Chương 368: 160.Hot Potato 1

"Lieutenant Hoshino?" Hedwig had caught me after all. Caught me completely. In that instant, every single person in the lobby — the clearance officers behind the counter, the MPs on duty, the staff who'd been working so hard to pretend they weren't staring — even the sensor heads on the two nearby security drones — seemed to pivot toward me at once. I stood there feeling exactly like a blown cover. Not the glamorous kind, with tragic background music playing underneath.

The unlucky, bottom-tier kind — the one who's halfway out the back door when somebody points straight at her face and calls out her full name.... Fuck. I suddenly had a profound urge to go home and farm vegetables. The young reception officer who'd just been trying to quietly route me toward the Research Wing turned a shade of green you could see from across the room. Not the ordinary this is inconvenient shade.

The kind that comes over a man rapidly calculating whether playing dead right now might still save next year's performance review. I looked at him and, somehow, found enough composure left over to reach out and pat his shoulder.

"Go on," I said. My voice was almost steady.

"I've got this." The kind of loyal-sounding line you can only afford while you're still pretending it's true. Because in five minutes, the person most likely to get thrown under whatever came next would still be me. He looked at me with an expression too complicated to name. He clearly wanted to say something, and clearly knew nothing he said would help. In the end he just gave a small nod, stepped half a pace back, and shot me a look that read exactly like: may the Federation see you safely upstairs. Good.

And with that, we officially entered Phase One. Screening. I have never understood why this particular stretch of Joint Operations Command has to feel like premium border control. You're walking into a building, not emigrating off-world — and yet the procedure runs long enough that one wrong answer could get you deported into deep space.

ID gates, clearance checks, visitor tethering, contraband scans, route isolation, one airtight layer after another — less like a command center, more like the sphincter of civilization itself. I held my wristband up to the scanner first. Beep. Green light. Smooth. No SYSTEM ANOMALY, no IDENTITY PENDING VERIFICATION, no SUBJECT PRESUMED DECEASED — nothing that would've had me smashing my terminal on the spot. I appreciated the mercy. Then the real disaster stepped up.

The screening officer raised his eyes to Hedwig standing in the detection zone. Black coat over her shoulders. Dark uniform pressed razor-straight. The insignia at her chest sitting there as quietly as knives. Gold hair almost hostile in its precision under the lobby's cold-white light. And — worst of all — what she had on was the full, formal dress of a senior Galactic Empire officer. Not similar to it. Not a borrowed aesthetic. Not Imperial-inspired fashion of the day.

The genuine article, worn out loud, like she'd dressed specifically to be looked at. The officer's brain audibly jammed. Not an embarrassing, jaw-drop kind of jam. A very standard, very bureaucratic, half-second freeze — the kind where you can see the gears grinding as he weighs, with real moral seriousness, whether to call security immediately or just follow protocol and ask for a name. I had a petty, uncharitable thought: this was probably the single thing he'd least wanted to walk into today.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. It was also the single thing I least wanted to be responsible for. The universe, clearly, had other plans.

"Name?" He finally got it out. Hedwig was calm. Calm enough that she might as well have been reciting a breakfast order in her own garden, instead of standing at the checkpoint of the Galactic Federation's Joint Operations Command.

"Hedwig von Wittelsbach." His brow creased, very slightly. Yes. That look. The exact look I'd worn the first time I heard that name myself — I've heard this somewhere, it's clearly heavy, and I cannot pull the right file fast enough out of the vast cross-referenced database of politics, military history, diplomacy, royalty, and incoming disaster.

"Occupation?" Hedwig didn't even pause.

"The Galactic Empire's Third—" I slapped my hand over her mouth. Extremely dangerous. Genuinely. This wasn't a social misstep anymore. This was the line between making it into the elevator and not making it anywhere. Letting Hedwig finish that sentence — letting Third turn into Princess at a Federation command checkpoint — would land about as well as lighting a cigarette in a powder magazine. In theory, there might still be time to put it out. In practice, everyone in the room would try to put me out first.

The officer looked up at me. I held an expression that was restrained, civic-minded, and radiating the specific energy of a woman personally trying to save the capital district some administrative overhead, and leaned in, voice low.

"She's Dr. Heinrich von Steiner's granddaughter," I said.

"Here on a special visit." Hedwig's eyes slid sideways toward me from behind my hand. There was a lot packed into that look. The most legible part of it was: you've got nerve. Thanks. I didn't want it either. The officer clearly wasn't fully sold. His face managed to be professional and deeply pained at the same time.

"I'll need to confirm that with the doctor directly—""Of course," I cut in, smooth as if I impersonated royalty's relatives every day of the week.

"I'm heading up to see him anyway. I'll bring her along."

"Lieutenant..." That single word carried the full weight of the institution's last appeal to a person's conscience. I gave him a smile — polite, warm, and very clearly saying you'd better think this through. He was quiet for two seconds. Then he folded.

"... Lieutenant. In that case, this visitor will be tethered to your clearance." Translated: If this blows up, it's on you. Of course it would. I'd known it would end here. I nodded, keeping my face somewhere in the neighborhood of this is entirely reasonable and I do not currently want to walk into a wall. Phase two was easier. Contraband scan. We stepped into the arch and let light cold as a surgical lamp sweep us head to toe.

Hedwig's Imperial uniform stood out even here — the gate seemed to stay lit half a second longer than it should have. The good news: Her Highness at least understood the basic principle of not bringing weapons into a Federation command lobby. Or if she had, they were well above this scanner's pay grade. Either way, we cleared it fast. Then I took the princess and got into the elevator.

The doors slid shut, and the whole lobby — its onlookers, its MPs, its checkpoints, its institutional weight, its live diplomatic incident — was sealed off behind a sheet of brushed metal. Inside, it was just me, Hedwig, and a silence with no good intentions. I watched the floor numbers climb for two seconds before I finally cracked.

"What are you actually doing here?" She stood beside me, coat still resting quietly on her shoulders. She didn't look over right away — first she adjusted the edge of one glove in the door's reflection, unhurried, almost elegant. Only then did she answer.

"I didn't want to come." Said with complete matter-of-factness. So matter-of-fact I wasn't sure whether to doubt her or doubt myself. Hedwig finally turned to look at me.

"The Federation summoned me on its own authority," she said, her tone mild, almost detached.

"Then left me downstairs on its own authority. I imagine they wanted to remind me of my place." Right. The Federation had the nerve. And she had the composure to absorb it, then hit back. Looking at her, I finally understood why someone like this could bend the atmosphere of an entire lobby just by standing in it. It wasn't volume. It wasn't temper. She was simply too used to power — so used to it that when someone tried to put her in her place, her first instinct wasn't to bristle.

It was to wonder whether she should just flip the table on her way out. The corner of Hedwig's mouth moved, barely. Not a smile. More like a blade catching the light at one degree off.

"So I went back," she said.

"Changed into this. And came again." I stared at her. One second. Two. Then, with total sincerity, I arrived at a conclusion. Right. She'd done it on purpose. How considerate. No wonder the lobby had looked like a diplomatic car crash no one wanted to admit they were watching. Hedwig hadn't drifted in passively. She'd walked out, put the full Imperial uniform back on with deliberate care, and returned on her own terms. On an ordinary person, that's called a death wish. On her, it's called a statement.

The most irritating part was that the only real difference between those two labels was how much power was standing behind you.

"You're extremely good at giving people headaches," I said. She was perfectly composed.

"So are you." I had nothing. The doors opened. The Research Wing corridor was quieter than the lobby, and sicker. Not hospital-clean — the particular cold-white air that only grows where order, clearance, technology, and secrecy have all been sealed in together for too long. The walls were smooth to the point of feeling inhuman, data threads flowing silently beneath the surface.

People in research jackets passed at intervals, and every one of them, catching sight of the princess beside me, held their gaze a half-second too long before their training kicked in and they looked away. I understood completely. Most people only need to see a floor like this once. And today I was giving Hedwig von Wittelsbach a personal tour of it. At some point this stops being bad luck. It becomes a structural feature of your life. I walked forward.

Hedwig kept pace, her boots hitting the floor with an infuriatingly steady rhythm.

"This way," I said. And I led the woman who'd just rendered half of Joint Operations Command speechless toward Dr. Heinrich von Steiner's laboratory. I only hoped the rest of today wouldn't get stranger than the part that had already happened. Given my recent statistics, that hope had about the same odds as a volcano developing manners.