"Ya know," said Brant. "I'd always thought this part would be a little more glamorous."

"Don't know what you mean," 78 said.

She, 8, and Toh were trapped together on the bridge for the duration of the thirty hour jump. Life support was on but they'd lost control of the doors and airlocks, and only the ones around the bridge would stay closed.

"I don't know. It's the last jump. There's a certain romance to that, right?" She set an emergency flare down upright on the floor of the bridge, next to four others set up the same way. They didn't look much like votive candles, but it was good enough for what little they had on the bridge. "I thought there'd be, like…a reckoning, or something. Last chances to say things that need saying, a time to share memories of our experiences and homes, maybe an opportunity for…"

"My home was a dump," Toh said.

"That's not the point! I thought…"

"That's why I left. Total dump."

"Deduction: just mad you never got to sleep with Engineer Vossler," 8 said. He had his multitool out, scratching marks into the floor of the bridge in front of the flares.

"In all likelihood, he's the only man I'll ever get a crack at again. And what better time than the last jump? My frustration is warranted!" she shouted, poking a flare emphatically at 8's chest.

"I don't know," Toh said. He had a small slab of igneous stone in one hand and a microreader in the other. The bridge did not have room for much, but the pilot had spent most of his time aboard in here and Brant was not surprised to find he'd kept one of his Tablets of Hof in a drawer at his station. "I always thought we'd be doing something like this."

Five flares.

"And that was in my best-case scenarios."

Scratched in the floor in front of them, five names.

Brant sighed. She stood over one of the names and collected herself.

"Ahabzara was a liar, and a cheater, and a killer, and a thief," she said. "He learned the art of weapons through years of experience, many of them as a pirate. He prided himself in his skills as a torturer. He committed fraud on a cartoonish scale. He was an unlikely comrade." She knelt and lit the flare with his name before it. "But a comrade he was. He risked his life for us, maybe more than that when he came for me in the Eye, and he was our constant companion through many other dangers. We wouldn't have made it this far without him. I thank him for his service. Whatever it may say about me, he was my friend."

"Harlan Mickleson should not have been here," Toh said. He knelt and lit the flare. "He might have done well on a ship in peacetime, working the engines or collating data – he grew up in peace and was suited to peace. Nothing wrong with that. It's a fine thing, really, to be at home in peace, if the world will just let you have it. The world didn't let Harlan have it, though. He was called to serve, and he answered. I thank him for his service and his sacrifice, and ask the hand of the Preserver to show him the peace he could not find in life."

"For all the mystery surrounding his ancient people, I do not think Translator was all that mysterious," Brant said. She lit his flare. "He devoted himself to his work, as we all do. He did not just study our cultures, but internalized them. He cared what others thought of him, as we all do. And though he was raising a child when he was assigned to our ship, and though he knew this mission would probably kill him, he did his duty without question, as we all do. He wasn't an angel or a demon. As strange as he was, he was one of us, and he died for us. I thank him for his service."

"Katarek never wanted funeral," 8 said. "Her views on ceremony, sentimentality in general, well-documented. Would…be mortified to see us like this." He stopped. His face blacked out for a second, and he knelt his head. It came back on a second later, a somber dark blue, and he shook his head and bent to light the flare. "But…Katarek also shot me, first time we met. So she can just deal with it. Had spirit, Katarek. Courage, humor, loyalty, resolve. Did not always like her, to be honest. Lot of bad blood between our people, lot of bad history. Mentors at Exenu Hive, probably kick me out all over again if they found out about this. Wonder if engi has ever eulogized mantis before. I mean…probably. Big galaxy. Conflict between our people: simple. But people themselves…complicated. Have to imagine some of my folk have developed respect, however grudging, or even friendship, however fraught, with some of hers. Still…would be surprised if ever an engi has missed a mantis…" He blacked out again, just for a second. "…if ever an engi has missed a mantis as I have missed her."

"I am not the one who should be eulogizing Damion Andrews," Brant said. "A man like him deserves better than this. He should have a state funeral with full honors on Terra Nova, with a monument commemorating his defense of the planet from the mantis. He should have Admiral Tully attesting to his long career and his many virtues. He should have General Klakmannak speaking to how much she admired him as a foe and how easy she found it to be his friend after the war. The goddamn funeral program should go on and on. Local school kids should get the day off for it and all that. Instead he has us. Three screw-ups, barely out of academy, who he had to whip into shape on the fly. But those three screw-ups saw this mess through to the end after he left us, despite everything. Maybe that in itself isn't so bad a eulogy."

She lit Andrews' flare, and they all took a step back. Toh intoned a passage from the tablet in Vrochok-C, a whistling tongue that always reminded Brant of birdsong. Charlotte bowed her head, and 8 put an arm around her as they listened to the memorial rite.

"Sure this isn't premature?" 8 whispered.

"I'm sure," Brant whispered back. "I think next time, it'll be all of us or none."

They checked and rechecked their setup. Brant had recorded a message explaining the intel they had received and highlighting its significance, accompanied by the decoded schematics and documents that would prove her testimony. Toh had switched the comm systems back online. Federation comm systems had been compromised for over a year now, with their long-range network disabled entirely by the Flagship, but they'd finally be close enough to Fed ships and bases to use short-range communications. While 8 was confident that the Flagship would know what they were saying, he was equally confident that it wouldn't be able to stop them from saying it. With the message already loaded onto their short-range beams and ready to go, they would only need a matter of seconds to broadcast it to as many targets as there were within range when they left jump. They wouldn't even need to break stealth. She'd wanted to load a hard copy of the material onto the transporter and send it to someone as a backup, but they couldn't fix the damage it had taken in the debris field until they had air on the rest of the ship.

They were going to get the word out. The secret that had been so devastating to the Rebellion that its commanders had devoted absurd resources to tracking and annihilating the Kestrel was going to get out. Brant found it easy enough to shelve all the little questions about whether any of this really mattered in the end, partly because she'd made peace with the conflict being an end in and of itself, and partly because more troubling questions had surfaced:

How was it going to change its strategy in light of the Kestrel's success? This news would put a Federation victory once more within reach, but that creature was not going to hand it to them.

The Flagship had deployed experimental tech to frag an entire planet just to keep them from getting where they were going. Did it have another trick to play?

Finally, the Flagship's mind, however mighty, had been shaped to have human characteristics. She knew they'd given it the capacity for hate. Would it have a capacity for frustration, too? Would it consider it an affront, a public embarrassment to have so inferior a foe slip through its fingers?

Would it want revenge?

These were not very productive questions to dwell on either. So, they checked and rechecked their setup, and kept as busy as they could. The hours frittered away slowly. Karl occasionally sent them messages. He'd been trying to close and seal the doors in the medbay, but with the central node damaged they kept reverting to their last order to stay open. He and Brant had tried to figure out something worthwhile he could do with this time, but they couldn't come up with anything.

It was theoretically possible that she or 78 could survive a sprint to the medbay – Toh was not an accomplished sprinter – and theoretically possible that they could run off to the damaged door control node and perform a few seconds of repair before running back to the medbay for oxygen, alternating with Karl, and so eventually regain control of the doors. Somebody could very easily go unconscious and suffocate in this scenario, though, and it didn't seem worth the risk. Their shields and engines were good, and the stealth drive was still unscathed – she wished they could have shields and engines manned, but they were equipped well enough as it was to just survive the jump. She and 8 talked about this extensively, even running some math on how long it would take a human or engi to go from fully oxygenated to unconscious, but this was largely just to keep their minds active and away from some of the less pleasant things they could dwell on.

She advised Karl to just enjoy the sedatives and get some sleep. She slept in her chair as best as she could, shifting her patch to her functioning eye to block out the light. The ambient beeps and whirs and vibrations of the ship, clearly audible even in her quarters, had long since stopped interfering with her sleep.

"Have been thinking," 8 said. He was sitting on the floor against the wall next to Charlotte.

"Oh?" she said.

"Will be heroes once Flagship destroyed. Probably have considerable leverage with Federation government, people. Been thinking about how to make use."

"We're just whistleblowers, 8. Intelligence carriers. You never really hear about folks like us in the histories."

"Federation on hard times. Propaganda ministry has interest in heroes – even if unwarranted, might force a certain amount of celebrity status on us. Really haven't considered?"

Brant would be lying if she said this hadn't occurred to her. Their mission was vital enough and, more importantly, far enough removed from the actual workings of the special ops intelligence teams that had recovered this intel that the Federation could lavish as much praise on them as it wanted, could practically canonize them. Everyone would need symbols to rally around, with the shape the galaxy was in. It had even occurred to her that she and the crew ticked just enough diversity boxes to really sell the whole "Federation United" image, especially with Ahab, their most problematic comrade, safely martyred.

"I want a mandate from the highest offices, to which all other major races and governments shall be treaty-bound, that I can just walk into any steakhouse in the galaxy and get whatever I want without spending a goddamn credit," Brant said.

"Including drinks, one assumes."

"Just beer is fine. I think the main lesson of these last few months – I venture to say the only lesson – is that scotch is gross. You?"

"Might like to do some lectures. Partly cathartic – will have a lot to unpack after this – but largely, engi always battling stereotypes. Meek, soft-spoken, dull, unpersonable. Not many engi find selves in place to so publicly counter them. Could do some good. If anyone goes."

"Oh, I'll go to every one," Brant said. She elbowed him in the side. "I'm going to heckle the shit out of you."

He trilled a quick, mechanical chuckle. "Error. Engi anatomy contains no shit."

She laughed, and put an arm out around his shoulder and squeezed. There was a lot to say. They could express their guilty relief that it hadn't been either of them that died. They could promise that they'd be around in some way for each other, in whatever shape the future took. They could use all sorts of embarrassing words and expressions to talk about their friendship. Brant could tell him about the life that other Charlotte had had. And where would that get them? She did not imagine it would lend this moment any more calm, any more contentment in the face of the coming storm.

"How about you, Toh?" Brant called out. The pilot was in his seat, reclined and studying his tablet.

He looked up from his microreader and said nothing.

"If missions makes you famous, influential, what will you do?" 8 said.

Toh looked back at the text on the reader. "I'll ask for my next assignment."

"No shore leave?" Brant said. "No…perks, no lavish fantasies?"

"I don't like not working," Toh said. "And this is the only thing I'm good at. Doing what I like for a living – don't need much of dream beyond that."

"Oh, that's good. That's really good," Brant said appraisingly.

8 nodded. "Propaganda ministry going to put that on a poster with your face on it."

Toh shrugged.

"Long as they give me royalties."

The hours passed.

The short-range comms were readied.

Power was diverted from weapons to stealth.

Weapons were prepped. Some were damaged and offline, and every remaining weapon would take longer to lock on without a gunner manning the station, but what they had would be ready to charge once they left jump state.

Toh gave her a countdown but she barely heard him, her hands relaying the countdown to Karl with the information barely crossing her conscious mind.

She gave thanks to Toh's god and hers for allowing them this much success, and for guidance through whatever might be waiting for them in the Volta Sector. And she waited.

With a glimmer and ripple in space, they dropped out of jump state and arrived at the beacon.

She was expecting a Rebel fleet at minimum. She was expecting to see the Federation in flames, its worlds laid bare beneath burning, toxic atmospheres and its ships reduced to sparks and fragments.

She knew it was unreasonable, but she was half expecting there to be a black hole right there at the other end of the beacon, conjured by some new experimental devilry of the Rebels, and that their engines would squeal with futile effort as they fell into the singularity and perished. It would end in seconds for them, but such gravity distorts time – to the rest of the universe, it would look like they were falling at a snail's pace, slower and slower as they got closer and the gravity got more intense. Their death would take eons to any observer, an eternal monument to the Federation's failure.

Experience had given her quite an imagination when thinking of all the worst ways a situation could go.

"Hit it, Toh!" she shouted, and her pilot activated the stealth drive. 8 was locking on with the comm beams to every Federation craft in range, and she was ordering the weapons to charge, not to win whatever battle might await them but just to buy time to…

She had to carefully study the readouts to believe what she was seeing. A fearful voice in her gut insisted this couldn't be real, was desperately searching for some proof that this wasn't real.

"We're being hailed," Toh said. "They're asking for identification."

"Congratulations," said the Flagship into her ear. "Enjoy this moment."

It couldn't be real.

"On screen, Toh," she said.

A screen flashed on ahead of her. An engi, Federation insignia and bars of rank etched into its chassis, appeared before her, its face an urgent orange.

"Federation craft, identify yourself."

"Savor it," said the Flagship. "It will be brief."

"Who is in command?"

She kept looking for the flaw in this illusion, for any sign that would give away the awful reality that that this was all a trick, all one cruel stratagem of the Flagship to bamboozle them at the last moment. But no.

They were Federation ships. Dozens of them, holding tight in formation, weapons charged and ready, all hailing them with authentication keys that checked out and many of them with non-human comms officers. There were damaged vessels and wrecks, some Fed and some Rebel, but nothing functional except for Federation craft.

"8?" she asked.

"Broadcast intel to thirty-one craft. Some have already transmit to nearby base," 8 said. "We've done it. Word is out."

Brant manipulated the holograms in front of her, bringing up a bright red Federation starburst with several coded bars – the IDs of her predecessors, strong together with official code to show the succession of command. The screen indicated that the ID was transmitting.

She stood. Other screens appeared with other faces – pasty-faced young humans and seasoned old veterans, alarmed engi and incredulous zoltan, two rocks boring into her with their burning red eyes. She faced them all.

"This is Captain Charlotte Brant of the Kestrel-I, acting under the authority of Captain Damion Andrews and Admiral Teramel-Ur-Curda.

"We have news."