Chương 284: 118. Friend's Kiss 2

When I left the temporary bridge, I still had the Kushima Heavy Industries reactor on my mind. Not in the "wow, shiny" little-kid way—though, honestly, it wasn't completely absent—but in the more complicated way. The way where once you started thinking, you couldn't stop walking down the chain: what if we get it; what if we get it and can't mount it; what if we can mount it, and what does that turn the Yukikaze into; what if someone else gets to the line first and how many of us bleed to catch up again.

In other words, not ideal bedtime thinking. Maki and Ash had both been very clear: my job now wasn't to cook my own brain down to paste. It was to rest, in case I needed to launch in the Zero and ride Hook. I understood that. Understanding didn't make the switch any easier. You don't go straight from conspiracy and tactics to sleep like flipping a light.

Especially not in a place where even the air smells like someone dumped scorched metal, iron filings, coolant, and the sighs from failed black-market deals into the ventilation. So I shifted course to the mess. The Yukikaze's mess, right now, functioned less as a "place to eat" and more as a half-functional emotional support structure. Scratched tables, patched wall corners, white overhead lights with one flickering unit—like a reminder that the ship's current state of "intact" was temporary at best.

But there was heat, there were voices, and there was something on a tray that could legally be called dinner. I picked up a tray and walked up to the serving hatch. Today's offerings made me go quiet for two full seconds. One bowl of thick, suspicious substance that might sue to strip the word soup from the language, a compression meat patty, a portion of vegetable fiber paste, and a small cup of water that, now that rations had stabilized, no longer looked like we were begging death for mercy.

"Actual meat patties," I muttered.

"Luxury." The server didn't look up.

"Please don't form expectations beyond the shape."

"Relax. My expectations for life are very tightly managed right now." I turned with my tray, scanning for a corner, and spotted Harvey at the far end of the long table. Or, more accurately, I saw something that looked like Harvey but whose soul looked like Victor had disassembled it, run it through a rinse cycle three times, and hammered it back in. A bowl of nearly cold soup sat in front of him. He held what might have been repair notes or a form of legally actionable psychological torture.

The air around him carried the specific desolation unique to junior personnel in the engine section. I carried my tray over and sat down opposite him.

"Still alive, I see." Harvey looked up slowly. When he realized it was me, something very thin and very close to relief flickered in his eyes.

"At present, yes," he said.

"Doesn't sound promising."

"Victor told me this morning, 'Breathing doesn't mean you're worth the oxygen yet. Memorize this circuit map and then we'll talk about rights.'" I nearly spat my soup.

"... He actually said that?"

"The original was longer. And he insulted three different eras of engineering education along the way." Harvey stared past me.

"I've been running between the main cooling trunk, the secondary stabilizer modules, and a manual thicker than my face six times today trying to find one compatible connector."

"The fact you're eating means you're improving."

"No." Harvey shook his head.

"It means Victor doesn't want me dying in the engine room and having to fill out the paperwork."... Hard to argue. I sawed into the meat patty. The texture sat somewhere between "military" and "societal revenge," but given the day, anything hot was enough to make me retract half the things I'd said about the Yukikaze's logistics. Harvey took a sip of soup, eyes still a little empty, but he made the effort to ask:"You? Just off the bridge?"

"Yeah." I answered around the fork.

"You look like you can't sleep."

"I was going to eat, then sleep, then pretend my brain wasn't full of garbage."

"Didn't work?"

"That obvious?" Harvey looked at me.

"Hoshino, you currently look like an old ship that just found out it might be getting a heart transplant and hasn't decided whether to sign the consent forms." My fork stopped. Then I looked up at him.

"... When did you get that accurate?" Harvey frowned.

"I was just making an analogy."

"Uh-huh."

"... Wait." He narrowed his eyes.

"Did I just accidentally poke something real?" I stared down at my plate. Well, good. Loose tongue, meet table. This is what happens when your brain's cooked, the lighting's too white, the food's too bad, and the person across from you has been harassed by Victor so badly he doesn't have the energy to pretend at social nuance. You reach for a throwaway line, and the weight inside it falls out with a thud. Harvey set his notes down. Some semblance of engineer-brain slid back into place behind his eyes.

"You saw a new core?" he asked, low. I had planned to stonewall. But Harvey wasn't a drama type. Once he caught the scent of a key term, he snapped into function like a machine Victor had just kicked awake. If I insisted nothing was wrong now, I'd just look more suspicious. So I glanced around. The mess was thin—shift change had just gone through. The people still around were either hungry enough not to care what we said or exhausted enough to ignore it. I dropped my voice.

"Not the kind of 'saw' you're thinking," I said.

"A pirate ship in the station—raider-class—is getting a Kushima Heavy Industries Next-Gen Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant installed." Harvey's face went blank for a second. Then I saw the first honest spike of energy all evening.

"... What?"

"I knew you'd do that."

"No, wait. Did you actually just say Kushima Heavy Industries, helium-hydrogen plant, and pirate ship in the same sentence, or am I having auditory hallucinations?"

"Unfortunately, not hallucinations." Harvey set his spoon down and leaned forward.

"You saw it clearly?"

"I saw the logo clearly," I said.

"I won't pretend I fully understood the structure, but Maki's already taken a look and says it's not a civilian model." I took a breath and decided to stop dancing around it.

"Harvey, I want to ask you something." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. He looked at me, fully out of victim-mode now.

"Ask." I dropped my voice further.

"If," I said.

"Just if. The Yukikaze actually gets a shot at that core—could we swap it in ourselves? No local hands on the core section." Harvey didn't answer right away. Which meant this wasn't a "stop dreaming" question. He rubbed at his brow, eyes unfocused, clearly stripping our current fusion plant apart in his head, jamming a hypothetical helium-hydrogen core in its place, and seeing which part would explode first. After a while, he exhaled.

"Short answer," Harvey said.

"If what you want is 'no station techs touching the core assembly,' it's not impossible." My chest tightened.

"Really?"

"Don't get excited yet." He looked up at me.

"The gap between 'impossible' and 'we can do this' is a full strip of engineering hell that will have Victor inventing new gods to curse."

"That sounds hopeful and hopeless at the same time."

"Because that's what it is." Harvey's voice stayed low.

"Our fusion plant is an antique. Old interfaces. Heavy structure. Old stabilizer logic. If that helium-hydrogen plant is a true Kushima next-gen unit, then on paper the output curve and transient response will be gorgeous. It also definitely wasn't designed with ships the Yukikaze's age in mind." I nodded. That part, at least, I could follow. The bits I couldn't, I translated into ancient bone and gorgeous. Harvey continued.

"If we do it ourselves, there are four conditions." He held up a hand and counted them out.

"First: the core has to be intact. Not a half-dead prototype that's already been butchered by Hook's idiots. Second: we need at least partial original interface parameters. Otherwise we're guessing. Third: the Yukikaze's main cooling loops and stabilizer distribution have to be re-laid before we cut the old core out. Otherwise the new one goes in and the ship chokes herself to death first. Fourth—" He stopped and looked at me.

"Fourth is people."

"People?"

"Yeah." Harvey said.

"Victor, me, Aida, Akari—minimum. All at once. Plus someone like Maki reading the specs, or we'll have entire sections we simply can't brute-force our way through." Listening to him, I felt something odd. Not disappointment. More like... the ground firming slightly. Because he hadn't said "no" or "get real." He'd said "hard, but if the core is real, intact, and in our possession, this isn't fantasy." For me, right now, that was enough.

"So," I said slowly.

"If we do get it, we're not automatically stuck needing station help." Harvey's mouth twitched.

"Hoshino, that verb came out very fast." I stayed solemn.

"I'm just doing risk assessment."

"Your risk assessment sounds a lot like premeditated crime."

"This is Lawrence Shipyard. Adapt to the environment." Harvey was quiet for two seconds, then covered his face with one hand, exhausted.

"I'm starting to see why Kushima and Ash never get any rest."

"Thank you," I said.

"That wasn't praise."

"I'm selectively accepting positive feedback this week." Harvey looked at me like he wanted to keep arguing, then just sighed.

"Fine," he said.

"If you really start down that path, tell me early. Don't drag the core onboard and then wake me up at 0300 to look at a stolen heart." I couldn't help laughing.

"Deal. I'll try to give you advance notice before your mental breakdown."

"Take 'try' out of that sentence."

"You're asking too much." I choked down the last of the hot, unpleasant soup. I still felt like my brain was wrapped in cabling, but not as badly as when I'd left the bridge. Harvey hadn't solved anything. But he'd dragged the core down a notch—from "nightmare-class black-market monster" to "if this lands in our lap, the Yukikaze might actually be able to digest it." That was a big difference. Big enough to make living with the next few hours of complication slightly easier. As I stood, Harvey called after me.

"Hoshino."

"Yeah?"

"Be careful," he said. His face was unusually serious.

"If the station really is tracing Frostcrystals to people, you're a much easier mark than that core." I lifted a hand in acknowledgment.

"Relax. I'm hard to kill." Harvey watched me for two beats.

"I'm more worried about you being easy to overheat." This ship was full of people who'd recently gotten much too honest. Deeply unappealing. After the mess, I was, on paper, supposed to go back to my bunk. Really. On the way there, I even kept lecturing myself: All right, Hoshino Shimo. Wash your face. Lie down. Close your eyes. Count cooling pipes. Don't count Maki. Don't count that damned helium-hydrogen core.

I'd only made it as far as the corridor outside the second-class quarters when I saw Jess standing there. Alone. She wasn't leaning against the wall in some exaggerated pose, and she wasn't putting on a pathetic face waiting for someone to walk by. She was just standing there under the corridor lights, an empty cup in her hands, her expression so quiet it barely looked like her. Honestly, that was more unsettling than if she'd suddenly burst into tears. I stopped.

"... What are you doing here?" Jess saw me, pressed her lips together for a second, then finally spoke.

"Waiting for you." Those two words put me on instinctive alert. Not because of danger. Because when Jess stopped clowning around, it usually meant whatever came next would be direct. And direct people are the hardest to defend against—especially when they usually hide behind jokes. I walked a few steps closer.

"What's wrong?" Jess looked down at the empty cup in her hands, thumb rubbing along its rim. For once she didn't answer right away, like she was still assembling the sentence. That was rare enough for her that I found myself wondering if I should be standing a little straighter.

"I never properly said this to you," she finally said, her voice low, almost soft.

"Before—thank you." I blinked.

"Before?" She lifted her eyes to mine.

"A lot of times," she said.

"On the bridge. The water run. And that time I was about to fall apart. You probably think it was nothing, just something you did in passing. But I remember." This was bad. Because if she'd said it in her usual joking tone, I could have immediately fired back something like don't thank me, I just didn't want to lose my best source of gossip if you died, and dragged the mood back to somewhere survivable. But she wasn't joking. She was serious.

Serious enough that all I could manage was a flat: "I'm not used to you like this." Jess actually laughed. A small one.

"I know," she said.

"That's why I picked the moment you were heading back to your room, when your brain should be at its slowest."

"... Jess, that's a dirty move."

"Picked up bad habits hanging around you people." I opened my mouth, still hadn't figured out how to respond, when Jess took a step forward. And hugged me. I went completely rigid. Not a tactical steadying grip. Not the rough shoulder-clap kind of hug people give each other after surviving something together. This was a real hug. Her arms came around me—not hard, but not a token touch either. She smelled faintly of the mess hall mixed with shipboard detergent.

When her hair brushed against my jaw, it tickled just enough that I forgot to schedule my next breath.

"... Jess?" My voice came out a little hoarse.

"Don't move," she said, muffled.

"You sound like you're mugging me."

"Then let's say I'm mugging you for a little ceremonial gratitude." What a terrible excuse. The problem was, I couldn't immediately think of a better comeback. So I just stood there, stiff, both hands hovering uselessly in midair, with no idea whether I was supposed to hug her back, push her off, or just accept my fate like a handrail that happened to be getting hugged. And then it got worse.

The second Jess let go, I'd barely started breathing again when she tilted her head up—fast, like she was stealing something—and— Light. Quick. Almost just a graze. She pressed her lips to mine. My mind went completely blank. It wasn't a kiss hot enough to burn through anyone's judgment, and it wasn't skilled or deliberate. It was so brief it was practically an ambush, so light it felt like she hadn't fully decided whether it counted as crossing a line before she'd already done it.

But it was exactly because it was so short, so light, that it landed like a precision strike. I stood there. My brain stayed offline for three full seconds. Jess's own face had gone a little warm, but she held onto that expression—I'm not panicking, the universe is panicking—took half a step back, hugged the empty cup tighter to her chest, eyes darting everywhere, and finally forced out:"... A friend kiss." Me: "..." She added another line.

"Right. That kind. Very healthy. Very normal. Nothing anyone needs to make a fuss over. A friend kiss." Me: "............"

"Don't look at me like that. You're making it very hard for me to walk this back."

"Jess." I finally found my voice.

"Do you have an unusually loose definition of the word friend?" Her ears went redder, but she held her ground.

"Border customs are different, all right?"

"Don't use a criminal zone's customs to cover for yourself."

"I'm not covering anything, I just—" She stumbled, then said, very quietly, "I just wanted this. For now." That line was more against the rules than the kiss had been. Because it wasn't a joke. Not entirely. She didn't look at me again. She just hugged the cup tighter against her chest, like she was pressing something down, and turned her eyes away.

"Anyway. Good night," Jess said.

"Go sleep. Just—consider that a display of friendship." Before I could react, she'd already spun around and slipped off, quick and guilty, exactly like someone making a getaway. Leaving me standing alone at the entrance to the second-class corridor, facing the bulkhead, the lights, the hum of the ventilation, and the complete wreckage of my own brain.... Friendship. Friendship, my ass.

I touched the back of my hand to my lips, and understood one thing with total clarity: If I actually managed to sleep tonight, it would only be because the Yukikaze's medical officer had finally slipped high-grade sedatives into the water supply. I made it back to my room on pure muscle memory. The moment the door shut, I leaned back against it, closed my eyes, took a deep breath—and found it did absolutely nothing. Because my head wasn't running "one thing" right now. It was running a disaster.

Half of it was still turning over the Kushima Heavy Industries Next-Gen Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant. Half was on Hook and the Frostcrystal leak. Half was on Harvey's "not entirely impossible." And the remaining two halves—at least—were replaying Jess's arms around me, and that kiss, light as something stolen. Worse, at a moment like this, I was somehow still thinking about Maki. Thinking about the weight of her hand against my shoulder when she pulled me back into the shadows of the deep refit dock.

Thinking about the brief moment she smoothed down my collar. Thinking about the sound of her voice saying good work. Thinking about her line: From now on, Hook's ship isn't just black-market scenery. It's a target. And then straight back to Jess's friend kiss. My brain finally arrived, in that moment, at the one honest conclusion available: —I'm doomed.

I dropped straight onto the bunk, arm over my eyes, feeling like I'd taken two direct hits from two completely different directions, with no damage control team I could call.

"... What even is all this." The room, of course, didn't answer. Only the Yukikaze's low, distant vibration—the old reactor we hadn't replaced yet, still beating away somewhere deep in the bulkheads. Usually I found that sound comforting, like lying in the belly of something old and still alive. Tonight it sounded more like a countdown. Because I knew that when I finally closed my eyes, it probably wouldn't be darkness waiting for me. It would be three faces, taking turns.

Harvey's, with you'd better figure out how you're mounting this written all over his exhausted engineer's face. Maki's, calm enough to double as a tactical ruler. And Jess's—clearly panicking herself, and still insisting it had been a friend kiss.... Like hell I was getting any sleep tonight.