Chương 267: 110. Absolute Limit 1

Under Roy's helm, the Yukikaze surged forward. The whole ship moved like a blade just pulled from a body — no time to wipe the blood off, drive flare stretched long behind it, boring straight through the gap in the Imperial formation. Not a clean, elegant exit. The ugly, effective kind of bore. Ahead lay the chaos we'd just bitten open ourselves. Behind us, the Imperial cruisers had finally caught up with what had happened and were coming back to collect interest.

The relative-track overlay on the tactical display looked like someone had scattered a handful of red-hot nails across the star map — every line saying the same thing: run, now, immediately, or stay and pay for it with the whole ship. Tobita's face hadn't moved.

That face I was increasingly convinced the Federal military should classify as restricted equipment — cold on a normal day, colder when things went wrong, and carrying a faint, unsettling glow whenever the situation rotted into something interesting enough to be worth his attention. He picked up the captain's internal line with the efficiency of a man calling in a dinner order, not a call to his Chief Engineer.

Less than two seconds later, Victor's broad, bearded face filled the screen — a presence that took up space the way a load-bearing wall does.

"Victor," Tobita asked, and nothing else.

"Kamikaze — damage status. Operational?" Victor didn't waste a syllable.

"Yes." The line went dead.... Good. That was Yukikaze work culture in its purest form. Other ships might run through current status as follows, risk assessment as follows, recommendation as follows. Not this one. This one asked: can it work? Got: yes. Then everyone went and gambled their lives on it together. Tobita set the handset down without a pause and issued the next order straight to Roy.

"Ensign Hartmann. Hold current speed — two minutes. Prepare for short-range jump." The instant those words landed, the first thing that surfaced in my head wasn't relief. It was a considerably more stomach-turning feeling. Not a full FTL run. A short-range jump. Which meant Tobita wasn't just trying to run. He was trying to reposition — and flip the board again from somewhere else.

I hadn't even finished formulating you're not seriously thinking about going back in before Tobita, apparently running some kind of dedicated radar for subordinate skepticism, gave a short laugh without fully turning his head.

"There you go again, Lieutenant." Thin. Brief. Extremely punchable.

"If we just run now — what do you think an Imperial fleet with a grudge is going to do to Parker-6? I don't need to spell it out." I shut my mouth.... Fine. That was an infuriating thing to say, because it was right. Turning our bow and running clean through the gap we'd just torn in their rear formation was perfectly defensible from a we survive standpoint. The problem was that the four Imperial cruisers still capable of pursuit weren't kindergarteners who'd go home crying because someone took their candy.

They were Imperial forces who'd just had a knife driven hard into their spine by the Yukikaze, angry enough now to turn an entire sector inside out looking for the culprit. And the nearest, softest, most available target for that anger was Parker-6. I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Understanding your CO's logic at a time like this is a genuine buzzkill.

"Executive Officer. Jump alert."

"Copy." Maki reached for the wall handset without hesitation, hitting the alert switch with her other hand. A short, sharp electronic tone cut through the ship — not as heavy as the earlier action-stations gong, but pointed and immediate in a way that did something unpleasant to the inside of your chest. Maki drew a breath. Her voice went out through the shipwide net, steady.

"All hands. Prepare for Singularity Jump." Still steady in a way that made you want to argue with the universe about it. Not the warm, reassuring kind of steady. The you can throw up after the jump, not during it kind. Having Maki deliver that alert was unreasonably effective precisely because it made no logical sense. As long as she could still use that tone of voice, it made you believe — against all available evidence — that at least someone on this ship knew what they were doing.

Tobita looked forward and added one more line.

"Roy!! Be very careful this time. The Type-6 can only run at twenty-five percent output." I followed that line to the sub-panel that had just opened on the side display — the controls governing the Type-6 Space-Time Quantum Fluctuation Warp Engine, Kamikaze. Then I stayed quiet for two seconds. Because that panel had three buttons on it. Large ones. Impressively primitive ones.

The kind that looked like they'd been pried off an industrial machine that refused to retire, dusted off, and bolted into a warship as a temporary fix that had somehow become permanent. They read, respectively: FULL HALF STOP... I suddenly felt a strong urge to draft Roy a eulogy in advance. Roy was clearly staring at those same three buttons, his entire face expressing the particular combination of shock and despair that comes from asking how exactly did the Federal military's technology tree grow like this.

He gripped the helm and forced out half a sentence.

"Captain... how do I get twenty-five percent?" Tobita answered with complete naturalness.

"Press HALF. Then STOP." I nearly choked on my own spit.... What era did this operating method come from??? This wasn't the jump controls for a warship. It sounded more like a repair tech giving you a folk remedy for a busted old fan: put it on medium, then kill the power fast. And the Federal Navy was taking this thing into live combat, expecting a young helmsman to feather it to exactly twenty-five percent under Imperial intercept fire — at that point it wasn't trust in your crew anymore.

It was throwing your crew at whatever deity happened to be on duty today and hoping for a good mood.

"Hoshino—" Akari's voice yanked me back from the commentary.

"Behind us. They're coming." I snapped the rear-pursuit feed to the main window. Four Imperial high-speed cruisers, like four provoked hunting dogs, were closing fast through the debris and the minefield's edge. Their formation wasn't as clean as before — clearly that first bite had hurt enough — but hurt didn't mean slow. The lead hull had already started pushing its bow main battery into pre-charge.

The intention was obvious: land one clean hit before we made the jump, preferably converting the Yukikaze into scrap right at the singularity's doorstep.

"Copy." Almost on reflex, I pulled the chaff and decoy-pod release interface wide open. Launch. A burst of strobing interference points scattered from the Yukikaze's stern — like someone shaking a net of crushed silver across vacuum. A second wave of decoy pods fired on offset vectors, seeding false heat blooms and fake propulsion waveforms into the mix. It wouldn't fool veterans outright. It would, hopefully, make their fire-control solutions sneeze twice in exactly the seconds that mattered.

"All bridge personnel — strap in." Tobita's voice dropped.

"Take us into the jump — Mr. Hartmann." I didn't even have time to comment on the sudden shift into stage-curtain phrasing before Roy gritted his teeth and hit the button. HALF, first. Then — STOP. Right in that absurd, definitely-not-in-any-regulation instant, an Imperial beam came screaming straight for the bridge.

"—!" Nobody had time to shout the whole word. The good news: the counter-beam charges I'd tossed out a moment earlier finally earned their keep. Several detonated aft of the Yukikaze, throwing up a dense layer of refraction and particle disturbance that bent the incoming beam off most of its original angle. The bad news — Bent is not the same as gone. The turbulence and high-energy interference the beam dragged through the refraction field hit the Yukikaze at the single worst possible moment.

The windows before and after a jump — and at FTL cut-in and cut-out — are when any ship is at its most vulnerable. That's not literary description. That's the boring, terrifying kind of vulnerable that can get a whole hull torn open like garbage if the universe catches it at the wrong second. The next instant, the Yukikaze jumped. Not a metaphor. The whole ship felt like it had been snatched by something invisible and flung violently in every direction at once.

Every fixed light, every screen, every alarm, the scream of metal through the frame — all of it twisted into one knot in the same instant. The harness slammed hard into my shoulders and ribs. I got yanked back into the seat, everything inside me thrown into a drum on maximum spin — and then, as if that wasn't quite enough, someone kicked the drum down a flight of stairs. Alarms detonated across every frequency. My vision was nothing but flashing red and white. Someone was calling out numbers. Someone was swearing.

Someone was probably fighting not to throw up. Someone had probably already lost that fight. I couldn't tell who was who. Because for one genuine moment, I was completely convinced I was already dead. Not the dignified kind, with a life-review montage. The kind where you think: oh — so it turns out I die to a three-button antique engine and a deflected beam. The thoroughly undignified kind. And then — Snap. Not a boom. Not an explosion.

A strange, light sound — like someone had flicked the entire world with one finger. The next second, the Yukikaze vanished completely from that sector of space.