Chương 271: 112. Water Crisis 1

When I got back to the bridge, the first thing I saw was Jess sitting in the captain's chair — posture aggressively upright, hands placed with tremendous, almost comedic precision on the armrests, looking exactly like a grade-schooler who'd sneaked into the principal's seat and was doing her absolute best to look like she belonged there. The sight was more than a little absurd.

Because a few minutes ago, this exact person had been crying like her whole life had just been folded into a paper airplane and shot out an airlock. Now her spine was ruler-straight, her expression grave enough that she looked one breath away from ordering a strike on the entire universe. That gravity cracked the second she saw me step through the hatch.

"Shimo!" Jess practically launched out of the chair.

"You're finally back — I swear I was being so good. Three separate times I almost touched that button that looks exactly like it triggers a self-destruct sequence. But I held back."... Great. That single sentence told me my earlier risk assessment — that making her acting acting captain was a low-risk move — had been a little too optimistic.

"You did fine." I walked over and reached down to liberate her from the soul-eating piece of furniture.

"I'll take it from here." Jess let out a breath like she'd just been granted a full pardon. Sliding off the edge of the seat, she still managed to add, under her breath:"Honestly, sit in that chair too long and you start questioning your entire life."

"I know," I said. Because I'd already run a full lap of that myself. I sat back down. The chair was still cold. Still hard. It hadn't gotten one degree more comfortable just because I'd stepped away for a few minutes. It was still exactly what it had always been — something that, whether your hands were shaking or not, forced you to sit up straight, forced you to speak, forced you to pick the whole ship up and carry it. I tapped a finger once against the armrest and looked out over the bridge.

Most of them had found their way back into their own bodies. Not completely — more like souls that had just been checked out of an accident site, still wearing a temporary claim tag, but at least able to stand upright on their own. Roy was back at the helm. His face still had the color of someone who'd had his life force sipped by a space ghost, but his hands were back on the controls.

That paleness wasn't softness — it was the specific pale of someone who'd been scared past the limit and was now forcing every nerve back onto its station by hand. He clearly hadn't fully disembarked from that Singularity Jump yet, but the ship wasn't going to wait for him to catch up, so he'd simply decided to pretend he already had. Lan had returned to comms, back straight, the I have no intention of discussing what just happened frost already refrozen across her face.

Good — that meant she'd at least gotten herself packed away. That's how people like Lan work: the worse the wreckage, the harder they polish the surface. Whatever she was quietly freezing solid underneath was a problem for later. Akari leaned against the radar console, eyes a little hollow, wearing the same expression she always did — like someone who'd been sleep-deprived for a decade straight and was finally on the verge of a working professional relationship with death itself.

But her hands were back on the sensor interface. That was enough. The most reassuring thing about Akari was never how alert she looked. It was that even when she looked like she'd already scheduled her own funeral for tomorrow, she still finished the job today. Aida's color was still terrible — like she'd been run through a dryer along with an accident report and put back on the shelf afterward.

But she'd returned to her station too, pulling up the compartment structural schematic in one hand while reviewing damage-control reports in the other. That specific quality of hers — I hate every part of this, but I can finish processing it before I let myself hate it properly — was worth a great deal aboard the Yukikaze right now. A strange feeling settled over me. This ship had just been run through the universe's wash cycle hard enough to send her Captain into cryo-sleep.

But the moment these people sat back down at their stations, one after another, the Yukikaze started feeling like a ship again. Battered. Emotionally compromised. Carrying more than its fair share of fresh trauma. Still a ship. I patched shipwide comms to the main console, paused one second to make sure my voice wasn't shaking badly enough to embarrass me, and keyed it open.

"All hands, attention." Every movement on the bridge stilled, just slightly. Not only on the bridge — this sentence would land in the ears of every soul still aboard capable of hearing a broadcast. Which meant it couldn't carry my usual private inventory of fuck and table-flipping impulses. At least not on the surface.

"This is Acting Command, Lieutenant Hoshino Shimo." Saying my own name still felt wrong — like reading aloud from a posting order that belonged to somebody else. That wrongness was going to have to wait. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"This ship has cleared the enemy engagement zone and is currently in unknown space along the frontier. Navigation is rebuilding the star chart. Main hull structure is sound. All departments, hold stations and continue reporting status." I paused, forcing my voice down a notch steadier.

"CIC sustained heavy damage and is sealed effective immediately. Excepting Medical and Damage Control, no unauthorized personnel may enter. CIC functions will be temporarily folded into the bridge and auxiliary stations, with the bridge assuming direct data integration." The bridge stayed quiet — just the hum of machinery and the click of controls. Short orders were better right now. A brain freshly hauled out of a near-death spin cycle isn't built to withstand a speech.

"All hands, shift to conservation mode. No non-essential maneuvers without my authorization. Medical, Damage Control, Navigation, Engineering, and Comms take priority. All other personnel, hold position and await tasking." I added one last line.

"We're still alive. So we keep this ship moving." I cut the broadcast. Nobody on the bridge clapped. Nobody barked yes, ma'am with any fire behind it. Good — if anyone still had the spare energy to perform an inspirational drama right now, that would be the genuinely alarming outcome. Roy just pulled his shoulders that little bit straighter. Lan dropped her head back to the link calibration. Akari pushed the sweep grid out to the outer net. Aida spoke first, with zero ceremony:"I'll seal off CIC, then."

"Go," I said. She nodded, called over two damage-control ratings, grabbed the sealing tape and temporary lockout clearance, and headed out. I couldn't see into CIC from the bridge, but the image of it — like a god had physically overturned the room — was still stuck behind my eyes. Sealing it was the right call. Not until the blood was wiped up, the equipment secured, and that dead-room feeling had thinned out was that space fit to be called a "center" of anything.

"Lan. Comms status." She didn't turn, fingers already flying across the interface.

"Short-range internal and inter-compartment comms restored to ninety percent. External bands nominal, but no identifiable Federal relay beacon in range. A long-range hail right now is functionally a message in a bottle thrown at the universe." Good. Very Lan phrasing. Very bad news.

"Akari. Sensors."

"No large hull signatures in the vicinity." Her voice stayed in that flat register hovering between exhaustion and sleep.

"Background radiation's clean. Too clean — clean enough that it doesn't feel like a good neighborhood. No immediate pursuit signals, no usable shipping-lane heat sources. Short version: we're a very long way from anywhere."

"I already knew that part."

"I know," Akari said.

"Repeating it just felt more ceremonial."... Good. That meant she'd genuinely come back.

"Roy. Main propulsion?" He ran his tongue over dry lips, eyes locked on the nav interface.

"Sub-light propulsion holding. Attitude control's stable. As long as nobody asks me to take that three-button antique into a second Singularity Jump, I should still be able to function as a useful member of the Federation."

"Not happening any time soon," I said.

"Thank whatever's listening." He said it with the sincerity of a man who'd just temporarily converted to a religion he otherwise had no use for. I pushed Victor's star chart onto the bridge's main layer — not all of it, just the relevant navigation block. As for the line reading BIG-TITS STRIP BAR IS FUCKING GREAT, I very responsibly buried that first.

The Federal military might be understaffed, unreliably supplied, and running a tech tree that looked like it had been drawn up drunk — but the whole ship didn't need to know our one viable repair stop came with that particular endorsement.

"Everyone, here." I lit up the Lawrence Shipyard coordinates — an unremarkable little dot clinging to the edge of a gray transit route, like an unreliable mole the frontier had grown on itself.

"This is the nearest suspicious — no." I caught myself.

"The nearest usable repair point. Lawrence Shipyard. From our current position, taking the shortest safe route at sub-light on existing main propulsion, that's roughly five days."

"Five days?" Aida looked up from the structural schematic, brow drawing together.

"Out here?"

"Yes," I said. Ash and Maki had already talked me through the worst of this back in the ward, so saying it out loud now didn't make me want to throw the chart in the trash quite the way it had the first time I'd seen the numbers. I pulled the route out segment by segment.

"Not a straight line. Gravity-well distribution out here is ugly, and the background's too clean — clean enough to hide things. We'll run this gray band, skirt the outer edge of the Void, then cut in toward Lawrence Shipyard from there." Roy watched the line, his throat working once.

"Five days sub-light... I can do that." Translated into plain speech: I hate this, but at least this time nobody's making me touch those three museum-piece buttons again. Lan recalibrated the chart and added, cold as ever:"Assuming nobody puts another round into our stern along the way."

"Don't jinx it," I said.

"I'm stating risk."

"State it with a little less flair."

"This isn't a literary society." Good. Both of them could bicker normally again. The Yukikaze had drifted one more step away from total collapse. Aida stayed strictly practical.

"Five days is workable — assuming the ship's consumables hold." She worked through the compartment tables as she talked.

"Power can be rerouted, medical and sealed compartments take priority, that's not the issue. A long sustained run isn't just a question of whether the engines turn." She didn't finish the sentence. She just stopped, her eyes dropping to a different column on the report. I'd been watching the course. Following her gaze, I found what had stopped her. The life-support and internal-circulation overview. Nothing looked wrong at first glance.

Oxygen, pressure, CO₂ scrubbing, thermal control — all within tolerable, if unpleasant, ranges. Unpleasant, but the legible kind of unpleasant. Then I saw the row underneath. Water Reclamation Efficiency: 61% Potable Reserve: Declining Partial Purification Sections Offline I stared at those lines and didn't speak right away. The strange thing was, it didn't hit with the drama of an enemy hull, or the spectacle of a failed jump. No alarm. No fire. Not one red letter large enough to jump into your eyes on its own.

It just sat there, quiet — a thin, slow needle already working its way into the flesh. Five days of travel. Unknown frontier. A repair yard that might not be legal, might not even be open. And the ship's water — was starting to run short. Aida spoke first, voice flat but harder than a moment ago.

"Lieutenant. Second problem." I leaned back in the captain's chair, looking at the course that had seemed relatively clear a minute ago, and felt the whole ship sink another notch. Not because we had no road. Because now that we had one, staying alive long enough to reach the end of it had become its own separate negotiation with the universe. I looked up at the newly reassembled star chart on the main display.

"Finish the shortest-route calculation first," I said.

"Then pull me the full breakdown on the water systems." Roy said nothing, just quietly held the bow steady. Lan started pulling external environmental samples for comparison. Akari pushed the sensor net one grid further along the route. Aida had already lowered her head over the water-cycling schematic, wearing the expression of someone who badly wanted to swear at somebody, but intended to finish reading the numbers first before deciding exactly who. The Yukikaze was running again.

Only this time, what was pushing her forward wasn't just enemy hulls and cannon fire. It was a repair yard five days out. A star chart from a former pirate Chief Engineer. And an entire ship's supply of water, quietly, steadily, running low. Sitting in the captain's chair, I understood one thing with total clarity: In a war, the first thing that kills you isn't always the guns. Sometimes, it's thirst.