refused to arrive, stuck somewhere behind the memory of a man who'd talked about a blue door with a height chart penciled on it not two hours before he stopped existing.
Colonel Lyn didn't cry. She'd learned a long time ago not to, in front of a crew, whatever it cost her privately to hold the line. What she did instead was reach into the breast pocket of her flight suit, the one she never opened in front of anyone, and close her hand around a small, chipped bead bracelet that had been made, six years ago, by a seven-year-old girl with more enthusiasm than skill, out of glass beads bought from a market stall on a world Lyn hadn't been back to since. Mira had died of the fever while her mother was eleven light-years away chasing a mission that could have waited. Lyn had told herself that for six years. She had never once told anyone else, and she didn't tell them now: only held the bracelet, tight enough to leave a mark, and let herself sit with the fact of it for exactly as long as the stillness demanded, before she made herself let go and stand back up.
"We bury him properly," she said, when she trusted her own voice again. "Not here. Not on this planet. When we're somewhere that isn't the site of an old crime, we do this right."
Nobody argued with her.
The buzz of engines found them not long after: a swarm of small, fast fliers cutting low over the dead treeline, and by the time Alita had gotten halfway to her feet waving for rescue, Link had already caught her wrist and pulled her back down.
"Those aren't rescue," he said. "Let me talk."
Two riders touched down on the far side of the wreckage, blaster rifles held loose and unhurried across their chests, amphibian faces bulging at the throat with every breath. Behind them, unhurried in a way that made the others look almost anxious by comparison, walked a lean figure in a long black coat, pale, sagging skin, and eyes the exact flat yellow of old brass.
"Well," the newcomer said, in flawless Basic, surveying the wreck with the mild interest of a man assessing a used speeder he had no intention of buying. "A science vessel. On Boettia. That's either very bad luck or very bad judgment, and I confess I'm curious which."
"I need to speak with Jorun Na'ak," Link said.
"You're speaking with him." Jorun's gaze slid over the group (Lyn's stripes, Alita's blue skin, Taisen's ruined suit and the strange, curved blade still clenched in his numb hand) and settled, unhurried, on the cyborg. "I don't know you."