CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Radian returned to Black Star under his own power, and for the first several minutes nobody in the bay understood that Ilyan had not really returned with him. He followed Sera's approach cleanly enough that nothing looked wrong from outside the cockpit beyond what Orison had already done to the Nyxion. The damaged thigh forced him to carry the final deceleration through the opposite leg and hip, the left shoulder had lost enough range that the normal recovery posture would have overloaded the joint, and one of the maneuvering clusters along Radian's side kept throwing heat warnings whenever Ilyan asked too much from it, but those were piloting problems. Piloting problems still made sense. He compensated, corrected, came through Black Star's open bay behind the guidance lights and let the recovery cradle close around Radian's battered body. Ivory armor that had left the carrier clean was burned gray around the edges now, opened along the shoulder and thigh, gouged across the chest where Asterion's weapons had reached him. Civilian blood had dried black-red across the front of the Frame in long smears and hand-sized bursts, darker where it had collected around panel seams. Something from the passenger transport remained trapped beneath one shoulder plate, a strip of interior wall covering with part of a printed safety marking still visible beneath the scorching, and a thin nest of insulation had wound itself around a broken armor edge near the ribs. The amber-orange routing beneath Radian's armor had dimmed throughout the return, though traces of it still showed when the bay lights crossed the seams at the right angle. The cradle locked around him, Ilyan lowered thrust, main output stepped down, and then he stopped doing anything.
The cockpit remained sealed. Radian's systems waited for the rest of the recovery sequence and never received it. Ilyan sat with both hands wrapped around the controls while the external cameras remained open across the display, showing Radian from the perspective of Black Star's bay. He could see the blood better from there. He could see the scratches where the passenger hull had folded around Radian before tearing apart and the strip of wall still jammed beneath the shoulder armor. Somewhere beyond those images the deck crew had started moving toward him, but their voices arrived without weight. Niko told him the cradle was secure and asked him to complete shutdown. Sera cleared him from navigation and told him he was home. A maintenance drone drifted beneath the damaged thigh and began painting structural warnings across the service network. Ilyan understood every word. His hands did not move. The battle had ended when he turned away from Asterion, but as long as he remained inside Radian there was still something to do with himself. Hold the controls. Watch the displays. Breathe when the suit told him he was breathing incorrectly. Keep checking Kaia's medical marker even though Tomas had transferred her out of Vesper before Radian reached the bay. Opening the cockpit meant there would be no next movement to calculate, no weapon line to avoid, nothing left to save, no Cai in front of him to hate. It meant the transport would finally become something that had already happened.
Niko tried him again after the silence stretched too long. "Ilyan, give me something. I don't need a report and I'm not asking you what happened out there. Release the restraints and open the cockpit so Tomas can look at you." When nothing changed, Niko climbed farther up the recovery cradle, boots catching on the maintenance rails around Radian's chest. Ilyan could see him through one of the external cameras, twenty-nine years old, face drawn tight with the particular irritation Niko developed whenever a technical problem refused to behave like one. He checked the diagnostic panel beneath the cockpit collar, exchanged something with Mara off-channel, then looked up again. "If the controls are locked or the feedback is bad enough that you can't tell what your hands are doing, tap the left grip twice. Don't talk if you don't want to. Just give me that." Ilyan's fingers stayed still. Niko waited, exhaled through his nose and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. "All right. If you can hear me and you're deliberately refusing to answer, I'm going to count that as useful information too, although I'd like the record to show you found the most annoying possible way to provide it."
Tomas replaced him on the channel a little later, and the change in voice made Ilyan's stomach turn. "Your suit says you're awake. Heart rate is still elevated, you're dehydrated, and your body is doing a very enthusiastic impression of somebody who thinks the battle is still happening, but you're conscious. What I need to know is whether you understand me." Ilyan stared at Radian's image and saw the green dinosaur instead, turning end over end through the wreckage, one rear leg bent where somebody had once repaired it. He remembered the broken cord trailing behind it and the thought that had come too quickly during the collision: that maybe the cord had been attached to a child. Tomas kept speaking without filling the cockpit with comfort Ilyan had not asked for. "If you understand me, look toward the left display." Ilyan's eyes moved before he could decide not to. Tomas caught it through the cockpit monitor. "There you are. Good. That tells me enough. Niko's checking the release. Nobody's forcing anything open yet, but if you want to save him from cutting into Radian and complaining about the repair for the rest of his life, this would be a good time to open it yourself."
The external release did not work. Ilyan heard the mechanism strain against the damaged cockpit ring and felt the vibration through the seat while Niko's face tightened on the bay camera. Mara came up beside him with a tethered diagnostic slate, studied the actuator load and pointed toward the section Asterion's final strike had warped. The emergency release moved partway and stopped. Niko tried it manually, bracing both feet and putting enough force into the lever to flex the service frame around him, but the lock held. He swore, checked the diagnostic again and told Mara that lock three had been driven into the collar badly enough that forcing the actuator any farther would probably tear the linkage somewhere they could not reach. Tomas asked how long it would take to get the cockpit open, and Niko looked toward the sealed canopy before glancing down at the cutter rack being brought beneath Radian. "If he helped me from inside, barely any time. Since he seems committed to making the rest of us earn our pay today, longer." Mara told him to shut up and cut the collar. He did.
The first cutter touched Radian's cockpit frame and vibration crawled through the entire seat. Ilyan's hands tightened until his nails pressed through skin already damaged by the battle. Outside, white sparks scattered across ivory armor, bright enough that the external cameras dimmed automatically. Niko stopped twice because heat was migrating toward the seal too quickly and again when the cutter found a reinforcement layer that Mara insisted did not exist in the engineering package. They argued over it for several seconds while Ilyan listened from inside and thought, absurdly, that he should explain what had happened during the fight, that he had watched Radian redistribute stress and particle reinforcement through paths the original technical package did not account for. The information mattered. He knew it mattered. He still could not make himself say anything. When the final cut went through, the canopy opened only a handspan before the damaged hinge bound again. Niko and Mara forced it wider together until something tore inside the collar and cool bay air finally entered the cockpit around the broken seal.
Niko's face appeared first. Soot marked his forehead where cutter exhaust had slipped around the shield and his hair was damp with sweat. He stayed outside the opening rather than reaching immediately, breathing hard while he looked over Ilyan's face. "There you are. Keep looking at me for a second." Ilyan did, and Niko's shoulders loosened slightly. "Tomas is right behind me. We're getting you out, then medical gets you. I'm going to start with your right hand because you've had it wrapped around that control since before you crossed the bay."
Niko reached in slowly.
Ilyan never consciously decided to hurt him. The hand entered his peripheral vision and became something else before his thoughts caught up with it: Asterion's lance, Cai's grip around Radian, something coming through an opening that should not have existed. His body moved while the rest of him was still somewhere outside Orison. He seized Niko's wrist in both hands, pulled him forward with everything he had left and drove his face into the cut edge of the cockpit frame. The sound was thick and physical. Niko's nose struck first, then the metal caught him above the eyebrow. Blood appeared immediately, bright under the bay lights, floating from his face in beads before circulation began pulling them away. Someone shouted beneath them. Garrick launched toward the cockpit on instinct, but Niko, half folded across the canopy rim with one hand over his face, threw the other arm back and shouted through the blood for him not to come any closer.
Ilyan released him. For several seconds he stared at Niko without understanding why he was bleeding, and then comprehension arrived all at once and made the cockpit feel smaller than it had ever been. He shoved himself deeper into the seat, restraints biting into his chest, eyes fixed on the red droplets drifting between them. Civilian blood outside Radian. Niko's blood inside. Tomas came up beside the opening but stopped beyond arm's reach. "Ilyan, look at me. Nobody is touching you until you know they're doing it." His voice was harder now, stripped down to instructions that could survive panic. "Stay here. You're aboard Black Star. Radian is secured in the recovery bay. There is nobody attacking you. The fight is over." Ilyan forced air into his lungs until his chest hurt and managed to whisper, "Don't touch me." It was the first thing he had said since landing.
Mara pressed gauze into Niko's hand while he tried to wave her away, blood running over his mouth and chin. Tomas kept his attention on Ilyan. "Nobody surprises you again. That doesn't mean you stay in there. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing before I do it, and if you start losing track of where you are, you tell me." Ilyan looked down at the restraint release and heard himself insist that he could get out himself. Tomas did not argue. He merely shifted enough to give him room and told him to take his time. That was worse. Ilyan knew the release. He had used it dozens of times. His hand moved toward it and stopped with his fingers hovering above the control while the passenger transport returned—not as a full memory but as pressure, glass, screams over the emergency net and that green dinosaur turning away from Radian. He jerked his hand back so quickly it struck the grip again. Tomas saw it. Niko saw it. Neither of them told him he could not get out.
Tomas waited before moving. "I'm coming in from your left. I'm touching the buckle, not your arm. Keep watching me if you can." Ilyan wanted to refuse and nodded instead. Tomas entered slowly, hand visible the whole way. His fingers found the chest restraint. The moment the first strap released, panic struck Ilyan harder than the collision had. He grabbed the control with one hand and reached blindly with the other, fingers closing around Niko's wrist again. Niko swore because it was the same wrist Ilyan had already wrenched, but he did not pull away. "You know it's me this time," he said through the gauze covering his nose, voice rough and nasal. "Hold on if you have to, but don't turn my arm into another repair job." Tomas released another strap. The pressure across Ilyan's body loosened and he reacted as though the seat had stopped protecting him from vacuum. His grip on Niko tightened. Niko grimaced but stayed still. "I'm not dragging you anywhere. Tomas is taking the restraints off. That's all that's happening. Nothing else."
The detail in the words gave Ilyan somewhere to stay. He released Niko a finger at a time. Tomas opened the remaining restraints, and Garrick approached only after Tomas told him to, both hands visible until he was close enough to help. The instant Ilyan left the seat his legs failed. He could feel them; they simply refused to hold his weight. Garrick caught him beneath the arms and absorbed the collapse against the maintenance platform while Ilyan shoved weakly at his chest before recognizing him. Tomas took the other side and together they lowered him instead of forcing him upright. From outside the cockpit, Radian looked worse. The Nyxion towered over Ilyan in the cradle with ivory armor ruined by cuts and impact scoring, one hand split around the fingers from the ring rescue, thigh opened where Asterion's lance had entered and civilian blood dried across the chest in uneven black-red stains. The strip of passenger transport interior remained trapped beneath the shoulder plate. Now that Ilyan could see it directly, close enough for his eyes instead of Radian's cameras, he realized the surviving lettering belonged to an evacuation instruction printed along the wall. Three words remained beneath the burns.
KEEP CHILDREN SECURED
Ilyan stopped moving. Mara followed his stare, saw the paneling and glanced toward the deck crew gathering wash equipment near the cradle. She started telling them to document the contamination before cleaning the exterior and to preserve samples in case Orison requested them later, but Ilyan interrupted before she finished. "Don't clean him." Mara looked back immediately. Ilyan was still half supported between Garrick and Tomas, knees weak enough that standing alone was not an option, but his eyes never left the blood across Radian's chest. "Leave it. Just for now." His throat tightened and he had to start the next part again. "I don't want him looking clean yet. I don't want it to look like none of it happened." Mara watched him for a moment, then turned back toward the waiting crew and changed the work order without asking him to explain further. Structural stabilization only. Diagnostics. No exterior cleaning until she cleared it. Ilyan kept looking at Radian until the bay hatch closed between them.
Kaia did not wake. By the time Tomas allowed Ilyan into medical, he had already been examined, rehydrated, threatened with sedation twice and put through enough neurological checks that he could have recited the sequence himself. His own injuries were minor compared with what Orison had done to Radian and Vesper: strained muscles through the shoulders and abdomen from acceleration and fighting the restraints, broken skin across both palms where his nails had dug in, bite wounds inside his cheek, one eye webbed with burst vessels and bruising he did not remember receiving. The phantom pain concerned Tomas more. Ilyan could tell his own thigh from the place Radian's lance wound still seemed to ache, but sometimes the answer arrived later than it should. The same was true of the shoulder. Tomas wrote everything down and did not pretend he understood why.
Kaia lay in one of Black Star's critical-care compartments beneath a thermal sheet, surrounded by enough medical equipment to make her look smaller than Ilyan had ever seen her. Her short black hair had been cleaned away from the injured side of her head where Tomas needed access. The severe thigh wound was dressed beneath the blanket, one shoulder immobilized, ribs stabilized, and monitors along the wall followed her heart, oxygenation, intracranial pressure and several things Ilyan had to read twice before the labels meant anything. Topper climbed from Ilyan's shoulder to the back of the chair, damaged rear leg clicking softly against the frame before the little frog settled and went still. Ilyan watched the pressure reading longer than any of the others before saying, "You're keeping her unconscious because of her head."
Tomas stood at the foot of the bed with Kaia's newest scan open against his forearm. "The head trauma is significant, and she was already unconscious before I sedated her. The swelling is stable right now. That's the part I care about." He moved the scan aside and checked one of the lines himself before continuing. "She stays sedated through the trip if everything keeps behaving. Morrow has a proper neuro suite. Black Star doesn't. Waking her here because all of us want to hear her swear at somebody would make us feel better and do nothing useful for her brain."
Ilyan kept looking at Kaia. "So she doesn't wake up until we get there."
"If the pressure remains stable, that's the plan. If something changes, then the plan changes with it." Tomas came closer and lowered his voice, though there was nobody in the room who needed protecting from the answer. "Her reflexes are there. The scans have not shown the kind of progression that would make me tell Lucien or you to prepare for the worst. Those are good signs. They aren't a promise about how she'll feel when she wakes, how quickly she recovers, or what the next few weeks look like. I'm not giving you a promise I don't have."
Ilyan did not ask him to. He leaned forward with his forearms against his knees and watched Kaia breathe. The silence around her felt unnatural. Kaia had always seemed capable of filling whatever room she entered by existing loudly enough. She should have been insulting Tomas's medical technique, demanding to know whether Vesper looked worse than Cassian's Bastion, complaining about the food she had not even eaten yet. Instead the room held only filtered air and the quiet rhythm of the medical equipment. Ilyan looked at her closed eyes and murmured, "You said you wanted tomorrow. You got it. Apparently it's going to be boring for a while, so don't start complaining when you wake up." Nothing changed except the monitor lines, and he stayed there anyway.
He might have remained until Tomas physically removed him if the door had not opened and Niko had not walked in with the bridge of his nose taped straight, bruising already spreading beneath both eyes and a medical seal over the cut above one eyebrow. He looked terrible. Ilyan stood immediately, the apology reaching his mouth before he had figured out what he wanted to say. Niko crossed the distance and slapped him hard enough to turn his head.
The sound cracked through the medical compartment. Ilyan's cheek burned before he fully understood what had happened. Topper's brighter eye shifted toward Niko. Tomas looked up sharply from his workstation, but Niko raised one hand without taking his eyes off Ilyan. "That was for me. I needed one thing today that wasn't about Radian, Concordance, trauma response or Tomas explaining why my face lost a fight with a cockpit." His voice sounded wrong through the swelling in his nose, and some of the anger went out of it as soon as the hit was over.
Ilyan touched his cheek. "You should've hit me harder."
Niko frowned at him. "No. I hit you because I was pissed, not because you're going to start collecting punishment until you convince yourself you're even with the universe." He flexed the hand he had used and winced, which only irritated him more. "Also, apparently your face is harder than it looks." Tomas pointed toward both of them from across the ward and warned that if either tried turning medical into a fight he would sedate them and write whatever reason he wanted in the report. Niko dragged another chair beside Ilyan's and sat instead of leaving. "See? This is why everyone hates doctors."
Tomas did not look up. "Most people who say that are alive because of doctors."
Niko eased himself into the chair carefully enough to avoid jarring his nose, then looked toward Kaia and lost most of the irritation from his face. He asked Tomas how she was doing, and Tomas gave him the same answer with the exhaustion of a man who had been asked variations of the question all day: stable, still sedated, still being watched, nothing had meaningfully worsened. Niko accepted that and turned back toward Ilyan. "I know you didn't decide to break my nose. Tomas explained what your body was probably doing when I reached into the cockpit, and I understood most of the words despite his best efforts to make them unbearable. I'm still allowed to be angry that you actually did it."
"I am sorry." Ilyan looked down at the medical film over his palms. "I saw your hand and I thought I was still fighting. That isn't exactly right. I knew I was in the bay. I knew Black Star was there. But the part of me that moved didn't care what I knew."
Niko studied him for a moment and asked, more carefully, "Was it the transport?"
Ilyan's eyes went back to Kaia. "There was a toy." Saying it aloud made the memory sharper. "Green dinosaur. One leg was bent. It hit Radian after the hull opened and floated past. I keep seeing that before I see anything else." He pressed his thumb into one palm until the healing cut beneath the film hurt. "I didn't see who it belonged to. I don't even know if it belonged to a kid. Maybe it was in a bag. Maybe somebody was bringing it home. I don't know. The cord was broken and I keep thinking there should've been someone on the other end."
Niko leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "That makes sense to me."
Ilyan looked at him. "Why?"
"I didn't say I could explain it." Niko nodded toward Tomas. "He does brains. I do Frames." Tomas continued working without acknowledging the insult, so Niko went on. "A passenger transport full of dead and injured people is too large to picture all at once. A little green dinosaur isn't. Maybe your head grabbed the smallest thing it could actually hold. Maybe I'm completely wrong. Either way, you're not going to get a brilliant psychological analysis from the man whose current medical problem is you."
That almost made Ilyan smile. The guilt reached him before the expression could settle, and Niko saw it disappear. He started to say something about being allowed to laugh, caught himself before it turned into another lecture and instead rubbed carefully at the tape across his nose. "Forget it. I'm not good at this part."
"I don't think I'm good at any part of this right now."
"Then we're balanced."
The wall display activated before either could continue. Hana's voice came through the ward speakers with a shipwide notice that the Solar Federation had issued an emergency public statement regarding Orison. Lucien wanted everyone awake to hear it before Black Star cut civilian relay access and disappeared into the route toward Morrow. Tomas glanced toward Ilyan, clearly considering whether he should mute the ward. Ilyan shook his head.
The Solar Federation crest filled the display and gave way to footage of Orison. The colony rotated behind the engagement while flashes of amber and blue-violet crossed the unfinished ring. Whoever had edited the broadcast knew precisely what story they wanted the footage to tell. The first clear view of the passenger transport began after Asterion had already forced Radian onto the collision path. Blue-violet glare obscured much of the Federation Nyxion and the angle placed Radian in front, ivory armor clearly visible as the Frame tore through the pressure hull. The clip ended before viewers could study the grapple between them. A public affairs officer appeared beside the footage, expression solemn, and described a Federation recovery operation involving the unlawfully seized strategic carrier Black Star that had been violently escalated by the armed organization Nexus. The officer said an unidentified experimental Nexus Frame had entered active civilian evacuation traffic and caused catastrophic damage to noncombatant vessels.
Niko leaned forward immediately. "They cut Asterion out almost completely."
Ilyan barely heard him because the footage had already changed.
Radian fired on the ferry.
Asterion moved.
The particle bolt struck the civilian vessel behind him and tore through it.
No amount of editing could make that part entirely false. The Federation had selected an angle that made Asterion harder to see and did not show Radian's fire-control display, but Ilyan saw the warning anyway because it had never really left his vision.
FIRE PATH BLOCKED — CIVILIAN CONTACT
He had seen it.
He had fired anyway.
The official reported sixty-three confirmed deaths so far across the passenger transport, the ferry, decompression incidents and structural destruction around Orison's unfinished expansion ring, with more than two hundred injured and additional civilians still unaccounted for. The number was provisional. Ilyan hated the word immediately. The broadcast moved to rescue footage, then Section Twelve already drifting out of synchronization. It skipped the destruction of the station-keeping nodes and cut directly to Radian with both hands against the main spine, thrusters burning while he changed the ring's path. Presented that way, the rescue looked like another piece of Nexus activity around the structure instead of the reason thousands of people had not died.
Niko's anger arrived faster than Ilyan's. "They're using footage of you saving the ring to make it look like you were part of whatever damaged it." Ilyan continued watching the smaller replay of the ferry. "They didn't have to lie about that one." Niko turned toward him. Ilyan pointed toward the vessel on the screen without looking away. "Cai put it behind Asterion and fire-control told me not to shoot. I saw the warning. I knew what was behind him, and I still thought I could get the shot through before he moved."
Niko's anger stopped searching for somewhere easy to go. He looked from the footage to Ilyan and found nothing useful enough to say.
Lucien entered medical near the end of the broadcast, command headset hanging around his neck and one sleeve rolled over a patched burn along his forearm from the battle stations. He stood beside Kaia's bed while the Federation officer formally referred to the fighting as the Orison Attack and attributed the civilian losses to Nexus's escalation. When the Solar Federation seal returned, Tomas muted the display. Niko's anger resurfaced immediately. "They're burying Arden. He destroys the station-keeping clusters, forces Radian through a transport, and the public version barely admits Asterion was there."
Lucien looked exhausted rather than surprised. "Solar Federation Command will bury whatever parts of him it thinks it can. They won't manage all of it. Corvane ordered him to disengage over channels Orison recorded, and enough civilian systems caught Asterion around the ring that the event won't disappear completely. But the public story is being written now, not after an investigation. They have Radian going through the transport, Radian's shot hitting the ferry, and Black Star sitting at the center of the operation. That's enough material to build something simple."
Ilyan finally looked away from the screen. "How many of the ferry deaths were from my shot?"
Lucien's eyes moved toward the casualty report on his wrist display and stayed there just long enough for Ilyan to catch the hesitation. "Don't decide for me what I can hear," Ilyan said. "If there's a number, give it to me."
Lucien came closer and opened the report rather than answering from across the room. "Twelve confirmed dead from that ship. Two more passengers are still missing from the section that decompressed, and thirty-four people are being treated for injuries tied directly to the hit or the evacuation afterward. Orison hasn't reconciled the final passenger manifest, so those numbers can still change." He let the display lower and studied Ilyan before continuing. "The transport Cai forced you through has a higher count. I can give you that number too if you decide you need it, but I'm not going to turn this into a list you use to hurt yourself."
Ilyan stared at the darkened display. "Twelve people died because I wanted one shot."
Lucien pulled a chair over near Kaia's bed and sat, keeping enough distance that Ilyan did not feel surrounded. "Tell me what happened when you fired."
Ilyan rubbed at the edge of the medical film over his palm until it began to peel. "I saw the warning. Cai put the ferry behind him and I still thought I could hit Asterion before he moved. I didn't forget the civilians were there. That would almost be easier." His thumb stopped moving. "For that second I cared more about hitting him than I cared about the warning. Then he moved and they took the shot instead."
Lucien did not tell him the deaths were really Cai's because Cai had used the ferry as cover, and he did not tell him the broadcast was propaganda so none of it mattered. He sat with the answer for a while before speaking. "That shot belongs to you. Cai destroying the ring controls does not. Asterion forcing Radian through the transport does not. Those facts don't have to cancel each other out just because the Federation wants one clean villain for the broadcast." He glanced toward the blank screen. "They're taking things that really happened and arranging them so people reach the conclusion they want. That is harder to fight than a complete lie."
Ilyan hated that Lucien was not defending him enough to make anger easy. He glanced toward Kaia and asked whether the ferry passenger manifest listed children. Lucien told him the detailed ages had not been released to Black Star's intercepted reports yet and that he would not guess just because Ilyan wanted certainty. Ilyan accepted that because uncertainty was better than another invented child filling the space around the dinosaur.
Lucien looked toward Kaia after that, and the change in his face was small enough that somebody who did not know him might have missed it. He looked younger when he was afraid for her. Less like the person managing pursuit routes, supply shortages and military decisions from a carrier built for hundreds, and more like a nineteen-year-old standing beside somebody he could not make wake up. He asked Tomas whether the intracranial pressure had changed. Tomas told him it had not. Lucien nodded, absorbed the information because there was nothing else he could do with it, then explained that Black Star would cut external civilian traffic after the next route change and remain dark until Morrow. The Federation would have the louder version of Orison for a while.
Ilyan looked toward him. "We're not releasing anything?"
"Hana is preserving every combat log, Orison recording and Federation order we can get. We release everything now, the Federation calls the files manipulated before anyone looks at them. We release edited footage, we become exactly what we're accusing them of doing." Lucien rubbed his thumb against the edge of the chair. "The people at Orison deserve the full record more than Nexus needs to win an argument tonight. We can decide what to release when we aren't still running from Alecto."
That sounded like Lucien. Ilyan almost wished somebody aboard Black Star would simply become furious enough to make the entire situation uncomplicated.
Nobody did.
Black Star went dark after the next course change. Civilian relay access disappeared from ordinary terminals, external transmissions stopped and Sera put the carrier onto a route weaving through industrial traffic dense enough to complicate pursuit without forcing Mara to abuse the drives again. Morrow Anchorage remained several days away, and Kaia remained unconscious. The lack of change around her became a rhythm aboard the ship. Tomas checked the swelling. Lucien found reasons to pass through medical that fooled nobody. Eli brought Vesper's damaged telemetry into the ward once before Tomas threatened to throw the entire slate into a sterilizer. Rafi asked whether Kaia might hear people while she was sedated, then spent almost an hour talking to her after Tomas admitted nobody could know what reached her. Anya eventually dragged him away to eat. Naomi had no flowers to bring because Black Star did not have flowers, so she left a tiny clipping from one of Orison's emergency-grown herb plants sealed inside a sample tube beside Kaia's bed and never mentioned doing it.
Ilyan moved between medical and Radian because his quarters made sleep worse. When sleep came, he woke with his hands clenched tightly enough to reopen the healing cuts beneath the film. The transport returned differently each time. Sometimes he heard the emergency channels. Sometimes there was no sound and the only thing in the dream was the green dinosaur rotating through dark space while Radian approached it forever without reaching it. Once he woke convinced somebody had touched his wrist and struck the wall beside the bed before his eyes were fully open. Tomas gave him a mild sedative after that and ignored the argument Ilyan tried to start about it.
Radian remained unwashed. The blood dried darker against the ivory armor while Mara and Niko documented everything, removed damaged plating and mapped changes that should not have existed. The amber glow had disappeared by the second day of transit, but the routing paths it revealed had not. When Tomas finally cleared Ilyan for limited time in the bay, he found Radian hanging in the maintenance cradle with the shoulder opened, thigh plating removed and the cockpit collar exposed where Niko and Mara had cut it apart.
Niko drifted beside the shoulder with a diagnostic slate tethered to one wrist. The bruising around his nose had become spectacular, purple spreading beneath both eyes. Someone had written FRAGILE COMPONENT across the medical tape. Niko had responded beneath it with TOUCH AND DIE. He saw Ilyan reading it and pointed a screwdriver at him. "You don't get to comment on my face until it stops being your fault."
Mara pushed away from Radian's shoulder and drifted down beside them, throwing two particle-routing maps onto the nearest display. "Look at this instead. It's more useful than admiring Niko's injuries." The first map showed Radian before Orison, familiar paths branching through the limbs, thruster groups and weapons. The second looked similar until Ilyan started following the lines. Entire sections had changed. Reinforcement had moved through structures the original engineering package treated as secondary. Blade containment had altered around the emitter. Load through the damaged shoulder had been redirected into sections Mara said should never have tolerated it. The forearm projector's field profile had narrowed under stress when it should have become unstable.
Ilyan leaned closer. "Can you make any of it happen again?"
Mara's expression gave him the answer before she spoke. "We can recreate the damage. Very confidently."
Niko drifted nearer and enlarged the shoulder routing. "The rest is another problem. We can manually send particles through some of these paths now that we know they exist, but if I force the output you were getting through them with ordinary controls, I'm pretty sure I cook the shoulder. Whatever happened during the battle was changing dynamically. Radian kept redistributing the load while you were piloting him."
Ilyan looked between the maps. "Concordance?"
Mara and Niko hesitated, and neither tried hiding the hesitation.
Niko lowered the slate. "Maybe. That's as far as I'm going. We can see what happened. We don't know why. I don't know why the routing changed, I don't know why Radian recognized a classification we've never seen before, and I don't know whether the people who built him understood all of this any better than we do."
Ilyan looked toward the diagnostic panel.
XF-01 RADIAN — NYXION
The classification had not reverted.
"What does Nyxion mean?"
Mara folded her arms. "You have asked that enough times that I promise the answer will not improve through repetition."
Niko tapped the classification field with one finger. "We searched every technical archive Black Star has. Nothing useful. Either the term came from buried project data we don't have access to, or Radian had information his own maintenance package somehow didn't, which would be insulting but not surprising."
Ilyan looked up at Radian's dark eyes. The Frame did not look asleep. He had never looked asleep. The thought had become impossible to ignore since Orison. "How long before he can launch again?"
Niko's expression changed immediately. "Eventually."
"That's not a timeframe."
"It's the timeframe you get until I know whether the shoulder needs partial reconstruction or complete reconstruction. The thigh has to be reinforced, the cockpit collar is ruined, half the armor needs replacement and some idiot made me cut into a prototype Nyxion because he broke my nose and refused to come out."
Ilyan winced. "You're going to keep using that."
Niko looked offended by the suggestion he might not. "I'm twenty-nine. I could annoy you with this for decades."
Mara pushed back toward the shoulder and muttered that his optimism about surviving the repairs was admirable. Niko ignored her and looked at Ilyan more seriously. "And before you ask the thing you're actually thinking, I don't know whether you can make Orison happen again. Maybe Radian can. Maybe you can together. Maybe trying to force it is exactly how we damage something neither of us understands. Next time anything starts changing, I want enough instrumentation on him that at least one person aboard this ship can see which engineering law is being violated first."
Ilyan remained beneath Radian after both engineers returned to work. The civilian blood still stained the chest. The strip of transport wall remained under the shoulder plate because Mara had honored his request not to remove it yet. KEEP CHILDREN SECURED stared down at him beneath the burn damage. He had expected the sight to make him sick again.
Instead he felt calm.
That frightened him more than the nausea had.
Lucien was alone in the operations room when Ilyan found him late in the second transit cycle. Black Star's reduced lighting left most of the compartment in shadow except for the central table and the route projection suspended above it. Morrow glowed as a small destination marker beyond a chain of industrial transfer points. Damage reports covered one portion of the table, Orison casualty updates another. The Federation's ORISON ATTACK headline remained frozen on one side display long after the original broadcast had ended.
Ilyan stopped opposite Lucien and immediately hated the sentence he had prepared on the way there because it sounded like he was applying for work instead of deciding what the rest of his life might become. Lucien looked up from a supply report and noticed the hesitation without helping him through it. "Tomas thinks you're sleeping."
"Tomas thinks everyone should be asleep whenever he isn't actively examining them."
"That is broadly how nights work."
Ilyan dragged a chair out and sat because standing made him feel as though he intended to escape the conversation if it went badly. He rested his hands between his knees and looked directly at Lucien. "Put me on the permanent pilot roster."
Whatever exhaustion had been sitting behind Lucien's eyes disappeared. He closed the supply report. "You already have access to Radian whenever there's an emergency."
"That's the problem." Ilyan leaned forward, trying to keep the words from becoming something rehearsed. "I don't want Radian sitting in the bay until the situation gets bad enough that somebody has to come convince me to use him. I want the training schedule. Readiness rotation. Sim time. Weapons training, formations, rescue work, whatever Kaia normally does when she's active. If Nexus deploys Frames and Radian is cleared, I want people expecting me to launch instead of wondering whether I'll decide to."
Lucien watched him in silence long enough for irritation to begin filling the room. When he spoke, the lack of anger made it harder to push back. "Niko had to cut Radian's cockpit open because you wouldn't leave it. When he reached inside, you grabbed him before anyone understood what you were doing and put his face into the canopy hard enough that Tomas had to reset his nose. Garrick and Tomas had to help you out because you couldn't release the restraints yourself." Lucien placed both hands flat against the table. "I'm not saying that to embarrass you. I watched enough of the extraction feed to know you weren't making a decision to hurt Niko. But you came out of that cockpit less than two days ago, and now you're sitting here asking me to make combat part of your permanent role aboard Black Star. I need to understand how those things connect in your head."
Ilyan stared at the faint crescents still visible in his palms. "Perrin happened and I spent days trying to decide whether that meant I could never pilot again. Every time something happened afterward, I waited until somebody else made the decision for me. You did it the first time. Kaia nearly dying did it at Orison." He rubbed his thumb over the deepest mark. "I don't want every launch to begin after somebody is already bleeding because I'm still deciding whether I can live with myself afterward."
Lucien's eyes moved briefly toward the medical status display showing Kaia stable. "Kaia chose to launch, Ilyan."
"I know she did. I'm not trying to take that away from her." The frustration came out more strongly than he intended and he forced himself to slow down. "That isn't what I mean. I thought refusing to be Radian's pilot kept me away from whatever happened with Perrin. It didn't. It just meant I sat inside Black Star until things got so bad I couldn't stay there anymore."
Lucien studied him. "And you think putting your name on the roster gets rid of the hesitation?"
"No. I think training means hesitation isn't the only thing I bring into the cockpit." Ilyan shifted in the chair, suddenly uncomfortable with how certain the next part felt. "I'm going to pilot Radian again. That part isn't really a question anymore. I'd rather learn how to do it properly than keep pretending every fight is one final emergency and afterward I'm going back to refusing him."
Lucien caught the certainty immediately. "You've already decided there's going to be a next time."
Ilyan glanced toward the frozen Orison headline. "Asterion exists. Cai exists. The Federation saw what Radian can do. Whatever Nyxion means, they know that word now too. Do you really think everyone suddenly leaves Black Star alone because I decide I'm uncomfortable?"
"That still doesn't answer why it has to be you."
Ilyan's frustration snapped before he could stop it. "Then who is it supposed to be? Kaia's unconscious, Vesper is torn apart and nobody else on this ship can pilot Radian. I'm the one who can do it and you already know that." The words left him and he immediately saw where they had landed. Lucien's jaw tightened, not because the argument was false but because Ilyan had used Kaia and Nexus's lack of pilots as a weapon in the conversation. Ilyan looked away. "That was cheap."
"It was." Lucien rubbed both hands over his face, then lowered them. "It's also part of why I'm worried about saying yes."
The operations room settled around them, quiet except for the faint vibration of Black Star's drives. Lucien glanced toward the casualty report reflected in the polished table. "There's another part you haven't talked about. The ferry." Ilyan's shoulders tightened, and Lucien did not rush into the silence. "You saw the warning before you fired. Training can make you faster and more accurate, but what happened there wasn't a lack of accuracy. If you're asking me to put you on permanent combat rotation, we have to talk about the part of you that saw civilians behind Cai and took the shot anyway."
Ilyan looked at him. "Radian didn't pull the trigger."
"I'm not blaming Radian."
"Then don't treat keeping me out of him like it removes the dangerous part." Anger entered Ilyan's voice and this time he let it. "I wanted Cai. I wanted that shot more than I cared about the warning for that second. That was me. If that means you don't trust me to pilot, say it. But leaving Radian in the bay doesn't magically remove whatever made me fire."
Lucien went still, and Ilyan realized only after he said it how strongly he had defended Radian without intending to. Lucien noticed too but did not press there. Instead he asked, "Do you think becoming a permanent pilot is punishment?"
The question irritated Ilyan immediately, then the irritation collapsed because he did not have an easy answer. "I don't know. Maybe part of it is." He rubbed both hands over his face and stared at the table afterward. "I asked Mara not to clean the blood off Radian. I don't even know why I needed that. Maybe I thought if I kept looking at it I wouldn't start lying to myself about Orison later. Maybe Tomas has some word for that."
"He probably has several."
Ilyan glanced up. Lucien was not joking; he was simply acknowledging reality. That somehow helped.
Ilyan leaned back and stared at the route projection above them. "More than anything, I want a future where all of this is over. No war, no kids growing up thinking they're supposed to kill somebody because the people before them never figured out how to stop. I don't want another generation inheriting this." He paused, jaw tightening as soon as Cai entered his mind. "But I'm not going to sit here and pretend that means I don't want revenge. I do. Cai used civilians because he wanted to see what Radian would become. He nearly threw part of Orison into itself because he wanted to push me farther. I still want to kill him for that." Ilyan looked down at his hands rather than let the words become something grander than they were. "If I get a clean shot into his cockpit next time, I don't know if I hesitate. Right now I don't think I would."
Lucien's expression changed, but he did not interrupt.
"That's a problem," Ilyan continued. "Not because I suddenly think Cai deserves forgiveness. I don't. It's a problem because I know what happened when I wanted him more than I cared about the people behind him." His fingers curled once before he forced them open. "I don't want the next thing I learn about myself inside Radian to cost twelve people. If I'm already the person Black Star needs when things get bad, then I need actual training before the next time I'm angry enough to make another decision like that."
Lucien looked at him differently after that, not reassured exactly, but listening to a version of the request he had not expected. "You walked in here asking for a permanent assignment. What you're describing now sounds closer to asking for somebody to teach you how not to become dangerous when you have power."
"It's the same request. I'm just terrible at explaining it."
A tired almost-smile passed across Lucien's face and disappeared. "There would be conditions."
Ilyan did not accept immediately. He had learned enough about Lucien to hear conditions before agreeing to them. "Tell me."
"Tomas can ground you from combat. Not recommend it. Ground you. If the phantom feedback gets worse, if you stop separating your own body from Radian reliably, if your neurological state worries him, you do not launch because you feel guilty or because somebody is in danger or because I need another Frame." Lucien waited long enough to make sure Ilyan was actually considering it before continuing. "Niko can ground Radian if the Frame is unsafe. Mara can override both of you on structural issues. You train in simulation before live weapons unless there is genuinely no other option. Formation work, rescue operations, civilian traffic management, disengagement, everything. Kaia trains with you when she wakes and is medically cleared. Eli works with you until then, and if we find other qualified pilots, you train with them too."
Ilyan found himself liking the rescue requirement more than the combat training and did not know what to do with that.
Lucien noticed. "And I stop lying to get you into Radian."
That changed the room more than any of the technical conditions had.
Ilyan's eyes settled on him.
Lucien rested his forearms against the table. "When we took Black Star, I used the shelter against you. I told myself I was explaining what would happen if you refused, but I knew what I was doing. I knew which fear would push you into the cockpit." His gaze did not leave Ilyan's. "If you're choosing to become a Nexus pilot now, I don't get to keep manufacturing your consent whenever the situation becomes bad enough that I want a different answer."
Ilyan took a few seconds before asking, "You mean that even if you think I'm wrong?"
"I can argue with you. I can tell you exactly what I think your refusal costs. I can be furious with you." Lucien's mouth tightened. "What I can't do is arrange things so that saying no feels like personally killing everybody around you. If I keep doing that, then you aren't a pilot who chose Nexus. You're a weapon I learned how to pressure."
The words landed too close to Cai's entire idea of power for Ilyan to answer immediately.
When he finally did, he had his own conditions. "Then I want the same thing from Nexus later, not just now. If this turns into taking jobs where the actual goal is killing somebody because they're politically inconvenient, I'm gone. Same if civilians ever become part of the plan instead of people we failed to protect. And if you leave something out of a mission because you know telling me would make me refuse, that counts too."
Lucien considered him carefully. "Nexus doesn't take assassination work."
"I know what Nexus does today. I'm talking about what happens when everything gets worse and somebody decides the old rules were only for easier times."
That distinction mattered enough that Lucien sat with it before nodding. "If the mission changes enough that what you agreed to is no longer what we're doing, you get told. If you refuse after that, I can argue with you. I don't get to pretend you already agreed."
Ilyan let out a breath slowly.
Lucien studied him for another moment. "There's one more thing. Permanent does not mean trapped. If you wake up tomorrow, or next week, or after Kaia wakes, and realize this was panic and guilt talking louder than everything else, you get to tell me that. I'm not making you prove commitment by staying in a cockpit you no longer want."
Ilyan frowned. "That sounds like you're giving me a way out before I've even started."
"I am. That is the point."
For a while neither spoke. Ilyan looked toward Morrow on the route projection. Kaia would remain unconscious until they reached it. Radian was in the bay covered in civilian blood because Ilyan had asked everyone not to wash it away. Sixty-three people were already confirmed dead at Orison and the number was still changing. None of this felt like the beginning of something he should want.
Maybe that was why the choice felt real.
"Put me on the roster."
Lucien studied him once more and then opened Black Star's personnel system. There was no ceremony. No oath, no uniform, no crew gathered to witness it. He entered the assignment while Ilyan watched.
XF-01 RADIAN — PRIMARY PILOT: ILYAN CORVEN
STATUS: NEXUS ACTIVE FRAME ROSTER
The line appeared with almost insulting simplicity.
Ilyan stared at his own name.
Once, seeing it attached to Radian would have felt like somebody else had decided what he was.
Now he had asked for it himself.
That did not make the choice lighter.
It made the weight harder to give back.
Talia watched the Federation broadcast twice aboard Resolute. The first time she watched with Cassian, Corvane and enough of Alecto's surviving command staff that every omission in the footage produced another argument around her. The second time she watched alone because the first viewing had buried too much beneath everyone else's anger. Her Bastion barely appeared. Asterion had been reduced to flashes of blue-violet around Radian whenever editing could not remove the Nyxion without making the battle nonsensical. Cai's name never appeared. Development Command had sealed his mission file and classified most of Asterion's telemetry before Resolute finished recovering its damaged Frames.
The Federation called what happened the Orison Attack.
Talia paused the footage on Radian firing at the ferry. That part required no manipulation. The pale Nyxion fired. Asterion moved. Civilians took the shot. She advanced to the passenger transport and slowed the recording until Asterion's grip became visible around Radian's upper body. Cai had forced him there. She moved farther. The expansion-ring footage began after the station-keeping nodes were already destroyed. Radian appeared later with both hands against Section Twelve while the broadcast narration discussed Nexus activity around the ring, leaving anyone watching without the battle record to wonder why the same Frame blamed for the disaster was suddenly pushing against the structure.
Cassian entered while she held the recording there. One arm remained secured close beneath his uniform, his shoulder injured badly enough that Vesper's earlier damage and the later restraint loads had compounded into something medical did not want him moving. He still moved it too much and looked irritated whenever the pain betrayed him. He noticed the paused image, then Talia, and told her she was supposed to be sleeping.
She kept her attention on Radian. "You came here instead of sleeping too, so I don't think either of us gets to use that."
Cassian lowered himself into the chair opposite her with more care than he wanted her to notice. "You watched it again."
"They're putting almost everything on Nexus." Talia advanced the recording back to the ring failure. "Cai destroyed the station-keeping nodes. Corvane ordered him to stop and he did it anyway."
"Corvane included that in the official action report."
"That report will sit behind classification while people watch this." She moved to the transport collision and left Asterion's grip visible. "He forced Radian through a civilian ship. They cut around it until he looks like another Federation Frame trying to contain Nexus."
Cassian rested his good arm along the chair support and watched the footage for several seconds. "Because admitting that a Federation experimental pilot deliberately used civilian traffic and sabotaged Orison's ring damages the Federation more than allowing Nexus to carry the blame. There isn't a procedural explanation that makes that prettier, if that's what you're looking for."
Talia looked at him. The lack of defense irritated her and relieved her at the same time. "So that's it."
"That's what Public Affairs is doing. Corvane is furious about it. I doubt he's alone."
She closed that portion of the footage and advanced until Asterion's silver-white body appeared clearly beneath the blue-violet routing. The image froze with one blue-white eye turned toward Radian. "How much of what Cai can do is training?"
Cassian's attention shifted from the screen to her face. "Why are you asking?"
Talia's jaw tightened. "Because Radian had me. I used everything I had left and none of it changed anything." She hated that the begging returned the moment she said it, her own damaged voice telling the unknown pilot that her brother was on Black Star, that she needed to find Ilyan, that she could not die before bringing him home. "I asked the pilot to let me live. I told him about my brother because I thought maybe if I made myself a person instead of a cockpit he would stop." Her fingers tightened around the edge of the medical blanket. "He still went for the kill. Cai stopped him because Cai could."
Cassian's expression changed. He had known Radian almost killed her. Hearing what she had done in the seconds before the strike was different. He started to tell her that Radian had been operating at a level none of them had encountered before, but Talia cut across the reassurance before it formed. "I don't care whether you call it failure. I care that once Radian decided to kill me, nothing I did could change the outcome. Not the shield. Not the axe. Not thrust. Not surrender. If Cai had been somewhere else, I would be dead."
Cassian shifted and pain tightened his mouth before he hid it. "So now you want to know what Development Command did to him."
Talia did not deny it.
His expression hardened. "Whatever you're imagining, it wasn't advanced pilot training."
"I didn't say it was. I'm asking what made him capable of standing in that fight when I couldn't."
"That answer should worry you more than it seems to."
"It does worry me." Talia turned toward him fully. "I'm asking anyway."
Cassian stared at Asterion's frozen image for a while before answering. His voice lost the patient instructor quality he normally used with younger pilots. "Arden was modified young. Gene therapy, developmental conditioning, neural work, physical adaptation, procedures I do not have the complete records for and don't want. Whatever version of Development Command's pilot programs reaches ordinary personnel has already been cleaned up."
Talia's eyes remained on Cai's Nyxion. "He survived it."
Cassian went still. "That is a dangerous way to phrase what happened to him."
"But he did."
"Surviving something doesn't tell you whether anybody should have done it."
Talia looked toward him. "I didn't say they should have."
"You don't need to. You're looking at Asterion and asking whether the price might be acceptable if it means nobody can put you where Radian put you again."
The accuracy made heat rise under her skin. "What am I supposed to think instead? That I train another five years, maybe become as good as you, and then the next Nyxion shows up and I learn there was another ceiling above me the whole time? That I should be disciplined about somebody else deciding whether I get to live?"
Cassian leaned forward despite the damaged shoulder. "You did live."
"Because Cai saved me. I had nothing to do with that answer."
"That does not make your life worth less."
"I never said it did." Talia looked away, catching her own reflection in the dark portion of the screen. "I said I begged."
The anger left Cassian's face.
Talia saw the sympathy replace it and hated that more. "Don't look at me like that. I don't need you telling me anybody would've been scared."
Cassian took a slow breath before answering. "I wasn't going to tell you that."
"Then what?"
"That nearly dying does not make you weak just because somebody else was stronger."
Talia shook her head. "That isn't what it felt like. I gave him my brother's name. I told him the reason I needed to live and none of it mattered. Cai's lance mattered. That's what mattered." Her eyes returned to Asterion. "Power changed the answer. Not my training. Not whether I deserved to live. Power."
Cassian watched her carefully. "And look what Cai did once he had enough of it."
Talia knew exactly what he meant. The passenger transport was only seconds away in the recording. The ring sabotage followed after. Cai's power had not made him wise or merciful. It had made it possible for one seventeen-year-old to decide that thousands of civilians could become pressure applied to another pilot.
That should have made Asterion repulsive.
It did not.
It made the silver-white Nyxion frightening.
It also made her want to understand how Cai had become capable of surviving inside it.
Cassian saw something in her face and his own expression tightened. "Do not go to Development Command while you're thinking like this."
Talia looked at him. "I was terrified."
"That's exactly why I'm telling you to wait. Fear makes every price look smaller if you think paying it means you never have to feel helpless again."
"I'm not pretending I wasn't afraid."
"I know. That's different from deciding what to do with the fear while it's still fresh enough that you can hear yourself begging."
The words hurt because they were true. Talia leaned back and closed the broadcast. The dark screen left her reflection behind, pale under the medical lights, Cassian sitting behind her with his injured shoulder and the Federation insignia still fixed to both of them despite everything the broadcast had hidden.
"What if it doesn't go away?" she asked after a long silence. "What if I wait and I still know I never want to be that powerless again?"
Cassian did not answer immediately.
That mattered more than anything else he had said.
Somewhere deeper aboard Resolute, Cai Arden was being examined, debriefed, blamed, protected and studied by different parts of the same Federation. Asterion was sealed behind Development Command security while people argued over what Orison had revealed about the Nyxion and its pilot. Talia did not yet know what she would ask for or what she would be willing to give if someone eventually told her the actual price.
She only knew she could still hear herself begging Radian to let her live.
She could still hear how little it had mattered.
And the things people whispered about Development Command no longer sounded like warnings meant for somebody else.