"Weeks," Swan confirmed. "Sir, I want to say one more thing, and I want to say it plainly, because I think plainly is the only way you actually hear anything right now, and God knows it's the only way I can manage to say anything at all when my hands won't stop wanting to shake. Whatever this hunt for Zhang costs us in time, it isn't separate from this. You're not spending this searching for him instead of dealing with your own hand. You're spending it either way. The clock doesn't pause because we're busy, and it doesn't pause because the cause is a good one either. I don't think it cares about causes at all."
"I know," Taisen said. "I've known since the beach. I've simply been choosing not to say it out loud in front of anyone who'd feel obligated to slow down for my sake, because slowing down isn't going to save Zhang, and it isn't going to save this hand either. The only thing that saves either of them is moving faster, not softer, and I've never yet found a version of caution that bought back time once it was already spent."
Swan didn't have an answer for that, and didn't try to invent one, sitting a moment longer in the quiet with the low hum of the Fold filling the space where a response might otherwise have gone. He thought, not for the first time, about how strange it was that the man who had once faced down an entire fighter swarm without his voice ever once losing its evenness could sound, in a small quiet cabin with nobody else listening, this tired. It made him like the man more, not less, though he wasn't sure Taisen would have wanted to hear that particular observation said out loud. He gathered the unit, and paused at the door, one hand on the frame.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I'm glad you told me tonight instead of next week."
"So am I," Taisen said, and meant it, and sat alone a while longer after Swan had gone, turning his own hand slowly under the light, grey climbing steady toward a palm that no longer felt like a distant hypothetical and had started, in the space of one quiet conversation, to feel like a date circled on a calendar nobody else aboard this ship had been allowed to see. He flexed the fingers once, watching the ash shift and resettle beneath the skin, and thought, briefly and without much comfort, that he had spent two lifetimes learning to plan around every kind of danger except the one that lived inside his own body, counting down at a pace nobody, including him, actually understood.
The first real attempt took place on the morning of the second day, in the cramped compartment that had once held the Beluga's overflow cargo manifests and now, by simple accumulation of use, functioned as the closest thing the Arctic had to an intelligence office: two consoles jammed against opposite walls, a single flickering overhead strip light that Swan had promised to fix three times and never had, and the particular stale, close air of a room too small for the amount of thinking that had been done inside it lately. A half-eaten ration bar sat forgotten on the corner of Swan's console, gone soft and unappetizing hours ago, and a second, empty mug had joined the first sometime before dawn, both of them silent evidence of a man who had stopped noticing his own hunger somewhere around midnight and kept working anyway.
Camaro had come to stand behind him not because anyone had assigned her to, but because Taisen had asked her, quietly, before the shift began, to watch the work rather than only the results, on the theory that a second set of eyes trained to spot a bad angle in a firefight might spot a bad angle in a query just as easily. She'd taken the request without comment and without complaint, and had spent the better part of an hour simply watching Swan build the thing, piece by careful piece, saying nothing until the moment it mattered.
The attempt lasted, from start to finish, eleven minutes before Camaro shut it down with her own hand on Swan's shoulder and a single word.
"Stop."
Swan froze mid-keystroke, the query he'd built sitting half-submitted on the console in front of him, a request routed through an old Beluga-era logistics credential that had, as far as any of them knew, never been formally revoked, asking Fleet's general supply network for standard requisition manifests filed by three specific department heads over the last ninety days. No names attached to people. Only department codes, abstracted one layer removed from anything that would obviously matter. Careful, he'd thought, building it. Bloodless. The kind of query a hundred quartermasters ran every week without anyone looking twice, buried in the ordinary tidal churn of a fleet that processed ten thousand such requests a day without a second glance at any single one of them.
"What," he said. "It's clean, Ensign, I checked it four times before I built it, there's nothing in that string that ties to Zhang, to any of the three names, to this ship's actual position. I even scrubbed the timestamp metadata."
"It's not the query," Camaro said. "It's the credential. Watch the response header before you submit it. Not the content. The header, top left, the small line you're not even looking at because your eyes went straight to the request field the second it built."
Swan looked, forcing his attention away from the query he'd been so proud of a moment ago, and went very still.
The credential's last verified use, according to the network's own routine handshake, had been flagged for a standing review eighteen days ago, quietly, the kind of administrative housekeeping that happened to old assets after the ship carrying them changed hands or purpose, the kind of flag that meant nothing at all until the exact moment someone with the right clearance decided to actually look at what triggered it, and everything after that moment.
"If I submit this," Swan said slowly, working it through out loud the way he worked through most things when the fear was climbing faster than his hands could keep up with it, his voice dropping into the particular flat, careful register he used when he was trying very hard not to sound as rattled as he felt, "and someone's watching that flag the way we're watching Zhang's three names, they don't get our query. They get a live confirmation that this exact credential is still active, still being used, and still being used by someone who cared enough to build a query this careful, which is exactly the kind of caution a person shows when they know, deep down, that they shouldn't be asking at all."