Chương 306: 129.Jess's Playful Provocation 2

She dragged those two words out — soft, slow, exactly like someone who knew she was standing right on the line and thoroughly enjoying the view. I turned my head away and refused to look at her. Because if I kept looking, there was a real chance I'd do something that compromised the structural integrity of the bridge equipment. On the main display, the first fast-extraction cycle was wrapping up. Sodium yield cleared the safety threshold; the high-altitude collector hauled back its first usable batch of gas.

The fog was still churning, the acid rain bands still shifting, the whole planet still looked like a vat of industrial poison built specifically to boil crew members alive. But at least our first cut had gone clean — nothing had taken a bite out of us yet. I exhaled and forced my attention all the way back where it belonged.

"Craft One, confirm shield-membrane loss."

"Craft Two, report fuel-bay filtration values."

"Maki's team, don't push deeper into the spore cluster — that yellow patch on the left doesn't look right—" I kept the orders coming, one after another, and my voice slowly leveled back out. The heat in my face did not. Worse still, I knew perfectly well the culprit beside me was probably still smiling, and I had to keep pretending she hadn't just knocked me completely sideways. This, I decided, was the real test of being acting captain. Not the toxic fog. Not the acid rain. Not the auxiliary fuel refinement.

It was getting your mouth ambushed by a woman on a crutch while the shipwide comm was live, and having to keep issuing orders like nothing had happened at all. The universe, clearly, has never once run on fairness. And Jess was obviously loving every second of it. She leaned against the auxiliary console and finally, unhurried, added:"Relax." I ground my teeth and kept my eyes forward.

"I am the opposite of relaxed." She laughed.

"I was going to say" — she was looking at the projection of the toxic planet now, voice dropped low — "you're cuter than I expected, blushing like that." My fingers stalled on the console. Then, in the flattest, calmest, most acting-captain voice I could manage, I said:"Jess McCallow. The second Ash is back, I am personally recommending he actually put you in the brig."

"Sure." She blinked at me, all innocence.

"But you won't."

"How do you know?" She looked at me. This time the look sat closer than before. And more real.

"Because you'd miss me." … Fuck. This woman is going to get herself killed by her own mouth one of these days. And the odds are good I'll be the one holding the knife. On the main display, the fog columns rose from the planet's surface like rotting yellow-green bones. I stared at the retrieval-route map and forced myself back into my lane.

The ghost of that touch at the corner of my mouth was still there, like someone had jabbed a hot needle into a nerve and then walked off without a second thought — and I couldn't even lift a hand to wipe it away, because Craft One, Craft Two, the surface team, and the entire Yukikaze all needed me not to suffocate in my own blush.

"Surface Team One, hold B-7," I said, doing my level best to sound like a functioning acting captain and not someone who'd nearly flatlined on open comms courtesy of a kiss.

"Pressure's climbing in the right-side spore patch — don't cut too deep yet—" Static crackled briefly in my ear. Then Maki's voice slid in.

"… Bridge." She stopped. Half a beat. Short enough to be entirely reasonable — the kind of pause that wouldn't earn a second glance in any comm log. But my conscience was dirty, and that half-beat landed in my ear like a very precisely placed knife. Then, perfectly level:"Repeat last order." A chill ran down my spine. Shit. Did she hear something? No — think straight. Fog activity shifting, signal degrading, bridge echo, my own voice glitching for a second — Maki asking for a repeat is completely reasonable.

Very reasonable. So reasonable that if I panicked now, I'd basically be confessing out loud: hi, yes, I just suffered a non-tactical assault on the bridge. … The problem was, the non-tactical assault in question had clearly heard it too. And she was delighted.

"Oh, no," Jess murmured next to my chair, low, gleeful, pitched exactly like a feather finding the one spot you can't afford to be tickled.

"You think she caught it?"

"Shut up." I ground the words out through my teeth. I drew breath to repeat the order in the steadiest voice I owned, and Jess leaned in again. Not a kiss this time. Worse. Barely a touch at all — the edge of her teeth grazing my earlobe, or something close to it, an exhale with deliberate malice in it, landing exactly where I had the least room to spare. I flinched, full-body. A sound came out of my throat. Thin. Short. Humiliating.

Light enough that I wanted to reach back in time and strangle whoever had just made it. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Because — humiliatingly — it landed almost exactly like the small, startled sound a kitten makes. My vision went black around the edges. Not the fainting kind of black. The social-death kind. Jess came alive off that sound.

Her breath stayed right at my ear, her voice carrying every ounce of the delight of someone who knows exactly how indefensible she is and doesn't care.

"Comm's still open, you know," she murmured, then dragged the next four words out, one syllable at a time.

"Act. Ing. Cap. Tain." My whole face went up in flames. Not just my ears this time — the heat surged from my neck all the way up, hot enough that if the console had thermal imaging running, it probably would have flagged me as a new anomaly rising off the planet's surface. And the comm was still waiting. I clamped my breathing down, locked my eyes on the display, dug my fingers into the edge of the console, and — with a level of willpower I felt fully entitled to a medal for — opened my mouth again.

"Re — repeat order." I gave myself two-tenths of a second to steady my voice, for all the good it did.

"Surface Team One, hold B-7, do not enter the main column. Right-side spore pressure rising — fall back twenty meters, route below the secondary wind band. Craft Two, delay ascent ten seconds, hold collectors at seventy percent, don't take the front of the eruption head-on." Silence on the comm again. I genuinely wanted to fire myself into deep space after this. Then Maki came back.

"Copy." Another half-beat pause. Not long. Just exactly long enough.

"… Confirmed. Executing B-7." I was done for. She'd definitely heard something. Or at the very least, she'd heard that something was wrong with me. I locked my eyes on the yellow-green mess ahead like my life depended on it, pouring every ounce of survival instinct I had into keeping my voice and hands steady, refusing to let my mind wander anywhere that would get someone killed.

Beside me, Jess had stepped back half a pace, leaning against her crutch, wearing the exact expression of someone who's just committed a crime and is thoroughly at peace with it. I now understood, on a deep and personal level, why some people prioritize eliminating their own allies on the battlefield.

"Jess McCallow." I kept my voice low. At this point my mouth was probably the only organ in my body that hadn't fully melted down.

"Right here, Acting Captain." Fast, and she made even that sound obedient. I turned and glared at her.

"Do you feel like you haven't been hurt enough?"

"Not even a little." She blinked, the picture of innocence — the innocence of someone who'd just casually walked off with a chunk of your soul and was acting like she'd only been passing through.

"I just wanted to check you still had normal reactions."

"How about I show you a few very abnormal ones, right now?"

"Wow." Her eyebrow went up, smile turning a shade worse.

"You put it like that, I might get the wrong idea."

"Then start getting the wrong idea, and shut your mouth while you're at it." She laughed once — and, finally, stopped trying to set my ear on fire. … Finally. Because if she pulled something like that again, I seriously doubted I could still say "route below the secondary wind band" and sound like a trustworthy acting captain — instead of some pathetic idiot who'd just had her weak point exposed and was now doing her best impression of someone with no weaknesses at all.

Unfortunately, the universe has never once agreed to pause its professional torment just because you're busy humiliating yourself on a personal level. A block of red flared up on the right side of the main display. Akari's voice cut in immediately.

"Bridge, fog density spiking ahead of Craft Two — port-side viewport is starting to corrode!" Something snapped tight in my chest. I was back in work mode before she'd even finished the sentence.

"Don't cut through — climb." I pulled up the wind-field map.

"Harvey, drop collector pressure twenty percent, don't get greedy this pass. D, surface team fall back southwest fifteen meters — that right-side spore cluster's glowing wrong—""Got it." D's voice stayed steady. Maki came in a beat later.

"Fissure on the southwest surface. Possible pre-eruption sign." Her voice sounded completely normal this time. Too normal. Normal enough to make me want to die a little more. Because it meant either she hadn't heard a thing, or she'd heard everything and simply chosen not to deal with it right now. The second option was worse — it meant she'd quietly filed away something I had zero desire to face, ready to pull it back out whenever she felt like it. Great.

So now, on top of acid rain, toxic fog, melting equipment, and possible extraction failure, I also had to defend against some future moment when Maki Kushima would deliver me straight to social cremation with a single calm sentence. Life really was getting richer by the minute.

"Bridge?" Akari again.

"Confirm — is Craft Two aborting this gas window?" I shoved the noise back down and locked onto the numbers. Fog density really was running above projection, and the collector's shield-wear curve was climbing. Push through, and we might scrape out a little more radon — at the cost of the outer shielding, maybe the whole collector along with it. Ash wasn't here. Which meant the call was mine. I took a breath.

"Abort this window," I said.

"Craft Two, pull up, save the hardware — don't try to out-crazy this rock. Surface team, grab the first sodium batch while you can and get out. Don't get greedy."

"Copy." This time the replies came back tight and in sync. And somewhere in that instant, I settled again. Because no matter how humiliated I'd just been, no matter how badly I wanted to evaporate on the spot or throw the woman next to me out an airlock, the facts hadn't moved: I was the one watching. The one listening. The one deciding.

The people down there had handed me their lives — not because I didn't blush, and not because I couldn't be knocked off balance, but because even when I lost a beat, I could still drag the rhythm back. The realization landed suddenly, and without asking permission. But it did drop that hot, shameful knot in my chest down a notch, turning it into a different kind of heat — one I could actually use. Jess had probably noticed too. She went quiet.

Not completely quiet — the kind of quiet where she finally shelved the mischief and started actually watching the boards. Leaning on her crutch by the auxiliary console, she studied a secondary sensor window for a few seconds, then spoke.

"Bottom-left yellow patch is spreading." I switched over immediately. She was right. A fungal cluster that had only been faintly flickering was now pulsing and swelling inside the fog — like a whole field of toxic lung tissue gearing up for a collective sneeze.

"That's not a normal spore cluster." The wickedness was gone from Jess's voice now — what was left was clean, assessing.

"If it blows all at once, Maki's team is sitting right downwind." Something cold ran through me. I keyed the channel instantly.

"Surface team, cancel approach on the lower-left yellow patch, southwest. Maki, cut ten degrees north — now. That cluster's about to go." What answered was an unusually short pause. Then Maki, level as ever:"Copy. Cutting ten degrees north, clearing out." There was nothing in that sentence. No follow-up. No extra weight. No probing. And somehow that made it worse, not better.

Like someone who'd clearly seen something, and had quietly set it aside — waiting for the moment you finally cracked, or for the thing to grow too big to keep pretending it wasn't there, before she'd actually pick it up. … God. I was starting to genuinely understand why some people would rather deal with acid rain and toxic fog than with feelings. At least the first two show up on the instruments. The second one only ever shows up inside a person — and nobody's ever printed a maintenance manual for that.

Beside me, Jess let out a soft huff of a laugh, like she'd just walked straight through the mess in my head and taken inventory.

"Relax," she said, low.

"I'm not messing with you right now." I gave her a sideways look.

"That sentence has zero credibility coming from you."

"I mean it." She tipped her chin toward the front.

"Look after your bridge first, Acting Captain." … Damn it. Acting reasonable just made it harder to figure out whether I was still allowed to hold the grudge. On the main display, Maki's team cleared the downwind side of the anomalous cluster. A few seconds later, the whole yellow mass ruptured at once, like it had been jabbed with a thousand invisible needles, blasting out a thick wall of toxic fog that swallowed the ground they'd just vacated. Two seconds slower and they'd have been bathing in it.

I watched the yellow cloud churn, cold sweat crawling slowly up my spine.

"That was close," I said quietly.

"Yeah." Jess was still watching the same feed.

"You called it right." Quietly said. But I heard it. And something in my chest dipped when I did — then steadied. Because what her mouth had done earlier really had been wicked. But this was just as real. She wasn't only here to knock me sideways. She was also, genuinely, watching the same front I was — helping me keep this ship on a road that still led home. Which made everything more complicated. And worse. Because it's one thing to hate a bastard who flirts with you.

It's another thing entirely — the actually lethal thing — to discover that same bastard is also reliable. I ground my teeth and pulled my eyes back to the data.

"Craft Two, wait for the next stable wind window before you cut back in. Surface team, secure what you've already collected, don't push it. This garbage rock isn't worth trading your lives for a few extra tanks of gas." Replies came back one after another through the comm. The rhythm caught and held. And somewhere in the middle of a ship's worth of toxic fog, acid rain, corrosion readouts, and emotional wreckage, I'd managed to piece myself back into something that could function as an acting captain.

My ears were still burning, though. And the culprit beside me, after roughly one full minute of actually behaving, opened her mouth again — with absolutely no sense of self-preservation.

"Though—" Every alarm I owned went off at once.

"Think very carefully before you finish that sentence." Jess kept her eyes on the main display, the corner of her mouth curving.

"That sound you made earlier. Genuinely cute." I closed my eyes. Fine. Great. Once this op was over, I really was going to go ask Ash if I could borrow the brig for a day. Intended use: locking Jess in it. Or locking myself in it. Either way, somebody was going down.