Chương 369: 160.Hot Potato 2

Steiner's lab was big. Not the room has good proportions big. The kind of big where you step inside and instantly understand: whatever this place cost could have funded several quiet, law-abiding lifetimes on Platinum Bridge Street. The ceiling ran high enough to feel inhuman. Cold-white lighting traced deep into the space along curved rails, lighting the whole room like a sterile temple where feelings weren't permitted.

The walls were layered with semi-transparent data screens, blue and white streams sliding silently through them, like the room's nervous system had been left exposed. On the left, a row of equipment I had no business touching. On the right, sample cabinets, containment tanks, analysis stations. At the back, a separate isolation door ringed in red warning light that made me want to leave immediately. Worse — Steiner wasn't alone. Several researchers were on-site.

A cluster of lab coats stood around a whiteboard, wearing matching expressions of scientific agony: I know this matters, but I'm starting to want to pull my own hair out. The board was covered in things I had no desire to understand and was better off not understanding — equations, vectors, diagrams that looked like spacetime topology in a violent argument with advanced number theory.

A few numbers off to one side had been circled, then savagely crossed out, telling me plenty about this lab's current emotional weather.

"Hoshino? Wait over there a minute." Steiner didn't even turn his head. You could barely call it speaking to me. More like some subroutine in his brain, responsible for minimum-courtesy noise management, had auto-filed me under sample arrived, hold position and spat out the response on reflex. Then he went right back to it. Writing. Erasing. Writing. Erasing again. Perfectly content, like a man who'd finally locked himself inside his own heaven.

I stood at the door watching that white head move at speed and arrived, calmly, at a conclusion. Great. I was probably going to lose my entire morning to him. The scary thing about a man like Steiner was never the madness itself. It was that the madness was efficient. I was scanning for a corner to stand in, hoping to pass for misdelivered furniture, when Hedwig looked at the whiteboard before I did. Just once. Then, evenly:"That's wrong. The answer's twenty-six." The whole lab went still.

She leaned in a fraction closer, her tone still level to the point of rudeness.

"Line seven's also wrong. The prime is three, not five." I almost laughed. Not because I understood a word of it. I had no desire to understand a word of it. I laughed because, in that instant, the whole row of researchers who'd just been tearing their hair out switched, in unison, from we're doomed to oh — a small, stupid, entirely sincere intake of breath, the kind that only happens at the exact second something clicks.

Then, as if only just remembering the room held more than a whiteboard, everyone — Steiner included — looked up, half a beat late. The look on Steiner's face when he registered Hedwig was good enough to belong in a Federation medical textbook. I already had a title for it: On the Collapse of Facial Muscles in a Research Obsessive Upon Discovering His Least Desired High-Voltage Power Source Standing in His New Employer's Lab. Genuinely hard to describe.

If I had to try: it looked like being hunted down by your old boss all the way to your new company, only to open the conference room door and find her already sitting at the head of the table, having politely corrected your quarterly report while she waited. Steiner's mouth twitched. Twice. Then twice more. I stood at the back, working hard to swallow the laugh. It cost me something. A person with basic decency would leave him some dignity here. I am not that person. Especially not for Steiner. My current feeling?

Pure schadenfreude.

"... Your Highness." Steiner finally found his voice.

"It's been a long time." The pause before it was enormous — long enough that you could watch him deciding, in real time, whether to bow, flee, or eat the whiteboard to destroy the evidence. Even better: his usual posture — the one that says if Imperial technology isn't first in the universe, second place has no reason to exist — had completely evaporated. He looked, for once, genuinely humble. Not the virtuous kind. The survival-instinct kind.

"To what do I owe the... pleasure?" Hedwig stood in the doorway, coat still on her shoulders, the Imperial uniform still looking, even in a room reeking of Federation research funding, like a blade polished a little too clean.

"I was merely passing through," she said.

"I'm here for Colonel Wiesland." The smile dropped off my face. Colonel Wiesland? Now I was the one losing composure. Wait. Why. This princess, Steiner, Joint Operations Command, the Research Wing, and now Colonel Wiesland — What exactly was today? A high-concentration hazardous-trouble distribution hub? Steiner's expression, on hearing it, went even more complicated — like a man braced for the absolute worst version of this visit, only to be told: relax, I'm not here to dismantle you today.

Hedwig delivered exactly that.

"Don't worry, Heinrich," she said lightly.

"I'm not here to settle accounts." She paused, the corner of her mouth curving just a fraction.

"My tolerance isn't as narrow as my brother's."... That one landed. The particular kind of weight that keeps every inch of royal decorum intact while quietly sliding a knife into your own brother's ribs. I understood, a little better now, why a woman like this could make half a command building's ears stand up just by walking in wearing that uniform. Steiner clearly understood too. Wisely, he didn't take the bait. He turned to me instead, switching gears with admirable speed.

"Ah — Lieutenant Hoshino. Excellent. You're here." A very bad feeling went through me immediately. The kind that only shows up in three situations: One — a superior officer says your name and smiles. Two — a doctor says you're just in time. Three — someone like Steiner reaches for a box. Unlucky me: today I'd hit at least two and a half out of three. Steiner lifted a box off the nearby workbench. Not an ordinary box. The kind you know instinctively shouldn't share a table with food.

Inside, dozens of glass vials sat arranged in meticulous order — different lengths, colors, viscosities, degrees of transparency — as neatly displayed as a set of courtroom exhibits. He turned it toward me, his tone almost eager.

"I've just gotten a new batch of experimental compounds," he said.

"Shall we work through them together?" I looked at him, expressionless. Honestly. How does he do that？ How does a man use the exact tone of I just got a new box of cookies, want to try one? to offer a box of vials that looked capable of rearranging someone's whole understanding of the universe. This wasn't frightening anymore. This was approaching art.

"I'm here to hear your analysis of my condition," I said.

"Not to get high with you." The longer I looked at that box, the more I wanted three meters of clear air between us.

"Keep them for yourself." One of the nearby researchers looked like he wanted to laugh and didn't dare, turning his face toward a data screen instead. Others had clearly been through this enough times that their expressions didn't move at all — just the professional exhaustion of ah, here we go again. Hedwig glanced at the box without much change in her face. That was its own kind of unnerving.

That particular calm — I know exactly what those are and I see no reason to look surprised — made the whole scene feel even more like the normal world had officially given up on me. Steiner looked genuinely disappointed by my refusal. Not the wounded kind. The kind that comes from finally acquiring limited-edition experimental materials and discovering his subject hadn't burst into tears of gratitude — leaving him disillusioned with human taste yet again.

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"These aren't narcotics," he said, frowning like I'd insulted science itself.

"That's worse," I said.

"Why？"

"Because if they were, I'd at least know which law to invoke when I said no." He went quiet for half a second, apparently running a genuine logic check on that. I sincerely hoped he found no flaws. The lab door opened again. Cold air and corridor light spilled in with it. A tall, lean officer stepped through — around forty, uniform immaculate, shoulder seams and collar so precise they looked printed from a regulations manual.

The kind of person whose arrival quietly converts a room from a bunch of weirdos doing weird things into someone's here to put the weird things back into the system.

"Ah — good. You're all here." His gaze swept the room. Steiner first. Then me. Then Hedwig. It rested, for a fraction of a second, on that exact configuration — as if he understood, without needing to say so, that this particular combination of people had no business sharing a room for longer than ten minutes.

"You two," he said.

"My office. Now." I looked at him for a second. Right. The whole set. The people who should be here, the people who shouldn't, and the people who should never, under any circumstances, share the same room — all present and accounted for. I had a very clear feeling about what came next. Whatever the rest of today held, it wasn't going to be as simple as Steiner analyzes my anomaly. And the worst part was, I wasn't even surprised.

"It's been a while." That was Colonel Wiesland's opening line. Not the kind that misses an old friend. The other kind — the kind you get when you open a door, find the man who once fed you into a grinder sitting right there, and he greets you as if nothing of note had ever happened.

"Sending you to the Academy looks like it was the right call, Hoshino." I can say with confidence that my expression at that moment qualified as a chemical weapon. If the Federation was ever short on equipment for tanking officer morale in an enclosed space, my face was available to fill that particular defense gap. Because I genuinely wanted to hit him.

"I'm not some convenient master key." My voice came out hard, stiff enough to have just been pried out of a freezer. Master key? Please. No one treats an actual master key by running it through high-intensity fatigue tests, throwing it into a military academy, handing it to Dr. Steiner to be dosed with experimental compounds until it's practically retching, and then sitting back to watch whether it warps on its own. That's not a master key. That's a heavy-duty consumable.

The kind government institutions love best — use it until it breaks, and when it breaks, file a report. I hadn't forgotten the training that had nearly ground me into an early ascension. And I certainly hadn't forgotten the doctor's compound trials. It's a hard feeling to put into words. If I had to try: someone telling you this is for science while treating your body like an unapproved, hazardous rough draft — filling in whatever blank space they could find.

Wiesland looked straight through the murder in my eyes and simply raised a hand.

"One thing at a time." His tone was disturbingly level, like a man sorting paperwork, not arranging someone else's life. Then he turned to the other side of the room.

"First — on behalf of the Federal Government, welcome, Your Highness, Third Princess." Hedwig gave a short "Mm." Barely long enough to count as a response. And yet somehow half its meaning came through clearly: good — you remember how to speak to people. Of course. Royalty. Some people can carve a class line into the air with nothing but a single nasal syllable.

"Your enrollment paperwork is complete. Your uniform can be collected downstairs on the first flo—" He stopped, glanced at her, and seemed to remember, half a beat late, that the woman in front of him wasn't a standard transfer student — she was the Third Princess, the kind of person whose presence made an entire building's administration stand up straight by reflex.

"... I'll have it sent up instead."

"Wait." The word was out before I could stop it.

"She's enrolling? What is this — some kind of institutional joke?" I genuinely couldn't help it. It wasn't that I had anything against princesses specifically, or carried some blanket prejudice against the Empire — Fine. I did. Quite a lot of it, actually. But this sounded exactly like something that happens when Federation leadership sits in a meeting until the oxygen runs low, and someone slams the table and says: what if we threw an Imperial princess into our military academy and see if a miracle happens?

Miracles were technically possible. For instance, I could stop breathing right now out of sheer shock.

"Doesn't the Galactic Empire have its own military academies?" I asked.

"It does," Hedwig said, crisp, maddeningly composed as ever.

"But I have no interest in spending years at one only to graduate knowing nothing but which fork to use." I nearly laughed out loud. That was vicious. Vicious enough that I felt the Imperial officer corps deserved a full second of silence. So it wasn't only us who knew about the Empire's quality problem. The Imperial princess knew it too — knew it well enough to use as an opening line. Just as Steiner had said, the Galactic Empire's technology really was first in the universe.

You don't build something as deranged as the Hohenzollern — an artificial celestial fortress on that scale — without it. But technology is technology. Military discipline is something else entirely. The first can be bought with resources, industry, scholarship, centuries of accumulated technique. The second can't.

And the second, once it collides with a hereditary aristocracy, tends to grow into something extremely expensive, extremely ornate, and highly capable of blowing up its own people at the worst possible moment. Because the Federation didn't have it, and the Empire did. Nobility. Once military authority fuses with bloodline, things start growing crooked. Orders stop being pure. Obedience gets contaminated with lineage. Responsibility loses to pedigree.

The dead on a battlefield end up buried alongside somebody's family pride. Set all of that aside. Looking at the Third Princess in front of me, I had exactly one plain, honest, entirely inelegant thought. This woman is terrifying. Not because of her title. Because she clearly knew what kind of place this was, and delivered herself here anyway. That wasn't bravado.

That was something closer to high-level self-deployment — the kind where you know exactly where the wolves are, open the door, walk in, and lock it behind you from the inside.

"Is the Federation serious about this?" I said to Wiesland, no longer bothering to hide the skepticism.

"We're not going on a picnic with a blanket. The day we actually face Imperial forces for real, I'd rather not get a knife in the back from my own side first." Hedwig turned to look at me. Her gaze was direct. No anger in it, no interest in arguing. Which was worse — it meant she wasn't sulking, she genuinely intended to answer.

"Lieutenant Hoshino." She said my name in that overly correct register that made me want to check whether there was another Hoshino somewhere in the room.

"I've already made my peace with it."... We're doomed. That type is the worst. If she'd been merely spoiled, childish, drunk on her own rank, I could laugh at her safely. She wasn't. She was the kind who checks the burn curve before she throws herself into the fire. My unease about the future deepened. Sharply. Deep enough that I could already picture the next few months of my life being shaved down, elegantly and methodically, by this exact woman. Wiesland kept going.

"As for whether you'll enter the Upper House or the Lower House..." He paused, tone as careful as someone testing the temperature of water.

"The government hasn't made a final decision." Every alarm I had went off. Bad. Very bad. Questions like this work like landmines — the danger isn't whether they go off, it's that you usually realize what you've stepped on only after your weight's already down. Sure enough, his next line:"Hoshino — Upper House, or Lower?"

"Lower House." The regret hit the instant it left my mouth. Not ordinary regret. The kind where your soul crouches down right next to you and starts drafting your will before the sentence has even finished landing. Hedwig barely paused.

"Colonel Wiesland. Then I'll take the Lower House as well." I wanted to slap myself. Twice. Hoshino Shimo, what exactly are you doing. Was that your mouth outrunning your brain, or is your brain simply dead. He asks where, you answer honestly like a good citizen, and now congratulations — you've personally tethered a Third Princess to your immediate future. Was your life going too smoothly? Did you feel some deep need to introduce a high-yield unstable element into your own routine?

I caught Wiesland giving me a look that said, with total clarity: I genuinely feel for you. I'm also not going to help. Then he nodded, as naturally as if he'd just settled on where to order lunch.

"Then it's decided." I nearly stood up to object. Too late — I watched him finalize a decision that would restructure my entire future campus ecosystem with the same casual weight as let's just get takeout. He asked Hedwig to wait outside. Her Highness didn't argue. She rose, turned, left. When the door closed, the room lost a layer of invisible pressure — and yet, somehow, I didn't feel any lighter. Because I knew whose turn it was now. Wiesland's attention came back to me.

"Now. Your situation." Congratulations. One hour and twenty-five minutes after walking into Joint Operations Command, the state had finally gotten around to processing the actual subject of the visit. I genuinely wanted to applaud the Federation's administrative efficiency. Unfortunately, both my hands currently wanted to be around someone's throat, so I settled for two symbolic claps inside my own head. He ignored my expression and cut straight to it.

"The changes in your body are a natural phenomenon. You're not dying. It's not a genetic mutation." I frowned at him. Natural phenomenon. Wonderful. If the Federation ever officially classified a meteor strike on a residential block as a natural phenomenon, I doubt I'd blink anymore either.

"It involves two disciplines," he went on.

"Physics and medicine." He said it the way you'd read out the abstract of a report.

"From the medical side, it's relatively simple. The residual and side effects of the experimental compounds the doctor administered are dissipating. That's the first factor." My expression got worse. I see. So whatever had been quietly wrecking my body was finally done wrecking it. That framing was exactly like someone blowing up half your house, then patting your shoulder: don't worry, the explosions have stopped. Very reassuring. Reassuring enough that I wanted to drive a pen through somebody's skull.

"The second factor," Wiesland continued, "is the partial physical change caused by the Yukikaze's sustained faster-than-light transit on its return from the Boötes Void." I went quiet for two seconds.... Great. Now physics was taking a swing at me. Apparently staying alive these days requires watching your back against the Academy, the doctor, the Empire, your own mouth — and, on top of all that, the universe casually doing things to you on the side.

"This involves general-relativistic gravitational biological effects," he said, and even added, helpfully: "if you have questions, there's documentation and case files available."

"Or I could just curse Einstein," I said, flat. Saying it, I realized I'd actually made some progress. I used to only swear at the living. Now I was extending the privilege to dead physicists. Civilization really does foster growth. Anyway, the official conclusion was — Healthy development. I had to admire the compression. Take an entire chain of causes — drug residue, fading side effects, sustained FTL travel, gravitational biological effects — and boil it down to two words.

It was like someone shelling you with a ship's main battery for half an afternoon and writing in the final report: local ambient noise slightly elevated.

"If you'd like the doctor to conduct further examination, I have no objection."

"No. Absolutely not." The refusal came out before it even passed through my brain. Was he serious. Letting Dr. Steiner examine me further doesn't usually end with me feeling reassured. It ends with him feeling satisfied. I'd figured out one very clear rule about this world by now: some people say don't worry to comfort you. Others say don't worry because they're about to do something considerably worse to you. Steiner is unmistakably the second kind.

"Last item. Your status." He pulled a new student ID out of a drawer, along with two small, button-sized objects. The second I saw them, a very specific unease settled in. I've had enough life experience to know the pattern: anything small, harmless-looking, and handed to you personally by a superior officer usually comes with a delayed-onset side effect.

"First — over the break, your enrollment remains suspended and under review. Once the new term starts, you'll be placed with the second-year cohort like everyone else." He paused, glancing at the door.

"Along with the Princess." Fuck. I really am my own worst enemy. Why did I have to open my mouth about the Lower House. Who exactly was I trying to punish — Hedwig, the Lower House, the Federation? No. Looking at the results, the only person I'd actually managed to hurt was myself. Wiesland, looking like a man who'd just finished the day's paperwork, delivered the dismissal with total ease.

"You can go." I took the ID, stood, and felt exactly like someone who'd been buried alive by an administrative process with full courtesy — and was expected to thank the man holding the shovel. I turned for the door. My hand had almost reached the handle when Wiesland's voice came again, offhand, like an afterthought.

"Oh — one more thing, Hoshino." My spine locked. That tone is always the worst kind. It usually means whatever's coming isn't official business — it's the kind of thing that makes you want to walk face-first into a wall.

"You and Kushima. Making progress?" I nearly did put my head through the wall. Not a figure of speech. It was close. I spun around.

"Who told you that?" Wiesland looked completely reasonable. Even a little innocent.

"Your classmate McCallow is very... proactive. She posts updates daily, on the social networks." Jess. I am going to bury you. Not hit you. Bury you. Find a nice patch of dirt, pick a spot with decent feng shui, and put up a headstone that reads: HERE LIES ONE OVERLY ENTHUSIASTIC, CHRONICALLY GOSSIP-ADDICTED WOMAN WITH ZERO RESPECT FOR HER ROOMMATE'S PRIVACY.

"Are you here to mock us too?" I asked, nearly through gritted teeth. He shook his head.

"No. If anything, I'm entirely in favor." That threw me. The answer was strange enough that I had no comeback ready. Then he went on, in that infuriatingly level tone of his:"Man and woman, woman and woman, man and man — I don't care which. What matters is that she's from the Kushima family." My frown came back, hard. That single line dragged the shame I'd been feeling straight back into cold reality. Right. This man was never just gossiping. He never is. In his eyes, relationships aren't relationships.

Feelings aren't feelings. The moment either one falls into hands like his, it gets taken apart, sorted, priced, and filed away in a drawer marked power and lineage. Something tightened in my chest. Not because he'd hit on something true. The opposite. Because he was wrong, and that was exactly why it bothered me.

"I didn't put my arms around her because she's a Kushima." I dropped the sentence on the floor like something heavy. Then I turned and walked out before I gave myself the chance to strangle him. One more minute in that room and I'd genuinely have shaved years off my life. The door closed behind me. The corridor air was a little colder than the office had been. A little cleaner. I looked down at what I was holding — a new student IDand whatever shape the next stretch of my future had just been pressed into.

Enrollment on hold. Second-year cohort after the break. Hedwig in the Lower House. My body's anomalies filed under healthy development. Maki Kushima. And Jess — that woman who apparently treats her roommate's private life as a morning broadcast segment. It occurred to me, standing there, that the Federation probably didn't manage to govern a world this size because it was efficient. It managed it because everyone was too busy to die.

And I, Hoshino Shimo, had clearly been scheduled, with real forethought, into this high-efficiency machine of suffering.... Fuck. I was actually starting to miss the days when the only thing on the agenda was drug trials. At least back then, the pain had the decency to be focused.