Forty seconds in vacuum and the picture assembled fast.

  Righteous Fury was below, stationary, at low orbit, nuclear batteries charged and aimed down at Radvanje's night lights. Three point eight million people who hadn't looked up yet. Corvette Beta was in escort position, circling in a slow protective arc, point defense warm, filling every approach angle between the capital ship and anything that moved toward it.

  Behind them, the corvettes Cannae and Trebia and the OSS Hannibal. The OMEGA fleet had already spoken: Dragon Flight is classified rogue. Engage and destroy.

  Kai counted what they had. Five Dragons. All of them scarred from burnout. All of them free.

  Alexandra was already on tactical.

  "Righteous Fury won't fire on the city while we're a viable threat to its hull." Her voice had the particular flatness she used when the numbers were saying something nobody wanted to hear. "Corvette Beta is the immediate problem. It fills every approach vector to the Fury. If we go for the battlecruiser without neutralizing it first, Beta degrades our strike effectiveness by sixty to seventy percent. We need at minimum three of us engaging the corvette to have a real—"

  Bahamut went still. Kai felt the Dragon orienting toward something he was only now catching up to. Orochi was shifting.

  "Orochi and I take Beta."

  Mikki said it the way she said everything. No theater. A statement about what was already decided, offered to the room for information rather than approval.

  "Oni." Kai said the word. And stopped.

  Mikki was already moving towards the corvette.

  He had one second. He could call her back. Reconfigure the approach, three on Beta, two on fleet interdiction, run the math Alexandra had been building toward before Mikki interrupted it. He could make it a team problem instead of a solo problem.

  He didn't.

  He didn't know exactly when he'd decided. Maybe when Bahamut went still. Maybe back in Bay 7, watching her stand against the near wall with her arms loose, already somewhere else in her head, the decision made before Thorne finished speaking. Either way, the moment came and passed and he let it.

  Mikki had stopped waiting for his agreement a long time ago. That wasn't the job anymore.

  "Pack: holding pattern at fifteen hundred. Staggered vectors on the Fury." He heard himself giving the order and kept going. "Close enough to threaten Beta's point defense. Far enough to evaluate." He looked at the approach geometry. "Alexandra. Fleet timeline."

  "Pohl's bombardment window opens in forty-seven minutes." Still recalculating. "That's our window."

  On the far side of the formation, Mikki said one word to Orochi. Not to the pack channel, she didn't bother closing it, but she wasn't speaking to them. Just to the Dragon.

  "Ikuzo."

  And then she went.

  "You kick their ass, girl!" Not the tactical channel. Just Anya.

  He looked for the tell. He knew what it looked like, the early feral engagements, before she had the language for what she was doing, when Orochi would commit fully and Mikki would hit a half-second of lag between Dragon instinct and pilot intent, the seam where the thing she was becoming hadn't quite caught up to the thing she'd always been. He'd seen it. He was looking for it.

  He didn't see it.

  What he saw instead was something he didn't have good language for. Mikki and Orochi moved like the decision and the motion were the same event. No gap. No negotiation. Not the efficiency of an override, that had been something happening to her, her body relocated without her permission. This was something happening from her. He could read it in the geometry alone, from a thousand kilometers away: she was riding it. Not drowning. The predator finding its natural state. Clean in a way that had nothing to do with neatness.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Beta's point defense started tracking, adjusted, lost the target, recalculated.

  Ninety seconds into the engagement, the Hannibal's fire control went dark.

  The ping arrived. Recalibrating.

  The icon on his tactical display, the one tracking OMEGA weapons lock on Dragon contacts, shifted from ACTIVE to DIAGNOSTIC. Counter started. Ninety seconds. Standard safety protocol, triggered by anomalous sensor return.

  He looked at the timestamp. Looked at where Orochi was in the engagement at that exact moment: deep in the corvette's point defense envelope, maximum velocity, the window where every second of fire control delay was worth something.

  He didn't look toward the Hannibal.

  Then data arrived on tactical channel seven. A bearing. A velocity window. A gap in Beta's point defense pattern that hadn't been in anything he'd had thirty seconds ago. No sender header. No context. Just numbers, precise, stripped of everything except what was useful.

  He read them. He understood immediately what they were for.

  He passed the relevant portion to Mikki's tactical feed without commentary. She was busy. She'd see it when she needed it.

  He still didn't look toward the Hannibal.

  "That was—" Anya stopped. Couldn't find the word.

  Sanyog found it for her. "Hate to say it." Flat. Precise. Like he was reading from a technical manual. "Viper is really good."

  Anya laughed. Just once. A short, broken sound that wasn't really laughter, more like pressure releasing. "Yeah. Yeah, he is."

  The first sign was Bahamut.

  He felt the Dragon's posture change, not through any channel he could name, just the quality of the bond shifting, a tension releasing the way it released when something had been resolved. He looked at the tactical display.

  Beta was spinning off its axis. Propulsion gone. One contact return still moving — Orochi — decelerating, damage registers climbing.

  And then through the bond, one moment, clean and fast, nothing like anything he had words for, something hit him that wasn't pain and wasn't triumph. Satiation. The specific stillness that lives in a body when the hunt is finished and the body knows before the mind does.

  He needed a full second afterward to place it as Mikki, because it hadn't felt like her. It had felt like something she was carrying that was older than she was.

  He pulled back from it. Bahamut held steady.

  Beta was destroyed. Orochi was drifting.

  Nobody spoke first.

  Then Anya: "She did it." Half a breath on the pack channel, then she pushed through it: "She did it, she..." And then a sound that wasn't language, somewhere between a laugh and something that had no name, and then she went quiet. Not contained quiet, the quiet of someone who has said enough and knows it.

  "Oni." Sanyog. Just the call sign. Flat, precise. But he said it.

  "Bond signal present." Alexandra, pulling biometrics without being asked. Her voice was controlled. Doing what she did. "Pilot vitals irregular. Not terminal."

  He let it stand. All of it.

  Orochi was crippled — propulsion gone, attitude control intermittent, no offensive capability. Drifting at low relative velocity, orbit decaying slowly. He registered it. He put it in the place where he kept things he couldn't fix yet.

  "Poison."

  "I see her." She was already on it. Alexandra was on comms: auxiliary bay codes, stealth retrieval drone, Orochi's drift trajectory calculated against the drone's approach window, the Dragon engagement providing cover for an unauthorized deployment she hadn't asked him to authorize.

  Tiamat rolled hard to port, cutting an angle that should have triggered a cascade of course corrections from the co-pilot's seat. The comms stayed silent. Alexandra wasn't flying. She was letting the Dragon fly.

  "Sanyog. Formation on me. Fury approach, now."

  "Chalo."

  He almost let it go. Then it hit him again, the way it had landed on his channel, just slightly, in a register that made him think for half a second that he'd heard the word twice. Overlapping. Like two people had said it simultaneously in the same breath from the same point in space.

  He pulled Sanyog's telemetry. Everything nominal. He pulled Taniwha's. Also nominal, more exact than it had any right to be, given what the cybernetics were carrying right now.

  He looked at the two readings side by side. The synchronization was perfect. Too perfect. Like two instruments playing from the same sheet of music in the same breath.

  Then he stopped looking, because the formation was already moving and he had a fleet to engage, and some things you noticed and filed and dealt with later. He pulled his attention forward.

  They fell toward the Fury.

  He didn't call it. He didn't have to.

  The pack was flying differently than it had been five minutes ago, and he could read it without asking anyone to name it. Anya's vectors had no margin. Sanyog's positioning was exact in a way that shouldn't have been possible under that kind of load. Alexandra was trusting Tiamat with angles that three months ago would have required a written procedure and an argument.

  Nobody said Mikki's name. The pack folded her into their velocity and flew faster.

  He led them forward and tried not to notice the silence in the part of the web where she used to be.

  Six minutes into the approach, new contact returns resolved behind them.

  Not from the Fury. Behind.

  Fast movers out of the Hannibal's flight deck, already clear and burning hard. Six of them. Formation tight, painted orange on his tactical display. They had the Dragons' approach vectors mapped and they were not adjusting for the Righteous Fury.

  They were adjusting for the Dragons.

  He checked the display once. Didn't change anything about his course.

  Holt's Pegasus fighters were on their six. The Fury was ahead. The city below. Thirty minutes until Pohl's window opened, and Holt's squadron already closing the distance.

  "Eyes forward," he said. "Pack on me."

  They went.