Chương 209: 80. Too Close for Two 1

By the time the watch actually ended, I couldn't tell anymore whether I was genuinely awake, or whether something called duty had simply nailed my soul to my body and wasn't planning to let go. The black outside the Yukikaze's bridge wasn't the bottomless kind from the middle of the night anymore. Beyond the forward observation window, the distant starlight was still there, but further out, the navigational backdrop had taken on the faintest wash of grey.

Not sunrise — space doesn't hand out anything that convenient. It was just the ship's internal clock and its visual route-correction system working together to manufacture a sense of early morning. The main display was still lit, the cold white work lights on the bridge hadn't changed, but the whole place had somehow picked up the distinct scent of a night shift about to end. It smelled like death. The night-watch officer's version of it.

I filled in the last entry of the watch log, let go of the stylus, and very nearly ascended right along with it. Maki stood beside me, running through the final numbers before handover one more time. She still looked steady — at least on the surface. Hair unruffled, uniform still crisp. Only the faint shadow under her eyes proved she wasn't some living extension of the Yukikaze's night-navigation system, but a human being who got tired just like I did.

"Last entry," she said.

"I know..." I pressed my forehead briefly against the edge of the logboard.

"Give me three seconds to mourn my own soul."

"If your soul's that fragile, you shouldn't have sat in the captain's chair last night."

"That was a spiritual achievement. You can't lump it in with manual labor." Maki didn't even look at me. She just nudged the handover summary a little closer to my side.

"Write it clearly. Let's not have the next shift thinking two drunks ran the bridge last night." Brutal. But fair. I took a breath and neatly filled in the final time, heading, and handover notes. The instant I finished the last letter, the bridge doors slid open. Aida's group had come to relieve us. Aida walked in front, Evelyn beside her, Jess and Ash trailing behind. My first thought wasn't thank god, relief's here. It was — Wow.

Humans at 0630 really can radiate exhaustion, bloodlust, and morning rage all at the same time. Especially Jess. Her face had bypassed its usual "ready to tear someone apart" setting entirely and landed somewhere stranger — sleep-deprived to the point of looking almost ethereal, laced with pure resentment at having been dragged out of bed for handover. Her hair was technically tied back, but with visibly zero effort. She looked like a bomb that had been hauled onto the battlefield before it finished booting up.

I looked at her and something in my brain just short-circuited.

"Wait, fuck," I blurted.

"Aren't I supposed to be on rotation with Jess and Mr. Permafrown?" Mr. Permafrown, of course, being Ash. Not my fault. The man walks around with an expression that always looks like he's personally carrying three overdue reports, two liability forms, and a generational grudge. He's not even that much older than the rest of us, but he's got the specific energy of someone who long ago decided the universe was never going to learn to run itself by the book. Ash had been looking down at the handover checklist.

At my line, he glanced up. Zero temperature in that look. Perfect. The man himself was fully cooperating with the nickname's vibe. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Maki answered before I could.

"Jess and I worked it out." She handed the logboard to Aida without breaking stride.

"Rotating coverage. More efficient."

"Ah. Right." I nodded, tone perfectly level, while a completely unnecessary conclusion surfaced somewhere in the back of my head. So I'm basically the cheap giveaway, then? Buy one Maki Kushima night watch, get one Hoshino Shimo, no extra charge. Warranty included. Jess had been running on half-power up to that point. This woke her up another notch.

"Wait." She frowned at me, then at Maki.

"So you two really spent the entire night on the bridge?"

"What else?" I dropped the manual — heavy enough to knock someone out — onto the console.

"Did you think I came up here for a midnight picnic?" Jess narrowed her eyes. The look she gave me immediately picked up an unhealthy level of interest. Evelyn stood nearby, smiling. Too gently. That kind of gentle usually meant trouble.

"Junior Hoshino," she said, drawing it out, "you've got the exact look of someone who just barely made it back from somewhere extraordinary."

"Not 'look like,'" I corrected her, completely honestly.

"I did." Aida took the handover files, scanned them quickly, then checked the closing markers on the main display and the contact-anomaly entry from the small hours. Her brow twitched, just slightly.

"You ran into something?" Maki nodded.

"Civilian transport module malfunction. Detached external container. Misidentification risk was low, but its trajectory clipped the outer edge of the convoy. Flagged yellow-2, later confirmed the source." Aida's gaze shifted to me.

"You didn't pass out?"

"... Senior, is your confidence in me legally allowed to be this low?"

"It's not about confidence," Aida said, level as ever.

"You genuinely look like you're about to." I opened my mouth to argue, but Evelyn was already laughing, and even Jess snorted with her arms crossed. Apparently the entire relief team stood in complete agreement on this one point. At the back, Lieutenant Manny and Captain Tobita were wrapping up their verbal handover. Captain Tobita glanced our way, and — with what I can only call a functioning conscience — added one extra line:"Those two did well last night."

The second that landed, the low-grade gossip glint in Jess's eyes upgraded instantly to oh, now this is interesting. Shame D wasn't here. He'd have treated that sentence like something worth framing for the archives. Captain Tobita and Lieutenant Manny finished up and went off to catch some sleep. Aida took over the bridge watch. Evelyn and Ash started running through the new set of logs.

Jess kept muttering complaints about being dragged up here at this hour, but her feet had already carried her to the secondary console to read through the summary — clearly the type who gripes the whole time and still gets the job done. As for Maki and me — we were finally, officially, cleared to get out. The moment I stepped off the bridge, something unclenched in the soles of my feet. The doors slid shut, sealing away that cold, thin, sharp bridge air, and only then did I understand how tired I actually was.

Not just sleepy — a fractured kind of exhaustion, where the brain's still running but the body just wants to lie down on the nearest flat surface and die. Maki and I walked side by side down the short corridor. Neither of us spoke first. Because we were probably in the exact same state — one stray sentence away from whatever was left holding us upright simply giving out. Past the second corner, I finally said, quietly, "So a watch really can go that far." Maki walked beside me, steady as ever.

"Did you think night watch was for stargazing?"

"At this point, if I looked at stars, I'd just see glowing data points."

"Congratulations. You're developing bridge lag."

"That did not sound like comfort."

"It wasn't comfort. It was a diagnosis." Great. Even coming off the bridge at dawn, she still talked like built-in firmware. The strange part was, I didn't really want to argue with her anymore. Or rather — the energy was still there, technically, but the urge to snap straight back had been smothered by something quieter: a specific kind of exhaustion, and something uncomfortably close to familiarity.

Like something between us had been quietly nudged out of its old position — the watch, the contact signal, that quiet conversation in the dark corner of the bridge. Not by much. But enough that walking next to her now, even my breathing felt different. By the time we reached the residential deck, the Yukikaze's "day two" had clearly begun. The main corridor lights had stepped up a notch. Further down you could hear boots, the rattle of carts, and clipped status calls from some section or other.

The ventilation's baseline hum sounded different than it had at night — like the whole ship was shifting out of half-sleep and into full operation. Now and then an NCO hurried past clutching a databoard, and a few student trainees had already been roped into morning duty, wearing the honest expression of someone who'd boarded yesterday and already wanted to retire. I was about to say something philosophical about the cruelty of existence when Maki beat me to it.

"We're not on watch tonight." I turned to look at her.

"Seriously?"

"Yes."

"... That sentence just hit harder than the idea of meat at breakfast." She glanced at me.

"Low standards."

"Survive one full night on bridge watch and a person's happiness threshold auto-adjusts downward." Maki didn't say anything else. She just kept walking toward the eight-person berth. Walking beside her, I understood something very clearly. The person stepping off that bridge wasn't the same one who'd boarded yesterday, the one who still got baited into eye-rolling contests with Jess in the dorm. I mean — I'd still roll my eyes at her. That wasn't going anywhere.

But now I knew what the Yukikaze's bridge looked like in the dead of night. What a real watch felt like. What it did to you when a contact signal came in and the job just took over. And what Maki looked like, standing in the middle of all of it. All of it was still warm, like the watch hadn't fully ended and had simply followed me down the ladder.