Chương 206: 79. Abnormal Signal 1

Ladies and gentlemen, I am currently sitting in the captain's chair.

"Heh heh…" Honestly, this isn't my fault. The Yukikaze's bridge at night is genuinely too tempting. The full reinforced observation window ahead frames a star field so still it barely feels real. Rings of cool white and pale blue working light around each console carve the space into something high-end and clinical, like the inside of an expensive dream.

And at the center of it all, the captain's chair sits like the throne of that dream — a little higher, a little wider, positioned with an arrogance that says: sit here, and you're responsible for the whole ship. And I, Hoshino Shimo, was never going to let a moment this perfectly built for a brief lapse into adolescent delusions of grandeur pass me by.

So, with a complete disregard for my own survival instincts, I grabbed Captain Tobita's spare peaked cap from where it hung nearby, dropped it onto my head, dropped myself into the captain's chair, and stretched my legs out in front of me for good measure.... Yeah. There it is. At least thirty percent of the feeling.

Give me a tactical chart and a crew of people foolish enough to let me order them around, and I could probably improvise a whole scene called How the Supreme Commander of the Interstellar Fleet Saved Civilization Before Breakfast.

"Hoshino. Stop being an idiot and get over here." Maki stood at the nav console. She didn't even turn all the way, just tossed the line over her shoulder in a tone that said she'd stopped bothering to comment on my existence. I raised a hand immediately, in a completely unnecessary gesture of command.

"No, no. You're supposed to address me as — Grand Admiral Hoshino, Private Kushima." Maki finally turned to look at me. Her eyes were flat. Too flat. Flat like the sea right before a storm.

"I swear," she said, one word at a time, "if you keep this up, I will make you regret it for the rest of your life." Right. That wasn't a joke. I sensibly pulled the smirk back off my face, though I couldn't help muttering, "Honestly. Zero sense of humor." I hung the spare cap back on its hook and jumped down from the chair.

Maybe because I'd been sitting too pleased with myself, I misjudged the step down and lurched hard, nearly giving the bridge a live demonstration of Newly Appointed Grand Admiral Dies on Arrival. Maki's hand shot out and caught my wrist.

"... Thanks."

"You deserved that." She let go, voice flat.

"You can't even be an idiot without losing your footing."

"You are seriously not built for positive reinforcement."

"And you're not built to use the captain's chair as a toy." I was gearing up to fire back when a chime cut through the bridge — light, but sharp. Beep. Not a full alarm. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Not the kind of red-status sound that jolts the whole ship. The kind that lives in the bad middle ground between probably nothing and go look at this right now. Maki and I froze at the same instant.

A second later, a yellow contact box blinked onto the secondary radar display on the right. The air on the bridge pulled tight, all at once. Maki's expression changed in that same second. Not panic. Not aggression. She just went quieter, sharper — like the version of her that had been trading barbs with me a moment ago had been pulled back inside, replaced by the one I'd seen earlier during the watch handover.

"Back to your station," she said. Not a suggestion. An order. I moved on reflex — two steps back to the secondary console, log board and manual open before I'd consciously decided to. Maki was already at the main radar controls, fingers clean and fast, pulling the yellow contact up onto the main side screen.

"Right rear, thirty-five degrees. Distance, eight thousand six hundred." Her eyes stayed on the numbers, voice fast but every word clear.

"Relative velocity low. ID code blank." My stomach dropped. ID code blank. Meaning the system wasn't reading this as a friendly track.

"Could it be formation noise?" I asked, flipping through the manual.

"Don't know," Maki said.

"So don't guess yet." She ran another filter layer over the secondary radar. The yellow box flickered — and held. Sharper than before.... Not good. That wasn't what noise looked like. I snapped the handbook open to the anomalous-contact page, eyes running down it fast.

"Before three consecutive yellow pings, run three cross-checks—" I read aloud as I went.

"Formation comparison, route overlap analysis, visual confirmation against auxiliary sensor data."

"Do it," Maki said. I pulled up the fleet relative-position table and ran down the right-rear thirty-five-degree sector, line by line. Supply ships, transports, escorts — every registered track accounted for. The yellow marker's position matched none of them.

"Not on the formation table!" I called out.

"I know." Her voice stayed steady, but dropped a notch. Left hand hit the mode toggle; right hand had already synced the display to the optical assist window.

"Hoshino. Forward window, lower right. Look outside. Not just the screen." I was already moving, crossing to the auxiliary observation position, tracking the bearing she'd called into the star field. At first, nothing. Just layers of unsettlingly quiet starlight, and the fleet's distant running lights pinned like sparks in the black. Then I saw it. Not a ship. Not exactly.

Low and to the right, a faint, irregular reflection caught the light for a moment, then turned away and vanished — the way an uneven metal surface catches light when it's slowly tumbling. My spine prickled.

"Contact visual!" I spun back.

"Not an intact hull — looks like debris. No, a container. It's rotating." Maki pushed the optical zoom up a level the instant she heard it. The yellow contact on-screen resolved into a rough shape estimate. Elongated. Asymmetric. Attitude unstable. Near-zero propulsion signature. Her eyes narrowed a fraction.

"Doesn't read like an active approach."

"Drift object?" I asked.

"Maybe," she said.

"Don't relax yet." Right then, the internal report light blinked twice. Not main comms. A delayed fleet data-sync message. I dropped back into the secondary seat and pulled it open. Short. Rear-formation Transport Seventeen: external supply mount anomaly reported, under inspection. I stared at the line, and everything connected.

"Maki!"

"Go."

"Transport Seventeen just flagged an external mount anomaly!" I pointed at the screen.

"If something came loose—" She didn't wait for me to finish. She'd already pulled Transport Seventeen's relative position and overlaid a vector straight onto the yellow marker. The two lines converged on the side screen. Close. Very close. Her eyes went hard.

"Origin roughly matches." My pulse jumped.

"So it's a dropped supply pod?"

"Or an external container, a maintenance crate, a gear pack." Her pace ticked up.

"Doesn't matter what it is. What matters is it's tumbling near the fleet lane right now." I was already reading the next section of the manual.

"Unidentified drift object — classify size and threat level, then report to the watch officer—" I stopped mid-sentence.... Wait. We were the watch. More precisely: there was genuinely no one else on this bridge but the two of us. That particular reality suddenly got very concrete. I looked up at her.

"We need to call this in."

"Yes," Maki said.

"But get what we're saying clean first." That was what made her dangerous. She didn't just shout for help — she'd already started organizing the handoff before she'd even opened the line. She fired off orders.

"Hoshino. Log current time, bearing, distance, relative velocity. Add a note — suspected external drop from Transport Seventeen, attitude unstable, automatic beacon unconfirmed. I'm opening the bridge internal line."

"Got it!" Pen down, and my head cleared, faster than it had in the last ten minutes. Time. Bearing. Distance. Velocity. Basis for the call. Writing it out line by line, I realized I wasn't fully panicking. There was even, annoyingly, a sliver of something close to excitement — not the kind that wants something to go wrong, but the kind that says: so this is what night watch is actually for. The manual wasn't just there to scare us.

All those logs, all those cross-checks, all those entries that had felt like watching paint dry — they'd all been rehearsal for exactly this.