Chương 290: 121.Giving It Away 2

The inside of Hook's ship turned out to be even more of a place where crime, poverty, and machine oil had been boiled down into a single stew than I'd pictured. The moment the Yukikaze forced her hard dock and the connecting hatch opened, what hit us first wasn't gun barrels or killing intent. It was a smell — cheap lubricant, scorched metal, stale alcohol, and synthetic rations that had clearly been sitting out for several days too many.

The smell was almost impressively even, like someone had gone to real effort blending this ship is falling apart, criminals live here, and the ventilation filters have never once been cleaned into a single signature scent. If Lawrence Shipyard was an old black-market fox — filthy coat, gold thread still sewn into the cuffs — then Hook's ship was the kind of low-tier stray dog that couldn't be bothered washing the coat at all, just threw a torn sail over its back and went out to bite people instead.

And we were about to kick our way straight into the kennel. The security team went in first, fully powered armor, boots hitting the deck in a heavy thud, thud, thud — like a row of walking metal coffins that had just learned how to deliver a funeral in person. Leading them was Sergeant Takenaka. I'd met a fair number of people on the Yukikaze who looked like trouble. Very few carried an aura quite like his — the specific energy of a Showa-era yakuza boss who'd wandered onto the set of a space war film by accident.

His face wasn't built for the rank of Sergeant. It was built for the rank of boss. An old scar along the jaw, a heavy brow, a mouth that came pre-set to irritated. Even the powered armor didn't read as standard military issue on him — it read like a custom-tailored violence suit from some underground syndicate. If someone had told me he was about to pull a wooden sword out of his belt and start cursing people out around a toothpick clenched in his teeth, I'd have just nodded and said that tracked.

Then he kicked Hook's inner hatch open. The door slammed into the far bulkhead with a crack loud enough to serve as a funeral bell for every unlucky bastard's dignity aboard tonight.

"Hands on your heads! Down!" Takenaka's shout hit hard enough to make the whole corridor flinch backward. He raised his armor-mounted rifle, sweeping the barrel with special attention toward the handful of pirates still standing there trying to look tough.

"You little bakayaro — I said get down, what are you still standing there for?" The pirates clearly didn't understand him. One of them — a young guy whose hair looked like it had been styled with a live power cable — actually blinked, genuinely confused.

"Baka... what?" Standing further back, I couldn't help leaning toward Takenaka.

"... What does that mean?" Takenaka kept the rifle steady, didn't turn his head, and answered with total calm.

"Little lady, that's a dialect from my hometown."

"... Oh." I decided not to press for a translation. Because judging by the practical effect, it clearly meant something close to I'm in a bad mood right now, and you'd better cooperate immediately, or I'll switch to a more universal way of making myself understood. And the pirates apparently understood the universal version just fine.

The few who'd been trying to look hard folded fast, hands on their heads, dropping into a squat with an almost synchronized precision — like they'd suddenly realized they weren't pirates at all, just extras in a production with an extremely bleak career outlook. Maki and I came in with the second wave.

She walked half a step ahead of me on my left, still in her sortie gear, back perfectly straight, stride as steady as if that whole incident back in the Keiun — the one I still couldn't quite look at directly — had never happened. In some ways, this woman really is terrifying. It's not that she doesn't feel anything. It's that she takes every single ripple and presses it flat under an even calmer surface — like sealing boiling water under a sheet of ice. As for me — I was doing my best impression of normal too.

Except every time my gaze accidentally caught her profile, my brain would uselessly flash back to that too-short, too-messy, entirely unreasonable kiss in the Keiun — and then, right on its heels, serve up an even less appropriate image, until I genuinely wanted to nail myself to a bulkhead with a sign reading FOCUS ON THE CASE. Unfortunately, the brain has never once respected the chain of command.

The inside of Hook's ship was narrower than the hull suggested, corridors stretched thin like someone had tried to save on materials. Cables ran exposed along both sides with zero shame. Patches and splices were everywhere — this wasn't a ship that had been built so much as welded together, section by section, by a group of people with nowhere else to go, chanting it'll hold for now the entire way through.

Some stretches of deck still carried overlapping stains of old and new blood mixed with oil, sticking underfoot with a wet, tacky friction that made me want to hold a moment of silence for my boots.

"Cargo bay's aft," Maki said, low.

"How do you know?"

"A ship like this doesn't put anything valuable too far from the core," she said, eyes flicking over the cable runs and the hull's center-of-gravity markers.

"Thruster compensation wouldn't tolerate it either." Her tone stayed light, but I knew she was focused right now to the point of near-obsession. That Kushima-crested merchant ship out there had already driven the nail in deep: this isn't just an external transaction. If we found even more concrete Kushima traces aboard Hook's ship now, this would stop being suspicion, for her. It would become an autopsy. Escorted by two of the security team, we reached the aft cargo hold.

The hatch opened, and the first thing I saw wasn't the reactor. It was a row of mounting frames, far too neat for the rest of this ship. The wrongness of it hit immediately — like walking into a filthy gambling addict's apartment and finding a polished silver tea set laid out on the sideboard. Too mismatched not to catch the eye. Maki moved ahead of me faster. The center of the bay had been fitted with a triple-layer shock-absorbing frame.

In the middle sat a sealed equipment pod nearly twice a person's height, wrapped in gray-black thermal insulation, with just enough of the casing exposed at the edge to reveal a strip of industrial blue lettering — familiar enough to turn my stomach. Someone had tried to grind the marking off. They hadn't gotten it all the way clean. Like trying to scrape a family name off a headstone and only leaving a worse scar behind. Kushima Heavy Industries. My stomach dropped.

"So it really is here," I said, quiet. Maki didn't answer. She'd already crouched down, eyes going straight to the inspection access on the inside of the frame. A small maintenance panel sat there. Most people would just register there's a cover on it. She took one look and her whole expression shifted. Not dramatically. Just half a degree colder, all at once.

"This isn't a third-party field patch," she said. I moved up beside her.

"What are you seeing?" She tapped one fingertip against the weld line at the panel's edge.

"This reinforcement method only gets used on the internal refit lines back home," she said, voice completely flat.

"Outsiders can copy the shape. They can't copy the sequence." I followed where she was pointing and saw, honestly, just welded metal. That's the particular cruelty of expertise — what looks like metal to me looks like a family tree to her. Maki reached down and peeled back a strip of insulation that had been re-taped over a section below the panel, exposing the inspection code underneath. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

The code wasn't long. But the formatting was unusually clean. She looked at it once, and her breath caught, just barely, for half a beat. I saw it too, in that same instant — that carefully level calm in her eyes, cracked from underneath by something hitting it hard. I didn't say anything right away. Because I knew that are you okay is the single most useless question anyone could ask, right now. Someone like her, if she genuinely wasn't okay, wasn't going to admit it here. So I just asked, quiet:"Confirmed?"

She was silent for two seconds before she answered.

"... Yes." Just the one word. Heavy enough on its own. I didn't push further. I just laid my hand lightly against the outside of her arm. Brief, like confirming she was still there — like we were just two partners working a scene, nothing more. She didn't pull away immediately. That alone told me exactly how not-okay she currently was. Footsteps came in from behind us. Akari walked in with two of the engineering staff, Harvey trailing right behind them.

The moment Harvey's eyes landed on the pod, they lit up — not the way a normal person looks at stolen goods, but the way an engineer's soul wakes up at the sight of high-value hardware. He practically threw himself at the casing, the way you'd greet a long-lost lover, one wrench away from breaking into song.

"... Oh." He drew in a breath.

"This thing's even newer than I expected." Watching his face, I suddenly felt a little sorry for the helium-hydrogen core. Because anything Harvey looked at like that generally didn't get to keep much privacy for the rest of its service life.

"Can it be moved?" I asked.

"Yes." He was already checking the mounting clamps and the cooling module.

"And not just this." He tilted his head toward a few smaller sealed crates nearby.

"Take these too. Labels say high-conductance busbars and output stabilizer sets. Mount them correctly and you can push a weapons system's power draw up a solid notch." I blinked.

"... So Hook wasn't just helping carry a new heart. He was running steroids on the side too?" Harvey looked up at me, completely serious.

"Terrible metaphor. Correct direction." Good. If he was willing to sign off on it in that tone, it meant I'd landed the idea close enough. On the other side of the ship, Hook himself wasn't having nearly as pleasant a night.

By the time we'd finished a preliminary seal on the cargo bay and were brought back to the main mid-section cabin, the scene waiting for us made it genuinely hard to tell whether we'd boarded a pirate ship, or wandered into some strange joint production run by Federal law, applied psychology, and a discount diner. Hook, whose luck had run entirely out, sat bolted into a fixed chair, wrists locked behind him, face soured like a man who'd just discovered his own life insurance policy didn't cover tonight.

Ash stood directly in front of him, datapad open, unhurriedly reading through Federal statutes while, in an almost gentle voice, encouraging him to "come clean while it's still cheap." The whole scene made the hair on my arms stand up. Because Ash wasn't interrogating him. He was preaching.

"Under Article 17, Paragraph 3 of the Federal Maritime Safety Act, unauthorized military-spec power systems may not be circulated to civilian armed groups..." His tone stayed level enough to double as a bedtime story.

"Under Article 22 of the Border Security Ordinance, any party maintaining an ongoing transactional relationship with a registered raider fleet is treated as an accomplice—" He paused there, and looked at Hook with what appeared to be genuine sincerity.

"Captain Hook. Telling the truth right now would go a lot better for you." Standing off to the side, I arrived at exactly one conclusion. This man is basically some kind of cult priest. Not the cheap, screaming-about-the-apocalypse kind. The other kind — sharp suit, law book in one hand, smile on his face, capable of making you nod along and confess while quietly starting to wonder whether you've technically been breaking the law since the day you were born.

Aida was working a different angle entirely, off to the side. Calling it psychological warfare would be a bit much. Calling it "assisting with questioning" would be too generous. She read more like the specific breed of pressure specialist you get in old crime dramas — no shouting, no slamming the table, just laying one piece of evidence down after another, in a voice so calm, so technical, so quietly insomnia-inducing, that it said, without ever raising in volume: we already know most of this.

Playing dumb now just makes you look stupider. As for the one actually running "good cop" — that was Aitan. I didn't clock it at first, not until I saw him produce, from god-knows-where, an actual bowl of pork cutlet over rice, sit down across from one of Hook's crew, and address the man with an expression gentle enough to run for neighborhood youth council.

"If you're having a hard time, you can talk to me," Aitan said. The pirate, who'd been trying to look dangerous up to that point, actually froze for a second. Aitan kept going.

"My father knows people on a few of the supply lines. Be straight with us, and maybe we can find you something later that doesn't come with quite so much risk of starving." The man's mouth twitched. Aitan nudged the bowl a little closer, voice softening further.

"Hungry? Go on, have a bite first." I stood there completely floored. This was what the Galactic Federation produced from its brightest students? No — this was what happened when someone threw a debate club, a business school, and the son of a lunch-counter owner into the military together and they'd accidentally maxed out an entire skill tree labeled interrogation. If the setting had been even slightly less dire, I half expected his next line to be life's long, don't gamble your future on piracy.

And the worst part was — it actually worked. Pirates fear death and pain, sure. But they fear being completely read even more. Ash pinned them down with statute after statute; Aida sealed every exit with evidence; Aitan played the amiable con man offering a soft landing, making confess now, keep a little face sound genuinely appealing. It didn't take long before Hook's crew started cracking. First it was the parts manifest. Then the cargo's origin.

Then not only did they confirm the Kushima helium-hydrogen core, they handed over the crates of throughput-boosting components right alongside it. Watching the freshly extracted manifests and ID codes pile up, my feelings were a bit complicated. On one hand, I had to admit this unholy trinity of an interrogation method genuinely worked. On the other hand, it was getting harder and harder not to wonder whether a single department on this ship had actually developed anything like normally.

By the time it was Hook's own turn, he was still slick. Not the tough kind of slick. The kind that already knows it can't win the fight, can't outrun the situation, and that talking hard won't help either — so it just coats every sentence in enough oil that you can grab the meaning but never quite get a hold on the bone underneath. He looked up at Ash, managing to hold a businessman's smile in place.

"Acting Captain, sir, no need to make it sound so ugly." Hook's voice was raw, but he was still working the angle.

"I'm just a runner. Get paid, deliver the goods. Whoever pays, that's who I carry for — isn't that the most basic rule out here in the gray lanes?" Ash turned a page on his datapad.

"The Federation's legal definition of 'runner' might not line up with yours quite as neatly as you'd like."

"You people write the laws. People like me just pick our lives up off the ground wherever we find them." Hook shrugged, cuffs clinking.

"I don't get a vote on what the big names load onto my ship or take back off it." Ash looked at him.

"Then you can at least decide whether 'big names' stays vague, or gets a little more specific right now." Hook went quiet for a few seconds. His eyes drifted across the cabin, and finally, very subtly, caught on Maki's face for a fraction of a second. Very short. Short enough to almost look accidental. I saw it anyway. Then his smile got even oilier.

"Honestly don't know a name," he said.

"Whoever hired me just said they were someone inside the Kushima family. Paid up front, handled every handoff by cipher. Clean rules. Clean money — cleaner than me, at least on the surface." The air in the cabin thinned by a degree. I glanced instinctively at Maki. She stood perfectly straight, expression unreadable. I knew this particular version of her too well by now — the flatter she looked, the deeper she was pressing down whatever she actually felt. Ash didn't let the line slide past.

"The cipher," he said.

"Say it." Hook licked his cracked lips and rattled off a short string. Not plain numbers. Not a standard black-market handshake format either. There was an odd segmentation rule mixed in, along with a reversed tail sequence — the kind of thing that sounded like someone had gone out of their way to age an old-fashioned identification habit on purpose. To me it just sounded hard to memorize. But the instant Hook finished the last segment, Maki's eyes went cold. Not surprised. Not confused. Recognizing it.

The shift was tiny. But I was standing close enough to catch her fingertips curl in, just barely — like someone had driven an invisible needle straight through her palm. I understood immediately. She knew this cipher. And not vaguely. She knew it deeply enough that even now, in front of everyone, she couldn't fully smooth over that split-second loss of balance. I didn't call it out. Partly because I'm not an idiot.

And partly because the single dumbest thing I could possibly do, standing here in front of Ash, Aida, Aitan, and a full armed security detail, would have been to turn and ask her, out loud, isn't that the format your older brother's people use? That's not concern. That's walking her up to the stake myself. So I just stood there, quietly, pretending to be far more interested in Hook's irritating face than I actually was. Inside, though, the wire in my chest had gone taut. Hook kept talking.

"Genuinely don't know who they are," he said, spreading his cuffed hands, smiling helplessly.

"I only recognize codes, not faces. In my line of work, the ones who know too much don't usually live very long." Ash didn't answer right away. He just studied Hook, weighing whether what was currently coming out of his mouth ran seventy percent true and thirty percent lie, or the other way around. That was the genuinely inconvenient thing about Ash — his everyday speech ran gentler than most people's, but the second real work started, nothing in the room ran colder than his head.

In the end, it was Aida who spoke first.

"Doesn't matter," she said, flat.

"The hardware's real. The inspection codes are real. The supplemental materials are real. You not knowing a name right now doesn't mean we won't find one out later." Then she added, with surgical coldness:"And judging by the maintenance state of this ship, you'll probably die of neglect before we even get that far." Hook's mouth twitched. I almost laughed. Maki still hadn't said anything. But I knew that by now she'd already taken that cipher apart in her head and put it back together at least once.

Not guessing — cross-referencing. Not suspecting — confirming something she almost certainly didn't want confirmed. Her older brother's people. Or, at minimum, someone operating under that exact format. Which meant this had just turned into real trouble. Not the kind of trouble you can write cleanly into a report as the Kushima family may have a problem. The kind where the problem sits close enough to Maki that a face, a form of address, even some rule she's known since childhood could end up dragged into it.

I found myself thinking that the mess back in the Keiun — as chaotic as it had felt at the time — was almost simple, compared to this. Because the moment something reaches all the way into family, it stops being a clean question of who's right and who's wrong. Ash finally closed the datapad.

"Good," he said.

"Looks like you've still got a little willingness to cooperate left in you." Hook managed a strained smile.

"I've always known how to read a room."

"Then keep reading it." Ash's mouth curved, faintly.

"We'll talk again in a bit." That "talk again" didn't sound harsh. It even sounded polite. Which is exactly why, for some reason, I felt a little sorry for Hook. Because when Ash says "we'll talk again" in that particular tone, it usually means the genuinely unbearable part hasn't even started yet. I glanced sideways at Maki. She happened to look away from Hook at that exact same moment, her expression already smoothed back down to something almost unreadable.

Only I knew that underneath it, that cipher had just cut a real wound open. And all I could do, for now, was pretend not to have seen exactly where it landed. Not here. Not in front of this many people. Because what we'd dragged off Hook's ship tonight wasn't just a reactor, some materials, and a hold full of stolen goods. It was a line. One that was already reaching straight back into the depths of the Kushima household. And right now, that line was running dangerously hot.