Chương 243: 96. Tactical Officer 1

Captain Tobita's "Let's fill the rest of the seats" came out sounding like a man about to lower ingredients into a hotpot. The problem was, we weren't ingredients. We were the unlucky students about to get dropped into a bridge simulation, waiting to see which piece boiled apart first.

"Next." Tobita reached back into the box and rapped his knuckles against the rim — that same ominous rustle answering him.

"Who's got Helm?" Roy glanced down at his slip and raised his hand.

"Me."

"Good. Helmsman." Tobita nodded, the way you'd nod at a market stall over a reasonably shaped radish.

"On a ship like the Yukikaze, the helm doesn't need to look cool. It needs to hold. You don't flinch when an enemy ship's bearing down on your face. You don't get clever when I call for a turn. And you don't turn the ship into a circus act just because D's screaming next to you." D's hand shot up on instinct.

"Why am I always the negative example?"

"Because you're representative," Tobita said, without blinking. The whole bridge laughed. Roy just nodded, very seriously, folded the slip that said Helm and tucked it into his pocket — wearing the exact expression of someone who'd been drafted into hallway-monitor duty and had already decided to take it seriously anyway. Tobita drew the next one.

"Comms Officer." Lan looked at her slip, made a small "Mm," and didn't even bother raising her hand — just turned the paper outward for everyone to see. Tobita looked at her and actually produced an expression of genuine approval.

"Good. The most important thing for a comms officer isn't a sweet voice or perfect diction. It's fewer words, more accuracy, faster delivery. Combat-band comms aren't for expressing your feelings. Anyone who adds drama to the channel gets kicked straight into mute." Jess, beside me, made a very audible click of her tongue. Tobita's head turned instantly.

"Something to say, Jess?"

"Nothing." She smiled, all innocence.

"I'm just holding a moment of silence for the future of our comms channel."

"Then hold one for your own future while you're at it," Tobita said. I was starting to suspect he was in an unusually good mood today. Every line out of his mouth landed like one more shovelful of dirt on top of somebody's head.

"Tactical Operator." Jess looked down, then held her slip up in front of my face. The same three letters. Tac. Her mouth curled. She tilted her head toward me.

"Well, well, Shimo." The smile carried zero good intentions.

"Same department." I had the immediate sensation of having just clawed my way up from a cliff edge, only to be informed I'd be sharing a parachute with a monkey on the way down. Tobita, apparently blind to the despair on my face, cheerfully piled on.

"The Tactical Operator is the Tactical Officer's hands, eyes, and mouth — and the mouth part, you've clearly never had a shortage of." He looked at Jess.

"Data reporting needs to be fast. Fire-control corrections need to be accurate. If the Tactical Officer's about to collapse at her console, your job is to shake her back awake — not provide color commentary from the sidelines."

"I'll do my best," Jess said. That "best" carried absolutely no credibility whatsoever.

"Technical Officer." Aida unfolded her slip with a steadiness that suggested she'd always half-expected to end up in some position built specifically for cleaning up other people's disasters. Tobita saw it and nodded immediately.

"Right. The Technical Officer isn't necessarily the one who's best at fixing things. She's the one who knows exactly what absolutely cannot break right now. When the alarm goes off, everyone else is allowed to panic. You're not. Everyone else can scream. You only get to report how many seconds are left before something detonates." Aida answered, calm as ever.

"Understood." Good. Put someone like that in the Technical seat, and at minimum, when something does blow, she'll report the coordinates first — not scream first. Then: CIC. As Tobita pulled the remaining slips out one by one, the air on the bridge picked up a very specific flavor of chaotic amusement.

Because the four people assigned to the Combat Information Center happened to be exactly the kind of individuals who each carried their own particular issue on their own — and looked considerably more combustible stacked together in the same room. Evelyn. Akari. D. Harvey. I looked at that lineup, and my first thought wasn't we're covered. It was the Yukikaze's CIC is going to be extremely loud today.

Tobita, meanwhile, looked thoroughly pleased with the outcome — he even clapped once, like a producer watching his planned casting land exactly where he wanted it. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Good. CIC isn't a place where you sit and stare at screens. It's where every scrap of fragmented intel gets assembled into something usable in the shortest time possible. Who sees what first, who reports first, who integrates it, who sets priority order — miss one step, and people die." He looked at D first.

"Especially you. CIC is not a horse-race commentary booth."

"I'm not that bad," D said, wearing the face of a man deeply wronged. Tobita's eyes moved to Harvey.

"And you — drop the everyone be quiet, I'll just do the math myself routine. CIC is not your private research lab." Harvey adjusted his glasses and nodded, perfectly composed.

"Understood." Then he looked at Evelyn and Akari.

"As for you two — disagree all you want. But neither of you gets to play God during the simulation." Akari's eyebrow twitched. Evelyn just narrowed her eyes, slightly. I could already picture it: alarms screaming, data scrolling everywhere, D running his mouth, Harvey calculating in silence, Akari and Evelyn colliding over whose version of "correct" wins. The good news: extremely realistic battlefield energy. The bad news: possibly too realistic. Last slip.

Tobita looked down at the paper in his hand and, for once, didn't say anything right away. The bridge went quiet for a beat. Then he looked up.

"Executive Officer." Maki glanced at her slip and raised it, expressionless. I wasn't surprised in the slightest. If anything, if that seat had gone to anyone else, I'd have started wondering whether the real Tobita had been swapped out overnight. Tobita looked at her, and the corner of his mouth curved — not the game-show grin he'd been using on the rest of us, but something quieter. More direct.

"The Executive Officer's job isn't to look good, or to stand next to the Captain and nod." His voice stayed level.

"It's to know, before anyone else does, exactly which part of the ship is not allowed to fall apart — while everyone else is convinced their own job is the most important one." Maki nodded.

"Understood."

"When the Captain gives the right order, you're the one who gets the whole ship moving. When the Captain gives the wrong one—" Tobita paused there. Everyone on the bridge was watching him. He finished it, flat.

"—you're the one who figures out how to stop him from flying the ship straight into the grave." Ash, still wearing that borrowed officer's cap, turned his head slowly to look at Maki, then back at Tobita — wearing the exact expression of a man who'd just been formally notified he'd be under executive supervision for the foreseeable future. D laughed from the back, with zero conscience.

"That's a lot of pressure on you, Captain." Ash was quiet for two seconds, then answered, honestly.

"... I can feel that." Tobita clapped his hands together, satisfied.

"Good. Seats filled." I'd assumed that was more or less it. Everyone drawn, everyone branded with a position, Tobita would drop a few lines of doctrine, and we'd move into the practical. I was hopelessly naive. My own fault. Because Tobita — a man who'd made the entire seating draw look like a game show — had shifted the air on the bridge the second the last position was filled. Not a metaphor. It actually changed.

The bridge, half a minute ago still humming with jokes, tightened all at once into something else — the cut from pre-class messing around straight into stop pretending you're not paying attention. He stopped shaking the box. Stopped delivering one-liners. He just put his hands behind his back and looked at us the way an actual captain looks at a freshly assembled crew.

"The draw only decided where you're standing today. It doesn't mean I actually staffed this ship by luck." His voice never rose.

"I didn't feel like running personality assessments on all of you individually — but I'm not lazy enough to hand the helm to someone who can't hold steady, comms to someone who talks too much, or the XO seat to a vase that's only good for standing there looking pretty." Jess's hand went up immediately.

"Was that last part aimed at anyone specific?"

"If you recognized yourself in it, congratulations — you're still salvageable," Tobita said. Jess made a sound through her teeth, but didn't push back. Which meant she knew, same as the rest of us: from this point on, the class was real. He didn't drop us all into the sim seats at once. He walked us through, station by station, like disassembling a machine to show exactly how each piece fails. Not lecturing. Not reading from a manual.

Tying the person at each station to the specific way that station gets people killed. He brought Roy to the helm, made him put his hands on the controls, and told him the Yukikaze turns fast and accelerates hard — but not every fast move saves lives. Sometimes moving too fast wrecks the entire fire-control solution. The helmsman isn't there to show off. She's there to find the angles that let the guns and the armor do their jobs.

He brought Lan to the comms station, pulled up a mess of simulated channels, and gave her twenty seconds to sort priority — friendly traffic, internal comms, damage control, fire control, wide-area external — then said, flat: a comms officer who says one wrong thing might not kill anyone directly, but it will almost always get someone who didn't need to die, dead. When Jess stepped up to the station beside mine, she looked, unusually, like she was actually paying attention. Tobita didn't talk to her about buttons.

He talked about timing — when speaking up helps, when shutting up is worth more than a data point, what it means to turn fire-control corrections into a second nerve running through the Tactical Officer's head. Jess listened. She didn't start anything. I was almost moved. Right up until Tobita turned to switch the projection, and she leaned in and murmured:"Don't worry. I'll assist you very properly, Tactical Officer." I fired back immediately.

"You'd better assist me. Not assassinate me." Aida's side of the room was a different flavor of hell. Tobita dumped three fault-tree simulations on her console at once and made her triage a wall of alarms — decide which ones were actually going to explode, and which just looked like they would. Her face stayed level the entire time. Still as deep water. Having someone like that in the Technical seat genuinely makes it easier to breathe.

As for the CIC cluster — or rather, that entire group — Tobita ran them through what amounted to a live group stress test. D got two lines of banter out before getting cut off. Harvey started quietly organizing his own report and got told to say his thought process out loud instead. Evelyn and Akari needed exactly three minutes to start disagreeing on priority order.

Tobita stood there like a ruthless gardener, cramming a handful of wildly mismatched plants into the same pot, and said, cold and even:"You don't have to like each other. You just have to say what needs saying one second before the enemy does." With Maki, his briefing was the shortest of all. Because some things don't need many words.

He just stood by the XO's station, looked at her, and said:"When every single person on this ship believes they're doing the most important job right now — the Executive Officer is the one who has to know which job actually is." Maki nodded.

"Understood." That was it. Short. And just standing nearby listening, I could still feel the weight of that seat settle into the room. By the time Tobita finally turned to face me, I had exactly one thought left, and it was a very bad one. Right on cue.

"Hoshino Shimo." He said my name with a tone unusually mild, even for him. That particular mildness, coming from Tobita, was never a sign of spring. It was the last glass of water before an execution.

"For this simulation, you're the Tactical Officer."

"... Yes, sir." I wanted the answer to come out with more backbone. It didn't. Because the second the words Tactical Officer got attached to my name, I could already feel my shoulders getting heavier. Tobita stepped up to the weapons projection panel and swept one hand across it. The entire side wall of the bridge lit up in row after row of armament listings. I felt an immediate, deeply unpleasant sense of recognition.

Whatever this screen was, it looked exactly like the physical manifestation of the nightmare you have the night before finals.

"A good Tactical Officer," Tobita said, "knows her ship's weapons the way she knows her own hands. Not roughly knows. Not has seen the name before. Not finds the manual once the shooting starts." He tapped through the projection. Weapon modules, firing arcs, load specs, linkage restrictions, cooldown windows — all of it cascaded up onto the wall.

"You should be able to recite it backwards in your sleep." He looked at me.

"And you should know exactly which blade to draw for which fight." I stared at the wall of names and felt my soul making a serious attempt to escape through my sinuses. Beside me, Jess made a very pleased little sound.

"Wow." I didn't even need to look at her to know she was smiling like she'd just been personally invited to a festival.

"No rush, Hoshino." Tobita actually smiled — and that smile made the back of my neck go cold.

"We've got the whole day to get through all of this."... That wasn't reassurance. That was a death sentence.