Chương 311: 131.You're a Bit Dominant Tonight? 2

When I woke up, the first thing I felt wasn't pain. It was quiet. The Yukikaze's low-frequency hum — the kind with a real presence that never once admits to having one — ran through the bed frame and the walls at its usual steady rhythm, like some bad-tempered iron beast that had at least agreed to keep breathing normally. The lights weren't fully up yet.

Just a strip of cool morning illumination, falling in at a slant from overhead, cutting the already cramped second-class cabin into something even neater — and leaving even less room to hide. I stared at the ceiling for two seconds, and last night's memories came slamming back all at once, with zero mercy and even less warning. … Right. Humans really shouldn't be allowed to reflect on their lives the second they wake up. I turned my head, agonizingly slowly. Maki was already up.

Standing with her back to me at her locker, sorting through her uniform. Hair half-tied, jacket draped over one arm, her fingers moving with their usual steadiness — steady enough to make you think the woman standing there wasn't the same one who'd nearly reduced me to a full system failure the night before. Infuriating.

The worst part was that I actually caught myself staring at her back for a good long moment, and the first thing that surfaced in my head wasn't tactics, wasn't reports, wasn't the list of fresh disasters waiting for me today. It was— Did she even sleep at all last night? I mentally slapped myself. Hoshino Shimo. Wake up. Your life is already hard enough without you going out of your way to add extra homework. As if she'd felt my gaze, Maki turned around. Our eyes met. For a second, neither of us said anything.

The air felt thin enough that one more word would have torn open everything last night had never quite managed to put away. In the end, she spoke first.

"Awake?"

"… Yeah." I regretted the sound the moment it left my mouth. Too normal. Normal in the specific way that sounds like it's covering something up. Which, fine, I was — the problem was that covering that hard only made it look guiltier. Maki pulled on her uniform, and paused at the second button to ask, mild as anything:"How's your side?" I locked up for half a beat. On the surface, the question was flawless. Any medical officer would nod along — model teammate behavior, checking in on the injured party, commendable.

Unfortunately, she knew, and I knew, exactly how much of last night's unfinished business was packed into that one sentence.

"…Fine." I buried my face back in the pillow for half a second, then muttered into it:"Could you not open the morning with questions engineered to cause cardiac arrest." Maki looked at me, her calm bordering on unfair.

"I'm just confirming whether you can get out of bed."

"Do I sound that fragile to you?"

"Before yesterday, no." She said it.

"Today, that's less certain." I pushed myself up on the edge of the bed, nearly choking outright on that sentence. This woman really was something. She never even raised her voice, and somehow she always found a way to box me into a corner with nothing left to say. If she ever put that talent to work in an interrogation room, her extraction rates would be phenomenal.

Unfortunate for me that she was stationed with the Federal side and sharing a second-class cabin with me instead — which meant I was the only one who ever paid for it. I threw back the covers and swung my feet down. By the time they hit the floor, Maki had already turned, casually picking up the jacket I'd left slung over the chair the night before. She came over and held it out, the motion completely natural. I reached for it. The instant my fingers touched the fabric, she didn't let go.

Her eyes dropped to my collar, lingered there, then she reached up and smoothed out a small fold in the lining that had turned under. Just a small gesture. Small enough that on any other day — any boring, ordinary day — it would've filed itself cleanly under routine teammate maintenance. Unfortunately, ordinary died last night. I didn't dare move even my shoulders, just stood there while she pressed the crease flat and withdrew her hand like nothing had happened.

"Let's go," she said.

"… Oh." Outstanding, Lieutenant Hoshino. You just managed to make a single syllable sound like you'd already lost your entire strategic depth. We left the cabin one after the other. The corridor lights were already up. Early-shift crew and maintenance teams were moving through their sections, and the Yukikaze's particular brand of bastard discipline — doesn't matter how many times you nearly died yesterday, you clock in on time today — was seeping back in around us.

Somewhere down the passage a toolbox clanged against a railing; somewhere else a pressure test was running, a valve letting out one short, clean hiss. Routine like this worked. Worked the way it does when someone reaches in, shoves whatever nearly burned through you the night before back into your uniform pocket, and orders you to square your shoulders and stop embarrassing yourself. I deliberately picked up my pace by half a step.

Maki didn't close the gap and didn't pull me back — she just held a distance behind me that was neither far nor close. It was infuriatingly exact. Not the suffocating closeness of last night, when breathing had taken effort. But nowhere near the loose, each-to-their-own distance of ordinary crewmates, either. At the corner, I nearly missed a step. Not the injury. Just too much garbage stacked up in my head. Maki's hand caught me in the same instant, steady enough that she must have seen it coming.

"Watch your step," she said. The second I found my footing, my ears went hot. I yanked my hand back immediately.

"I was watching."

"Then your condition today is worse than I thought."

"…Maki."

"Mm?"

"You're genuinely insufferable."

"That's not what you were saying last night." I nearly choked on my own spit and spun around to glare at her. Maki walked past me without so much as a flicker, like the line she'd just dropped — the kind capable of putting a person face-first into a bulkhead — had been nothing more than a routine navigation note. This woman was terrifying. Compared to last night's openly line-crossing version of her, this deadpan, perfectly-calibrated version was somehow worse.

Because you couldn't even locate a place to start being angry. By the time the medbay doors slid open, I'd already dragged her outside for three rounds of untethered EVA drift, in my head. Aida was already inside. Back to the door, pulling up last night's biometric logs, the white coat layered over a utility vest so practical it verged on anti-romantic.

The desk held a scan slate, two pain-injector pens in different gauges, and a cup of concentrated black coffee that looked actively hostile to human health and that she clearly adored anyway. The whole picture radiated one very specific professional aura: if I have to scrape any more of you off a deck today, I'm hitting you with your own chart first. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. She glanced at us. Once. No smile. No raised eyebrow.

None of the oh-ho medbay-gossip look. Which, somehow, made me even more uneasy.

"Sit," Aida said. I sat, obedient. Maki took up position beside me, silent. Aida started the exam moving at the speed of someone stripping down an old machine she knew inside and out — pupil response, wound recovery, localized tenderness, muscle tension, sleep data, nerve conduction lag, item after item. No small talk. No reassurance. No traps for me to dig myself into. She just looked at the data, looked at me, looked at the data, looked at me again.

Then she flipped the scan slate over and said, flat:"Your reaction time is 0. 31 seconds slower than your baseline." I frowned.

"You're bringing up 0. 31 seconds?"

"Not on the bridge. On the surface, you pay for that with your life." Aida didn't even lift her head.

"Yesterday I could file it under post-shock residual. Today I can't. Sleep-deprived, sympathetic activity elevated, signs of secondary attention drift. Short-term recall's fine, but your rhythm hasn't fully recovered." She paused, and finally looked up at me.

"Translated into human speech: on the outside, you look like a soldier fit for duty. On the inside, you look like an idiot who just got scraped off an accident site and insisted on walking herself out of the medbay anyway."

"I object to that last part not being medical terminology."

"The fact that you've still got the energy to object is genuinely heartwarming." Aida made a mark on the slate, expression unmoved.

"No first-wave surface deployment for you today. Real-time frontline judgment under high pressure is not recommended. That doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't get to go stand on that surface and see whether you or the planet breaks down first." I sat up almost instantly.

"Hold on, I never said I was pulling out of the third—""I never said you were pulling out of anything." Aida cut me off.

"I said no first-wave deployment. The worst possible thing you could do right now is put yourself somewhere with zero margin for error and try to use what's left of your pathetic pride to prove you're fine." She'd ground that blade too sharp. For a second I genuinely couldn't find a seam to argue back through. Maki, beside me, stayed quiet a few seconds before speaking.

"She can handle in-ship analysis." Aida glanced at her.

"That was the plan already." She dropped the scan slate onto my lap and tapped the numbers with one knuckle.

"Shimo. I don't care what flavor of universal apocalypse was running through your head last night. If you want to push yourself, do it after your shift ends. What the Yukikaze needs is stability. Not emotional heroics." I looked down at the string of numbers and, unexpectedly, felt the urge to laugh. Not a happy laugh. The resigned kind. Last night Maki Kushima had nearly short-circuited my brain in our own cabin. This morning, Aida used cold medical data to hand down a formal ruling of you'd better behave.

This ship's version of tenderness, apparently, always starts by shoving you back into your assigned slot. Strangely, I wasn't even all that resentful about it. No — more precisely, the fact that I knew exactly how resentful I should be was exactly what told me how accurately Aida had just cut.

"Understood," I said, finally. Aida made a small sound of acknowledgment and saved the last entry.

"Good. The one thing you've earned praise for today is that, for once, you managed to say 'understood' without turning it into 'I'll do it my way anyway.'" With that, she turned to grab another shipboard medication list, making it perfectly clear the exam was over and emotional cleanup wasn't included in the service. Very Aida. She had no interest in being anyone's life coach.

Her job was to patch people back into working order; whatever the patient then did to further complicate her own life afterward fell well outside the warranty. By the time Maki and I left the medbay, the chime for mess hours was already sounding from down the corridor.

"Go eat something," Maki said.

"My appetite's in a complicated place right now."

"Go anyway." She said it like it was a law of physics. I didn't have the energy to argue, so I let her steer me toward the mess. The Yukikaze's mess hall maintained a permanent standard best described as: the Federal military clearly tried very hard, and the food still exists mainly to teach you to let go of your desire to eat. This morning's main course was a protein paste in a shade of yellow so honest it felt aggressive, served alongside nutrient blocks and a hot drink. Calling it bad would be uncharitable.

Calling it good would raise a moral question. I'd barely picked up my tray when I spotted Jess at an inner table. Crutch still in hand, the brace on her leg still on, but her color was a shade better than the last couple of days — at least she no longer looked ready to take the entire universe down with her.

Harvey sat beside her, staring blankly into a cup of something black that might have been coffee or might have been a chemical weapon, wearing the expression of a man trying to pinpoint the exact moment in his life he'd personally offended the universe. Lan and Roy sat across the table — one reading a maintenance sequence, one eating, both quiet enough to generate a psychic field labeled don't push me. No sign of D; probably still down in the hangar or the field-gear bay. I stopped, on reflex. Not out of fear.

Just instinctively bracing for the usual dose of sharp mouth I'd already gotten used to. But Jess looked up, swept her eyes between me and Maki once, and said nothing. She just hooked the empty chair beside her with the end of her crutch and dragged it out.

"Sit," Jess said. I froze.

"…That's it?"

"What else were you expecting?" Jess picked up her drink, expression flat.

"Were you hoping I'd stand up and recite my thoughts on last night in the middle of the mess hall?"

"I'm not that far gone."

"Then sit," Jess said.

"Finish eating first. I'm not messing with you today." That sentence was stranger than any teasing could have been. I sat down slowly, and somehow felt even more off-balance than usual. Because I'd just realized: Jess knocking me around with that mouth of hers, I knew how to handle. This kind of abnormal cooperation left me with absolutely nowhere to put my hands. Harvey glanced at me, then at Jess, clearly picking up on something being off, and — with impressive survival instinct — decided not to ask.

He just nudged the data slate a little closer to me instead.

"Last night's toxic-planet recovery data's sorted," Harvey said.

"I cut Craft Two's shield-loss curve together with the surface-blast replay. If you want to look it over, I can throw it up for you now." I looked at him.

"You being this proactive is making me uncomfortable."

"Acting captain did fine yesterday." Harvey shrugged.

"Also, I'd really rather not get that look from Ash again — the one that says 'do you have any idea what you're wasting.'" Lan, without lifting her head, added mildly:"Translation: everyone's decided to try being functioning adults today." Roy slid an extra high-calorie supplement bar onto my tray.

"You're heading up to the bridge after this, right?" he said.

"Eat first." I stared at the bar for a second. That strange feeling rose up again. Not being protected. Not being handled like something made of glass that needed careful cradling. It was — they'd already slotted me straight back into the position of someone we're about to need. No excess comfort. No overdone concern. No "are you okay" repeated so many times it starts sounding like a eulogy. Just data, calories, work, and responsibility, handed back to me like it had never left. That was heavier than comfort.

And it left a lot less room to go soft. Maki sat beside me, eating quietly, not interrupting. Jess really did keep her word — the only time she moved was to hook her crutch out and steady my cup when I nearly knocked my drink over. I glared at her. Jess didn't blink.

"Not messing with you today, for real," Jess said.

"Get the ship steady first." When that line landed, the table went quiet for half a beat. Nobody added anything. Nobody needed to. I took a sip of the drink — temperature perfect, taste exactly like it always did, an industrial filter cartridge given liquid form — and felt something press down, oddly, behind my ribs. Not the bad kind of pressure. More like someone had put something heavy into my hands and said: Hold it. You can carry this.

By the time we reached the bridge, the Yukikaze had fully rolled over into shift change and operational transition. The main display had killed whatever entertainment feed had been running; the course framework, propulsion monitors, resource tables, and internal damage reports layered themselves back up one on top of another. The whole bridge had returned to its default state: a cold, clinical hell entirely unsuited for personal problems. Ash stood at the main console, and he did not look good. Not angry.

Just the specific, worn-down look that belongs to someone who hasn't slept enough, whose brain has been running too long, and who still has to hold the entire ship up regardless. He heard us come in and glanced up once. The look didn't linger. Nothing in it suggested he was about to pull anyone aside for a private word. Good. That was Ash. The day a captain started managing his crew's romantic aftershocks was the day this ship got measurably closer to falling apart.

"Everyone here?" he asked.

"D's still in the hangar. Up in five," Roy answered. Ash nodded, eyes landing on me.

"Hoshino."

"Here."

"Resource recovery from last night's toxic-planet extraction — shield loss, collection-window drift, personnel stress curves. Today you consolidate all of it into a risk baseline for the third planet." He said it clean and fast, with zero apparent interest in hearing my personal reflections on last night's events.

"Akari will open you access to the environmental model. Harvey fills in remaining tolerance on the hull and collectors. Kushima helps you calibrate first-wave surface contingencies." I paused for half a second. Not because of the workload. Because of how much weight the position carried. This wasn't parking me in a safe zone to rest. Wasn't putting me on display as the delicate casualty of the day.

This was dropping me straight into a core analysis seat — one that couldn't afford mistakes, but also didn't require me to be first on the ground. Ash looked at me, tone perfectly flat.

"You made a decent acting captain yesterday." I hadn't even finished exhaling before the next line landed.

"Don't backslide today." …Of course. This man's idea of encouragement always came with a parking ticket stapled to the back of the commendation.

"Understood," I said. Ash looked away, like the answer had never been in question and wasn't worth further discussion. He turned to the others and started handing out assignments, fast.

"Kushima, first-wave field standby. We're not locking in surface versus near-orbital support yet — depends on how the third planet's window structure shakes out. D takes gear and entry planning once he's up. Lan, Roy, finalize the consumption models from the first two planets against remaining fuel stability. Harvey, final confirmation on collector nozzle life and backup modules. I don't want to hit the last planet and find someone's been patching the future together with tape."

Harvey raised a hand, wearing the expression of a man well-practiced at being insulted.

"For the record, that's high-temperature emergency bonding strip. Not duct tape."

"Then don't let me see it in the official report," Ash said. A short ripple of laughter crossed the bridge, and the tension finally cracked, just a little. Jess made her way to the auxiliary seat on her crutch, slower than usual but steady. She didn't meet my eyes — just, once she'd settled in, slid a neatly organized stack of comm-delay logs across to my side of the console. I flipped it open. She'd even flagged every response interval from my acting-command stint yesterday. I looked up at her.

Jess had her head down, adjusting a monitoring panel, like nothing had happened. Even her peace offerings had to look like contraband. Very on-brand for her. Maki came up beside me and pulled up the environmental model window Akari had just unlocked. Her fingers tapped through the air a few times, sorting the layers into the exact order I'd have chosen myself — clean enough it looked like she'd already mapped out which data set I'd reach for first. I glanced at her.

Maki didn't look back, just said, mild:"Don't push for speed today." I almost shot back you weren't exactly slow last night, but some scrap of survival instinct my military career had managed to install kicked in at the last second. I swallowed the suicidal comeback and bent over the model instead. Just then, the bridge door slid open again.

D had finally made it up, still carrying the faint smell of machine oil and cold metal that clung to the hangar — like he'd been pulled straight out of somewhere no normal human should spend long stretches of time in, and dropped into a meeting. He swept the bridge with one look, eyes catching on me, Maki, and Jess in turn for half a second, like he'd caught the faint but definite scent of some shift in the atmosphere. He didn't ask anything. Good.

There were still a few people on this ship who genuinely understood what being an adult meant. Once Ash confirmed everyone was present, he raised a hand and killed the previous operation's display. The main screen went dark for a breath. The whole bridge seemed to hold its air at once.

"All right," Ash said.

"Everyone's here." He looked forward, finger resting on the projection key.

"Let's talk about the third planet."