Chương 315: 133.Furious Planet 2

I stared at that field of storm crystal, suddenly and fully ablaze, and my mind went quiet in a way that bordered on cold. Under normal circumstances, this kind of thing belongs in the file marked glad we saw it, please do not touch it with your life. The problem was, we weren't operating under normal circumstances.

We were on a blue-white psychotic planet where gravity had seizures, mountains ascended, and the ground looked like it was filing for divorce from God — and that storm-crystal field was sitting exactly within reach of the first wave, glowing like someone had welded the words don't miss this chance straight into the surface.

"Storm-crystal cluster scale is anomalous." Akari's voice ran half a beat faster than usual, but hadn't broken.

"Before the western fissure comes down, estimated local workable window is eleven to fourteen seconds. Past that, we're in high-inversion territory." Eleven to fourteen seconds. Perfect. That length of time was very Yukikaze — not too short, not too long. Just enough to force a decision capable of changing your life, while also being just long enough to end it.

"Hoshino." Ash's voice cut in. Flat. Short. Not remotely interested in sharing the weight of this.

"Call it." Thanks so much, Captain. I finally understood, in that moment, what trust actually weighs. It isn't a hand on your shoulder saying I believe in you. It's the whole ship's breathing pressed down in front of you, and you have maybe a dozen seconds to tell everyone: do we get greedy, or do we get to live. I split the main display into three layers. Layer one: active-indium main-vein cutting progress. Layer two: dynamic model of the storm-crystal eruption zone.

Layer three: the gravity fissure currently bearing down on top of us. Looked at together, there were only two real conclusions. One — secure the primary target, leave the crystal, safest path. Two — gamble on the double haul, take both, but half a beat slow and this planet packages the first wave up and mails them back to us. If this were a tabletop exercise, I'd love to be the mature, sensible adult here.

Unfortunately, this was the Yukikaze, and the Yukikaze's reality was: we weren't just short on the resources to survive. We were short on the future that would let this ship actually run. I gritted my teeth and slammed my hand onto the comm key.

"First wave, listen up." The bridge went dead silent.

"Primary target unchanged. Active indium first." I spoke fast — fast enough that even I knew this sentence needed a blade right behind it, or my half-second of hesitation would've cost everyone's heartbeat for nothing.

"But—" I circled the nearest cluster in the crystal field and zoomed in.

"We take one bite. That one. Nothing else." On the main display, I cut away ninety percent of the blazing crystal field, leaving only the single cluster nearest the vehicle's forward-right position — closest, fully formed, most likely to be broken loose before the fissure came down.

"D, keep cutting the main vein. Ash covers. Maki, fourth fissure, forward right — take the nearest column. You do not go past twelve seconds. At twelve, whatever's in your hands, everyone is back in that vehicle. No exceptions." I didn't stop to breathe before pushing the second layer of orders straight down.

"Repeat — this is not a bonus round. This is a smash-and-grab. Anyone who reaches for a second column, I will personally write your name into the mission report under the heading: Died From Not Knowing How to Read a Watch." Half a beat of silence on the open channel. Then Jess cracked first.

"Vicious. Act—" She caught herself, and obediently corrected.

"—Lieutenant Hoshino has finally learned how to play the villain today."

"Shut up and watch the clock for me."

"Happy to serve." Ash didn't comment on whether the call was elegant. Didn't say good thinking — the one thing that would have thrown my whole balance sideways. He just said, clean:"First wave copies. Executing." Maki's voice followed right behind him.

"Fourth fissure, forward right. Twelve-second cap. Copy." She said it so evenly I wanted to pick up the comm unit and knock myself in the forehead with it. Please. You're acknowledging an order to go wrestle crystal out of a gravity field having a breakdown — not confirming a lunch allocation. Saying it like that just makes it look like I'm the only one on this bridge whose heart got replaced with two malfunctioning pumps. Unfortunately, I had no grounds to argue that point.

Because I was the one who'd given the order. Beside the vehicle, the multi-function arm was cutting hard into the active indium's outer shell. Every beam that struck lit the whole vein up from inside, like a nerve being scraped open against its will. Blue light ran along the rock seams, debris and glowing metal dust flying in every direction — even the camera lens looked like it might get scorched by the planet's temper. And Maki was already moving.

She left the vehicle's right-side cover position, running across ground that swung between weightless and crushing with every step, toward the fourth fissure. Her exo-leg braces and gravity anchors lit in sync, keeping the first low-G surge from sweeping her off her feet. She moved like a blade held low — fast, steady, exact, not a wasted motion in her. … Infuriating. Genuinely infuriating.

The woman who'd nearly emptied my head last night was now being unreasonably magnificent on a planet that threw mountains into the sky. Was there a harder working environment anywhere in the known universe? I didn't think so.

"Clock's running," Jess said. Her voice had been stripped down clean this time — thin as a blade, none of her usual deliberate drift.

"Twelve." Maki vaulted a half-floating shard of fractured ferrite, landing exactly in the gap between two rocks drifting in opposite directions.

"Eleven." D's progress was closing on the vein's inner layer; the active-indium blue light was starting to break through in wide sheets. Ash stood at the vehicle's left flank, weapon and anchor both aimed outward, eyes locked on the shadow of the entire western fissure band.

"Ten." I pulled the engine-room sub-window down to the corner, just about to recheck the timing ratios, when Borodin's face shoved itself into frame on its own. Perfect. Even fate on this ship knew exactly when to be inconvenient.

"Engine room, fast report." The second Borodin spoke, the background noise washed over the bridge — metal on metal, high-pressure venting, the grind of some heavy equipment being dragged by a crane. Loud, with real industrial dignity.

"Old core past halfway torn down. Main interface for the new Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant is clear. Harvey — tell them." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The feed jolted, and Harvey's face pushed into view, hair standing on end like he'd just had an unpleasant romance with a live circuit, grease and exhaustion fighting for space on his face.

"Short version!" Harvey shouted, clearly fighting the engine room's noise for airspace.

"We're one batch of active indium away from feeding the Kamikaze's conditioning sequence! Purity and volume hold, and Chief Engineer Borodin starts the first interface pass between the new plant and the warp stack!"

"Translate," D said, flat, from the surface. Harvey didn't hesitate.

"Translation: every glowing chunk of blue treasure you cut loose down there is one step closer to upgrading the Yukikaze from an oversized kettle into a ship that can actually do point-to-point jumps." Borodin added a line, tone flat enough to pass for a pre-written epitaph.

"Translated one more time: don't come back empty-handed. Or I might get very tempted to feed the whole team into the furnace instead."

"Chief, your idea of a pep talk has real old-world charm," I said.

"Effective is enough," Borodin said.

"Eight," Jess called, steady. Good. Engineering had slid that knife in at exactly the right second. Because I wasn't just watching an extraction anymore. I was watching the Yukikaze's heart. Those glowing veins on the surface weren't just mission targets. They were the ignition — the old hull getting pushed forward on new blood, the actual possibility of jumping clean out of this sector, close enough now that I could almost see it. That would make anyone greedier. It would also force anyone colder.

Which was exactly why I was more certain than ever that my call had been the right one. One bite. Then out. No coveting anything left on a god's table.

"Seven." Maki reached the fourth fissure. The storm crystal was bigger up close than it had looked from a distance — nearly half a person's height, glowing at a wrongness that made it look like a shard of lightning-struck ice jammed straight into a rock crack. She locked one hand onto an anchor point at the fissure's edge, deployed the multi-tool with the other, and the cutting head flared to life.

"Six." The first strike landed, and the entire crystal let out a thin, sharp, high-frequency shriek. Not the sound of stone breaking. Something closer to a thing screaming in raw displeasure. My spine went numb.

"…I strongly dislike that particular frequency."

"Logged," Roy said.

"Second entry in Lieutenant Hoshino's trauma catalogue: ore that screams."

"Thank you for building me a reference library."

"Five." On D's side, the active-indium main vein finally split open, the core coming free in the extraction arm's grip like liquid blue fire. The vehicle's rear storage bay opened automatically and swallowed the primary target whole. Good. At least the day's most important prize was finally coming in. Then Akari's voice spiked, hard.

"Gravity wave anomaly — no, not the western band, it's a local collapse rebound — Hoshino!" My eyes narrowed. Gravity around the fourth fissure was surging. Not climbing. Like someone had grabbed that one patch of ground and was shoving it straight down toward the planet's core.

"Maki, out!" I heard it leave my mouth before I'd decided to say it. Half a beat too late. That half-beat was short. Short enough, in numbers, to be the time it takes a gravity coefficient to flip from 1. 2 to 4. 3. Short enough, in human terms, to be the gap between hearing the alarm and the world landing its first blow before your body has even finished translating the fear. On the main display, Maki's body dropped. Not a stumble. Her whole frame pressed down on the spot by an invisible palm.

She'd only just cracked the first layer of the crystal's base when the spiking gravity drove her knees into the ground. The exo-leg braces let out a metallic groan that set my teeth on edge; the anchors bit hard into the surface; the rubble around her cracked outward in a starburst pattern. My heart clenched to match.

"Maki—" Her name was out of my mouth before I'd decided to say it, and the second I heard it back, I knew: it sounded less like control than anything I'd let slip all day. No time to sit with that. Because she hadn't actually gone down. Her left hand had already caught the ground. Her right still hadn't let go of the tool.

She hung there, half-kneeling under the weight, shoulders and spine pulled so taut it was frightening to watch — like a bow drawn to its limit by an invisible steel cable wound the entire length of her.

"4. 3G — still climbing!" Akari said.

"D, cover left!" Ash took the call instantly.

"Copy!" D swung the vehicle's body hard sideways, trying to use the hull to shield her from the worst of the flying debris. But this wasn't a matter of bullets or wind pressure. This was the entire planet deciding it didn't like her, and pressing down to make that clear. My fingers were dead against the comm key, palm soaked through. I wanted to call her back. Wanted to call the whole thing off. Wanted to take that twelve seconds, one bite order and swallow it whole. I couldn't.

Because first — I wasn't only bringing Maki home right now. And second — the part that hurt worse — she hadn't let go. Under weight that was nearly nailing her into the ground, Maki forced the crystal tool another inch deeper. I nearly put my own forehead through the console. What in the hell was wrong with this woman?!

"Maki! Drop the crystal!" I shouted. She didn't answer right away. Not defiance. At four-plus G, saying even one extra word meant squeezing it out from under her own ribs first. All that came back on the channel was one short, hard intake of breath. Then her voice, pressed almost to nothing.

"…One more second." My blood pressure wanted to flip right along with the planet.

"Denied! Fall back — now—""Shimo." Ash cut straight in. One word. No raised voice. No lecture. And it landed like a hand pulling me back from the edge of something I hadn't noticed I was falling toward, straight into the command seat. I bit down hard. Right. I wasn't her bunkmate right now. Wasn't the woman she'd nearly reduced to surrender last night. Wasn't some ordinary idiot who got to fall apart just because someone she cared about was being pinned to the ground by a planet's core.

Right now, I was the bridge's analyst. Right now, I had to bring the whole team home intact. I dragged my eyes back to the data, and held them there. The gravity peak around the fourth fissure was rolling into its second tier, but there was an extremely short low-G rebound pocket just behind the vehicle's right flank. One and a half seconds wide. Positioned so awkwardly it felt like a joke this planet had coughed up by accident on a rare good day. Not enough to pull the whole team out.

Enough to get Maki off the pressure point. I switched channels on the spot.

"Maki, listen to me." My voice went flat this time — flat as the back of a blade.

"Three o'clock. Half-pace. Don't stand — fall sideways. Drop your right shoulder first, let the anchor's release sling you clear." Akari came in right behind me.

"Rebound window opens in 1. 4 seconds. Lasts 1. 7!" I kept pushing.

"D, the second she's clear, bring the vehicle up to catch her. Ash, cover her left. Maki—" I paused for less than half a beat.

"Don't push it right now. Do what I say." The open channel went quiet for a moment. Then she answered. Short. Hoarse. Clear.

"…Okay." Damn it. One completely ordinary syllable, and something in my chest nearly gave way.

"Rebound now!" Akari called. On the main display, the gravity streamlines around the fourth fissure snapped upward, hard, like a fist yanking a rug out from underneath. That pitiful 1. 7-second window actually opened. Maki didn't try to force herself upright. She did exactly what I'd told her — let her right shoulder drop the weight first, rolling sideways along the edge of the fissure. The gravity anchors disengaged in that same instant, the sudden release slinging her clear of the pressure point.

D swung the vehicle across almost simultaneously, the side plating scraping through flying debris to close the gap. Ash fired a securing anchor into the ground on her left, hauling her into cover a half-second before the next wave of turbulence could sweep her away. The next second, the patch of ground she'd just been kneeling on collapsed entirely. 4. 6G. The whole rock face caved in like a god had driven a fist straight through it, rubble and blue light sucked inward together.

The storm-crystal column she'd cracked snapped clean off at the base, the upper half tumbling into the air, blazing like a particularly malicious firework. I stared at it, my whole back already soaked through.

"Maki!" My voice still didn't hold. She answered faster this time, though her breathing was clearly wrecked.

"…Still alive." Right. That has to be one of the top contenders for the world's most effective way to make someone feel relieved and want to strangle her in the very same breath. Beside me, Jess let out a breath, like she'd been holding it just as long as the rest of us.

"Congratulations," she said.

"We can temporarily skip adding 'Maki Kushima, killed on her knees by a planet' to the mission report. That would've made for an ugly read."

"Shut up," Akari and I said, almost in unison. Jess blinked and threw both hands up.

"Fine." But the faint curve at the corner of her mouth didn't fully disappear. Not schadenfreude. More like — thank god, at least everyone still has enough left in them to be annoyed at each other. The engine room cut in right on cue. Harvey's voice came through louder than before, like he'd caught the surface feed too and half his engineer's soul had fled out through his nose.

"Just saying — if you're going to risk four-plus G for that thing, you'd better fill the active indium tanks first! I'm halfway through gutting the old boiler up here, and if the new plant ends up with nothing to run on, I will genuinely cry!" Borodin added a cold line from behind him.

"He's loud when he cries."

"Chief, is this really not the moment to back me up?!"

"The only thing I want to back right now is getting the new core lit," Borodin said.

"As for you lunatics on the surface — take your first bite and get out. The Kamikaze needs fuel. It doesn't need martyrs." Blunt. Exactly what I needed. Because it yanked me straight out of the emotional tailspin I'd nearly gone into, back onto the only thread that mattered. Right. We weren't here to look impressive. Weren't here to prove who was least afraid of dying. We were here to pry the Yukikaze's next leg of flight out of this glowing lunatic's hands. I drew a breath and pulled the full picture back up.

First block of active indium: secured. Storm crystal: one section broken loose. First wave: all alive. Gravity fissure: still rolling south. Window remaining — not much. Not much, as in: I could already hear this planet grinding its teeth. I hit the comm.

"First wave, listen up." My voice had finally found the line it needed.

"Storm crystal — take only the piece that already broke off. If you can reach it, take it. If not, leave it. One more cut on the main vein, and the second it's enough, you're out. This planet's already losing its patience. We are under no obligation to humor it." On the open channel, Ash came back with a single "Copy." D let out a grunt that probably counted as agreement. Maki's line held for half a second before she answered, low:"Received."

Her voice still carried the rough edge of someone who'd just been ground down by several seconds of super-gravity — like metal scraped against a whetstone. It made my chest tighten again, treacherously, without my permission. Enough. Eyes locked on the data, I made myself a very serious promise: If we made it back from this alive, I was going to sit down and have a proper talk with Maki Kushima. Not for any noble reason.

Mainly because if she kept making my heart race and stop in the same breath like this, I was eventually going to have to file a formal request with the Federal government for additional psychological support, on entirely personal grounds. Assuming, of course, we lived long enough to bleed this planet dry first.