Chương 264: 108. First Sortie 3

"Commence departure sequence." Tobita's voice fell from the front, level, as if this were just another line item in a routine shift.

"All stations, report." The responses came back almost instantly.

"Comms nominal." Lan spoke first, her voice cold enough to have been pulled straight out of ice.

"Three-way link established — port tower, inner-ring guidance, military departure routing. Backup channels standing by."

"Radar active. Close-range sweep nominal. Returns outside the port running cluttered." Akari reported without looking away from her screen, still carrying the tone of someone who'd been owed eight years of sleep and had long since stopped expecting repayment.

"Noise index from the Corridor keeps climbing. These numbers are ugly." Ugly. Good. I appreciated that style of technical report. Short, direct, and thoroughly saturated with personal resentment toward reality.

"Engine output stable. Attitude control rings functioning normally." Aida's voice followed.

"In-port low-speed mode engaged. Main thrusters pre-warmed. Science analysis module syncing with interference-zone data."

"CIC data link confirmed."

"Weapons systems on standby."

"All hatches locked." One voice, then another, then another. Each response landed on the bridge like a metal latch clicking into place. None of them loud, but each one locking another joint of the Yukikaze's frame tight. It was only then that I truly understood what people meant when they said a ship isn't made of steel — it's made of stations, orders, and acknowledgments, hammered together until they hold. If one link in that chain slipped, everyone else went down with it.

And right now, Roy's hands were resting on the one link that absolutely could not slip. I looked forward, toward the helm. Roy was sitting very straight. Not a naturally composed straight. The kind that happens when someone's strung so tight they unconsciously turn themselves into a plank of wood, as if regulation-perfect posture might buy reality a few extra seconds before it comes looking for you.

The main navigation display in front of him had fully expanded — the port's 3D lane chart, hull attitude corrections, guidance buoys, tiered safety boundaries, all stacked on top of each other, dense enough to look like someone had compressed an entire geometric hell into a single pane of glass. Roy's right hand gripped the main control stick. His left hovered over the trim dial. The fingers under his gloves were steady — steady in a way that was almost too deliberate. I knew that feeling.

It's like an examiner standing behind you while you write, and the harder you try to get the strokes right, the stiffer they get. Roy was that pen right now. And what he had to write wasn't his own name. It was the Yukikaze. Maki stood at the XO's station, not far from him. She didn't crowd him. Didn't say much. She just added, flat, exactly as the guidance handoff approached:"Don't rush it. Follow port guidance first. Take over yourself after buoy three." Just one sentence.

The tension across Roy's shoulders — nearly visible to the naked eye — actually eased by half an inch. The sight was irritating. Not because it looked bad. Exactly the opposite — it was irritating precisely because it worked. Maki was the kind of person who rationed words like a strategic resource, and yet every single time she opened her mouth, it landed exactly on the point that mattered most. That kind of precision is far more dangerous than sweet talk, because it isn't built to make you blush.

It's built to make your pulse skip. And Roy, clearly, was susceptible to it.

"U-understood." He answered low, took a breath, and looked back at the guidance line ahead. The Yukikaze began releasing from her berth. Not a sudden whoosh. Something far more restrained, far more expensive-feeling. A faint low-frequency vibration rolled through the hull first, like some massive creature shifting its weight back onto its limbs before rising.

Then the external clamps released in sequence, the port's traction field engaged, and the entire ship was slowly drawn out of its mooring position with almost no excess sway at all. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"One meter clear of berth." Roy's voice came from the front, steadier than before.

"Attitude holding."

"Three meters clear." His left hand slid the trim dial through an almost imperceptibly small angle, and the Yukikaze's bow corrected to match. The scale of that adjustment was small enough to be uncomfortable to watch — a reminder that a ship this size isn't flown with big gestures. It survives on a thousand tiny corrections that aren't allowed to be wrong.

I watched the hull-attitude parameters ticking along the edge of my tactical display and suddenly, viscerally understood why Roy's face had looked so close to tears earlier. Fly a ship like this badly, and you don't just get yelled at. You become the cover photo on the port's historical incident archive.

"Departure lane clear," Lan reported.

"Military priority routing confirmed. Tower requests we switch to autonomous navigation at Outer Ring Track Five."

"Approved," Tobita said.

"Roy — once we're clear, don't rush the speed. Let the hull finish the turn first."

"Yes, sir." Roy's answer came a little cleaner this time. The port gate ahead of the Yukikaze opened slowly. The space beyond didn't rush in all at once — it widened inch by inch, like an extremely deep, extremely cold, entirely expressionless black seam. Port lighting slid across the outer hull near the bow, then gradually gave way to starlight further out. The view was, genuinely, beautiful — beautiful in a way that had absolutely no business belonging to a situation like this.

That's simply how the universe works. Even when things are about to go wrong, it still dresses itself up like a high-end postcard.

"Bow clear of port."

"Midship clear."

"Starboard clearance to safety boundary — seventy."

"Sixty-five."

"Sixty." Roy watched the distance markers, his throat bobbing once. The main stick came left by the smallest possible fraction. The Yukikaze's hull responded as if it had understood him, rotating slowly along the guidance line. That wasn't impressive. That was precise — precise enough that adding even one unnecessary word would have felt like stealing from the concentration he currently had in his hands.

I had to admit — once Roy actually had his hands on the ship, he settled into it like he'd finally been slotted back into the right place. Everyday Roy carried a faint aura of I'm trying to be a decent person, and the universe keeps making it difficult. Roy at the helm looked like someone who'd finally been pressed into a frame that left no room for overthinking. The nerves were still there. The sweat was probably still there too. But he'd pushed all of it down into the procedure itself. That was good.

A warship doesn't need heroic calm. It needs someone whose hands do the right thing even while the rest of him is scared out of his mind. Maki had evidently caught the same thing. She didn't add anything else. She just waited until Roy completed the first leg of the turn, then said, flat:"Good. Hold that." Two words, and the tips of Roy's ears went visibly red.... I found myself quietly mourning for him.

Because getting a "good" out of someone like Maki, delivered in a purely operational tone, carries almost as much damage as being told to your face that you're impressive. The only difference is that this version is less dignified — you're not even allowed to admit you'd been encouraged by it.

"Tactical station — project outer airspace once we clear the port." Tobita's voice pulled my attention back.

"Copy." I dropped the spectator mindset and turned the main tactical display into a layered map of the Corridor's outer-ring lanes and the approach to the Parker system. I'd assumed I was mentally prepared for this — we'd sat through the briefing, we'd seen the Imperial footage. However bad it turned out to be, there was supposed to be some kind of ceiling. Then I stacked the live data layers in, and my stomach clenched on its own.

"... Hey." Not trying to be unprofessional. This thing genuinely didn't make sense. The interference zone was far larger than projected. Not a little larger — the kind of larger that makes you want to ask whether the briefing had simply missed an entire sector of space. The high-interference area marked on the earlier chart had looked like a muddy smear. Now, with real-time data laid over it, it wasn't a smear at all.

It was a massive, spreading bruise, bleeding inward from the outer edge of the Corridor toward the shipping lanes. The signal-degradation curve looked ugly as sin. The nav-buoy returns stuttered like something gasping for air. Worse, the interference wasn't simply strong — it had layers. The outer band moved like turbulence. The mid-layer pulsed.

And deep inside, several stretches had gone unnaturally silent, as if that patch of space hadn't been obscured at all, but wiped clean away by someone dragging a thumb across it. I zoomed in and ran the filter again. It got worse.

"Akari," I said, unable to help myself.

"Did you run a second noise-scrub pass on the raw returns?"

"Did." Akari never looked away from her screen.

"Still looks like this after. So it's not the sensors that are ugly. The other side really is just ugly." Zero technical elegance in that phrasing. Completely effective anyway. I ground my back teeth and stacked the tactical layers fast — probable Imperial approach vectors, the last known position of the lost patrol craft, the Parker system's outer trade lanes, the Federal picket line. One after another, they surfaced. The more I looked, the worse it felt. Because this didn't look like a single point of failure.

It looked more like— Someone had turned the lights off first. And only then walked in.

"Bow fully clear of port," Roy reported from ahead.

"Requesting handoff to autonomous navigation. Preparing to enter Outer Ring Track Five."

"Approved," Tobita said. Roy set his hand on the mode-transfer switch. The movement was steady. Under his helm, the Yukikaze slid past the port's final guidance grating in silence, like a long blade finally clearing its sheath.

The starfield opened up ahead all at once — against the deep black backdrop, the lane beacons formed a cold, precise line, and further out, in the direction of the Parker system, the signal net that should have been orderly and intact now looked like a sheet of paper that had been set on fire and then left out in the rain. I stared at the tactical display, fingertip resting on the zoom key, and felt a very bad kind of quiet settle in. Not the quiet of the bridge. The quiet inside the data.

Some regions were chaotic. Others were chaotic in a way that was too neat. That kind of neatness didn't carry the signature of a natural phenomenon. It felt more like a blank space someone had left on purpose — the kind you leave open so something can slip through without being caught on a first glance. I took a slow breath.... This was worse than briefed. And the worst part probably wasn't how many hulls the Empire has out there. It might be — What we were looking at right now still might not be the whole picture.