Usyk watched him go, and said nothing further, and told himself, not for the first time, that the ache behind his ribs when he thought about Herman Wrath's name was old news by now, decades cold, nothing left to reopen, and knew, even as he thought it, that it wasn't true, and never had been.
The derelict lay half a kilometer off the equator of a gas giant three systems past the border, dead and dark and drifting slowly closer to the atmosphere with every orbit, exactly where Taisen had told the bridge crew they would find it before anyone else had believed there was anything out here to find at all.
"You might as well tell us what we'll find inside," Alita said, watching it grow in the viewport, unlit and silent against the gas giant's endless marbled blue.
"There were four of them aboard, the last time I saw this ship," Taisen said, and something old and careful came into his voice, the particular flatness of a man revisiting a memory he'd deliberately let go dusty rather than examine too closely. "Three purple-skinned, feathered, dressed like nobility. A fourth, gray-skinned, tall, heavy-jointed. A crescent scar on the temple."
"Just like on Avaros," Swan said, quietly, from his station.
"Just like on Avaros," Taisen agreed. "I found this ship a lifetime ago, in a body I no longer wear, and I didn't understand what I was looking at, so I left it alone. I've had a very long time to regret that particular mistake."
He and Alita went aboard alone, suits sealed, the ship's bridge eerily intact beneath a hull scarred not by weapons fire but by the violent, repeated stress of a vessel forced in and out of the Fold too many times too quickly to survive it cleanly: the unmistakable signature, Taisen understood now, of something that had been running for its life rather than fighting for it.
"The structure's sound," Alita said, running her scanner along a bulkhead.
"From the outside, perhaps." Taisen settled into the dead command chair, the current (the Aether the Sahir had never needed a separate word to explain, because every child on Kharsat learned to feel it the way they learned to feel their own pulse) already stirring low under his sternum, restless from three days of near-constant use he hadn't fully recovered from since the swarm. He felt the faint numbness still lingering in two fingertips from Avaros and understood, distantly, that whatever debt remained unpaid from that fight would come due again before this one was finished.
"Something's wrong," Alita said, a beat before the first explosion tore through the deck beneath them.
The blast sent transparent steel fragments scything across the bridge in a bright, silent spray, and Taisen had time only to drag Alita into the curve of his own body and call the current up hard enough to throw a shield of borrowed strength between them and the worst of it: felt the numbness surge instantly from fingertip to wrist, felt the fine gray thread of it creep in at the edges of his vision far faster than it should have, his body still running on a debt it hadn't come close to settling. A second explosion tipped the whole bridge forward, weightless, and flung them both through the shattered viewport into open space.
He threw Alita clear first, without deciding to, the decision arriving the way all his best decisions did (already made, somewhere below conscious thought, by the time he noticed himself making it), and only then tried to save himself, too late, as the ship's own dying momentum slammed him back against the crumpled hull and pinned him there while it fell.
He fought his way along the frame in the dark, boot sinking into a shard of steel that sent white lightning up through his skull, found the last unexploded torpedo bay door, and used the very last of what the current would give him (the numbness climbing past his elbow now, the ash-ring he couldn't see but could feel prickling at both eyes) to trigger it from a distance rather than fight it directly, blowing himself and a chunk of the derelict's hull clear into open space a bare second before the whole wreck folded in on itself and began its long fall toward the gas giant's clouds.
He drifted afterward in the dark, bleeding slow, bright spheres of his own blood pearling weightless around him, and thought, with the strange clarity that arrives only after a body has stopped bothering to be afraid, that he would very much like, someday, to stop needing this power to save his own life quite so often.
He woke four days later in a recovery pod's blue-lit fluid, thrashing before his mind had caught up to his body, and lay still afterward a long while, letting the med droid's careful adjustments talk his heart rate back down to something survivable, chasing a feeling at the edge of his memory that refused to resolve into words.
It was Swan who found him at the pod's control panel an hour later, still unsteady on his feet, treatment incomplete and clearly abandoned on purpose.
"Commander, you're supposed to be."
"Compare the derelict's hull signature against the registry for a ship called the Lady Luck," Taisen said, already moving toward the bridge. "Captain, one Jorun Na'ak. Leave tolerance in your parameters for heavy modification."
Swan didn't ask why. He'd stopped, somewhere in the last three weeks, expecting the why to arrive before the results did.
It took him forty minutes, and when the number came back, it came back at ninety-five percent.
"There was a third ship," Taisen said, once Alita had confirmed the match herself, twice, out of the same disbelief Swan hadn't yet managed to shake off his own face. "Three ships fled something, once, a lifetime before any of us were looking. One destroyed: the wreck near Avaros. One nearly destroyed: this one, twice now. And one that survived long enough to end up in Jorun's hands on Boettia, under a different name and a coat of paint I'd wager he never once questioned too closely."