He looked at me, hands clasped in front of him, thumbs fidgeting. I let the moment breathe. Let the crew see what it looked like when a Knight admitted fault. Let them understand that this wasn't just about words, it was about what came after them.
A minute passed.
Then another.
No one moved. No one spoke. The silence was its own statement.
"Thank you, Torvyn." I turned to the viewscreen. "Okay. Any thoughts on our first target?"
The shift was immediate. Vaelix's shoulders dropped half an inch; tension I hadn't realized he'd been carrying. Lyrin's hand moved to his chest, fingers pressed briefly over his heart before falling away. Even Kaedren's jaw unclenched, just slightly.
They'd needed to see this. They needed to hear an apology, and to witness accountability.
The bridge felt different now. Lighter.
"There are three service colonies nearby that provide resources to the corporations. Colony Alpha-16, Colony Zeta-3, and Colony Sigma-9," Vaelix said as he pulled all three planets up on the viewscreen.
Kaedren leaned forward, studying them. "Zeta-3 is too close to a shipping lane. If the guards send out a distress call, a corporate frigate could respond through slipspace in less than thirty minutes."
"That might not be the best option, then. What do you think, Kira?" Torvyn asked.
He'd asked my opinion in front of the crew, not as courtesy, but as acceptance.
The weight of that hit me harder than I expected.
I nodded. "What about the other two?"
"Alpha-16 has a smaller population than the other two," Lyrin said.
"What are their specialties?" I asked.
"Looks like mainly sanitation services and some redundant maintenance operations," Vaelix said.
"I don't think that will make enough noise, at least not right now. Let's keep it on the list for future consideration. What do you think, Torvyn?"
"I agree. What about Sigma-9?"
Vaelix looked up at us. "It's an intimate services colony."
My stomach dropped. Forced companionship. Coerced touch. Women, and sometimes men, trapped in contracts they couldn't refuse, serving executives who treated consent like a luxury item they could buy. I'd never been assigned to one of those colonies, but I'd known women who had. Some of them never came back the same.
"That would make noise," Kaedren said quietly.
"Too much noise, Torvyn?" I asked, though I already knew my answer.
He walked closer to the viewscreen. The planet rotated slowly in the projection; small, densely populated, its surface mottled with the gray sprawl of detention infrastructure. Numbers scrolled beside it:population density, slipstream proximity, estimated guard response times.
The bridge hummed quietly around us. Recycled air whispered through the vents, carrying the faint metallic scent that permeated every ship corridor. Somewhere below, the Starbreaker's engines maintained their constant low vibration, a presence you only noticed when you stopped to listen. The tactical console cast soft blue light across Torvyn's face as he studied the data, shadows shifting across his features with each data scroll.
I watched him think. Watched him weigh lives against logistics, safety against strategy. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. A muscle worked in his temple. This was the part of command I was still learning. The calculations that kept you awake at night. The choices that followed you into sleep.
Torvyn studied it in silence.
"It has two large detention camps. We'll only be able to free one," he said.
"Even with an additional storage bay converted to a med bay?" I asked.
Torvyn shook his head. "Space isn't the issue. It's the shuttles. We'll have enough time and capacity for one camp. The second camp is located on the opposite side of the planet. It'll take too long to rescue both."
