Chương 298: 126.Naked Malice 1

[Maki Kushima's Perspective] The instant D physically dragged me out, the first thing I felt wasn't pain. It wasn't the heat either. It was humiliation. Not because his grip was too hard — though it was, exactly the way you'd manhandle an uncooperative piece of metal cargo — but because I knew, with total clarity, that he was right. That was the part that made me furious.

"Let go of me!" I said it through my teeth.

"No." D didn't even turn his head. His voice came through the helmet and the wind-noise, hard as welded steel plate.

"You go back now, that's just one more person we have to pull out." I tried to break free. I didn't manage it. This Scorching Cadmium Planet's 1. 25G had a particular gift for kicking you while you were down. Aboard ship you could still fake competence. On the ground, gravity had you by the back of the neck, forcing you to admit you were nothing but meat that happened to think a little.

Every step felt like driving my entire self — suit, filters, cooling pack, magazines, tool kit, all of it — straight down into the crust like a nail. My legs weren't legs anymore. They were two lead-filled columns of obligation. And the storm around us didn't feel like weather. It felt like malice on a planetary scale. The charred ground stretched under a dark red sky, warped into one continuous sheet of black iron. The cooled lava channels in the distance were scars the world had left on itself.

The air was choked with metallic dust, the sulfur thick enough to feel like someone had burned an entire steel mill down to ash and packed it straight into my lungs to stir. My helmet filter whined harder by the second. The heat warning in the corner of my HUD climbed notch by notch, a badly mannered countdown eager to remind me: congratulations, you're still alive, and that's becoming less true every second. I looked back.

The structure half-buried in the charred ore vein was already just a warped silhouette in the heat haze. Around the collapsed entrance, metallic-colored dust still rose, like something underground had exhaled a mouthful of iron-tainted breath. And Jess had gone in there — no orders, no confirmation, not even the bare minimum self-awareness to register this is clearly a terrible idea — and simply thrown herself through. My first feeling toward her wasn't gratitude. It was anger. Stupid. Reckless. Full of herself.

The kind of person who treats her own life like a lighter to flick on and off for effect — that type is usually either a hero, or the one person on the team everyone secretly wants to strangle. The problem with Jess was that she was remarkably good at being both at once. What actually turned my chest cold was that Shimo had gone in after her. That was the part I couldn't stay calm about. If it had only been Jess, I would have ground my teeth, kept a tally, and waited to scream at her once she made it back alive.

But the second Shimo went through that entrance, something in my skull took a very precise hit — not loud, but exact, like being struck once with a wrench. I knew that wasn't ordinary teammate anxiety. That knowledge was more unpleasant than the storm.

"D, let go." I said it a second time, quieter now, because the wind was too loud to justify wasting emotion on volume.

"I'm going back."

"No."

"I'm not asking you."

"Neither am I." He finally stopped and turned. The dark red sky caught across his visor, turning his already unfriendly face into something like a regulation tombstone. He raised a hand and pointed at my HUD. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. External temperature climbing. Visibility dropping. Wind speed data bleeding red.

"Thirty more seconds and outside is an oven," D said.

"You want to die, I won't stop you. You want to drag everyone's locator beacon and mission log down with you, I'll knock you out first."

"Have you always been this bad at talking to people?"

"Depends who I'm talking to."

"Then you can shut up now."

"When we're back on the ship." Unfortunately, people who shut up at moments like this tend to die earlier too, so he didn't. Half dragging, half shielding me, he pulled us back along a ridge of charred rock the wind had turned into something close to a blade. Every time a thermal gust swept through, the world in my visor crumpled like paper. The metallic particulates drifting in the air caught the dark red light and flickered — pretty, in the way of the universe scattering glitter.

A shame that breathing it in wouldn't make you a princess. It would make you an anatomy exhibit. I looked back one more time. I couldn't see the entrance anymore. Something settled into my stomach in that moment, heavier than anything this planet could have produced. I hated Jess's unilateral decision. I hated even more that I knew exactly why she'd gone in — and that half the reason was probably Shimo. And I had no right to be angry about that.

Because if I had been the one to charge in, Shimo would have followed me too.... Just thinking that burned through another layer of my rationality, even on a planet this hot. By the time we stumbled back to the temporary deployment point, the thermal storm had fully formed. The Yukikaze's surface relay antenna stood behind a relatively flat stretch of fused rock, two transport soldiers pressing the equipment down to keep the wind from tearing it loose.

The whole position looked like the least promising doomsday campsite imaginable: red-black sky in every direction, ground hot enough to cook through boot soles, and everyone still holding their instruments with perfectly straight faces, pretending this was a professional field operation and not a group participation event in creative ways to roast to death.

"Got a signal!" a comms soldier shouted. I was at the console almost before the word finished. What came up wasn't clean audio. It was a shredded data packet. The identifier was one I knew better than my own reflection — Shimo's personal terminal. The packet had been refracted by the storm and bounced off underground metal strata; the contents read like something a dog had chewed and spat back out, but a few fragments still assembled:... Yukikaze... acknowledge... Imperial facility... medical section...

Jess injured... entrance collapsed... biological... The last segment was a string of coordinate corrections. She was alive. At least, she had been when she sent it. My grip on the console went white-knuckled, the lining of my gloves heating from the friction. The weight that had settled in my chest since the collapse didn't disappear. It just stopped being a stone and became a bar of red-hot iron. Ash's voice cut into the channel.

"Signal received. Sending confirmation." Even through the static, his manner hadn't changed — calm enough to make you want to throw him into the storm just to test whether that composure was actually fireproof. The comms soldier replied at once. D dropped a locator module onto the table beside me, as casually as discarding cheap scrap metal.

"Underground structure will eat most of the signal," he said.

"But their equipment should still pick up a shortwave return. Assuming it's still alive."

"The people matter more than the equipment," I said. D looked at me once. The look meant: I know. You don't need to announce common sense like a manifesto. Ash's orders came through the channel.

"All surface personnel, contract to the lander perimeter. Minimum external activity. Maki, take over position corrections. D, outer perimeter. Everyone else, prep the second set of penetrating scanners. No forced excavation before the storm peaks and passes." I answered almost before he finished.

"That's not acceptable. By the time it passes, conditions down there could—""I know," Ash cut in. Two words. The two most infuriating words he owns, because they usually mean he hasn't just understood — he's already finished the rest of your sentence in his head, ahead of you.

"Force the dig now, and the collapse face fails a second time," he said.

"You want them rescued. Not buried more neatly." Fine. That was even more infuriating. Also correct. I closed my eyes, forced the anger back down my throat, and took over the position data. Once the coordinates overlaid the geological survey, the outline of the half-buried structure drew itself out — not a natural shaft, not a standard outpost. A multi-level facility, abnormally deep, with clearly deliberate signal shielding. The outer shell read as medical or maintenance space.

The interior showed denser containment walls, an independent power ring, and blast doors far heavier than any mining base would ever need. D swore under his breath.

"What?"

"This isn't a temporary research post." He was staring at the scan.

"This is somewhere built to keep things locked away for a long time." I didn't answer. Because I'd seen it too. And the first thing that surfaced in my head when I saw those structures wasn't the Empire. It was the Kushima family's internal line. That made my stomach hurt considerably more. If the thread connecting the Kushima merchant ship and the Empire ultimately ran to something like this — then this wasn't just smuggling. Wasn't just gray-market trading.

Wasn't just selling military-spec hardware to the wrong buyers. It was dragging the entire family into a pit that would rot, bleed, and stink all the way from the history books to a tribunal bench.

"Maki." Ash said my name again.

"You still with me?"

"Yes."

"Send the return." I drew a breath of filtered, mechanically tinged air, and pushed the signal back underground. Yukikaze acknowledges. Repeat, Yukikaze acknowledges. Maintain low power. Your position is marked. Don't push it. Don't die. The last two lines were almost certainly Ash's own addition. Just as irritating as ever. Just as effective. I watched the confirmation frame blink out, and for the first time found myself hoping — very specifically — that the insufferable bastard's math was right this time.

Because if even he couldn't calculate a way through this, things were going to look very ugly. And ugly was the one thing I wasn't short of right now.