Chương 439: 207.Battlecruiser Asgard 2

The last airtight door before the bridge had more spine than I'd expected. Not the material — material's just steel, however hard it is. What had spine was the group behind the door. At least they hadn't done what the Busgo bay crew did, immediately simplifying the options in life to "crouch" and "don't die" the moment they saw a pack of Federation second-years crawling out of casualty Buss. These people had real professionalism. Unfortunately, professionalism usually just makes the way you die more formal.

I pressed against the edge of the door and signaled to Maki. Maki stood on the other side, fingertips already on the emergency override panel beside it. Lan, behind us, had patched into a line and was helping me peel off the last layer of the door's authorization lock. Hedwig stood half a step behind us, very still — still in the way that suggested she already knew that once this door opened, nothing about today would ever go back. Good. Not that we'd planned on going back anyway.

"Open." The instant I spoke, the override program under Maki's fingers finished running. The airtight door split left and right. And before we'd even steadied our heads, a dozen beams came straight at us. It wasn't the kind of opening to a firefight that left anyone any room. There was no warning from the far side, no dramatic nonsense about naming ourselves. The moment the gap opened, the beams bit in like a nest of vipers, scorching the doorframe white on the spot.

I'd barely caught half an outline of the bridge before Maki yanked me back and my spine slammed into the wall.

"Tch." I glanced down at the scorch that had just grazed my sleeve, and my mood turned bad immediately.

"These people take their jobs seriously."

"Seriously enough to make you happy?" Maki answered coldly.

"No." I shook my wrist out.

"But seriously enough for them to die." The firing line behind the door was pressed tight. They'd clearly set their angles inside the bridge well in advance — the moment the door opened, it was a textbook fan-shaped blockade. If we forced our way in, feeding our heads through one at a time, we'd just get shredded in an orderly manner. So I turned my head.

"D. Come here." D had been leaning against the passage behind us, unhappily adjusting the Imperial combat harness he'd just taken, and when he heard me call he grinned at once. That smile made it very hard to tell whether he'd come to fight a war or to take part in some leisure activity explicitly banned by law.

"Finally my turn?"

"What did you think I brought you all the way in here for — to watch you act in a documentary about racial oppression?"

"I thought your conscience had woken up."

"I don't have that organ." D let out a ha, reached over and yanked a beam-resistant shield straight off the ship's internal security rack. It should have belonged to the shipboard security troops; the face had a bluish energy coating, and the rim was thick enough that it looked purpose-built for reasoning with rioters. With his other hand he picked up his battle axe, and once he stood straight, the picture was absurdly complete.

A tall young Black man, in an Imperial uniform, Busrying a battle axe and holding up an Imperial shipboard security shield, preparing to pry open the bridge of an Imperial newbuild on behalf of Federation second-years. If I hadn't seen this story with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it either. I patted the shield.

"Hold the first wave. Open up the firing line. Don't die." D turned his face toward me with a grin that begged to be punched.

"That concern of yours sounds exactly like 'Buseful on the stairs' right before you push someone down them."

"Enough talk. Go." The next second, he actually went. D wasn't the type to be polite with you, to fuss over aesthetics, or to recite a couple of cool lines before charging. He was more like a battering ram that had suddenly decided to acquire a personality. Shield up, shoulder down, and he simply crashed into the bridge. A dozen beams hammered the shield face nearly at once; blue-white light sBuss burst across its surface, bright as if someone were celebrating a holiday inside it.

"Whoa." Jess whistled beside me.

"Now that's got the Black Meteor feel to it."

"Don't give him weird nicknames," I said, and immediately dropped low and moved in behind him. The instant D drove inside, the whole blockade angle was torn crooked by him alone. The bridge watch clearly hadn't expected the thing coming through the door to be a walking shield and a battle axe rather than a standard assault team — something capable of turning a man into a workplace safety incident.

The first unlucky bastard to open fire didn't even get his muzzle swung sideways before D knocked him over, chair and all. The second, trying to back away, had his rifle smashed in two by a backhand swing. The crack of bursting metal detonated through the bridge, like someone using the ship's budget to cheer us on.

"In!" I barked it and slid into the dead angle on the left inside the door myself, raised my gun and dropped the armed duty guard nearest the main control ring. Maki cut in from the other side, so fast there wasn't an ounce of waste in her movement; she suppressed the two firing points on the right, then took a petty officer reaching for the alarm lever and threw him bodily into the comms station. Roy and Lan came in too.

Roy normally looked like the sort who'd sneak two extra doodles onto the back of a student council report, but the moment it was real, his movements turned out to be remarkably steady. He blew apart the auxiliary control board beside the upper-right monitor station with one shot, stripping the last of the nerve from the two duty guards in that section. Lan was quieter still. She was like a blade shadow sliding out of a corner — first move, shortest path: take the gun, trip the man, pin him to the deck.

The whole sequence was as clean as if she'd turned administrative procedure into a violent edition. Akari charged hardest. The kid had long since torn off the fake bandages on her shoulder, and when she bulled in there was almost a shine to it, like "finally my turn." I suspect if you gave her a flag she could turn a ship hijacking into a school anniversary opening ceremony.

"Right side clear!" she yelled.

"Don't turn the bridge into an amusement park!" Maki shot back.

"Yes, President!" The first wave of resistance in the bridge had already collapsed halfway after D's thoroughly unreasonable charge. Of the remaining half, the real trouble wasn't the ones who could fight — it was the ones who wanted to destroy. Because just as I finished dropping the last armed guard in the central section, behind the main console a man who looked like the captain was already lurching toward the bridge's main systems.

He wasn't old, but his uniform was new enough and his shoulder boards clean enough, and his whole face was twisted ugly with shock and fury. He howled like a beast whose tail had been stepped on, hand already reaching for the innermost set of seal levers on the main control ring.

"An Imperial warship will never fall into the hands of scum like you!" You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. All I had time for was one curse inside my head. Not good. The most annoying thing about this type isn't that he's loyal — it's that he's loyal enough to burn the whole table before he loses.

If he actually damaged a critical node of the bridge systems, then even if we'd stolen the shell today, we'd only be hugging a pile of very expensive garbage in a naval port waiting to die. I was raising my gun when Hedwig beat me to it by a step. Really, just one step. I didn't even see when she'd drawn that energy pistol. One second she was standing behind me; the next, the beam had passed my ear and punched cleanly into the captain's face. No warning, no hesitation, no extra lines. The impact threw him back.

He never even finished his second piece of loyal advice — he simply dropped like a cut power line, knocking half the secondary console over. The whole bridge went still for a beat. Even I went still for a beat. Honestly, I knew Hedwig was no fragile ornament, and I knew that walking this far with us today meant she could hardly still count as clean.

But seeing her judge, draw, fire and kill inside a fraction of a second — and do it with near-cruel precision — made it hard not to open a separate column in my head for her. This Third Princess was a little too decisive in the killing department. Hedwig watched the body slide down, but her expression barely shifted. She just walked over, bent, picked up the energy pistol from the floor, and held it out to me grip-first.

"If he'd destroyed the Yggdrasil system, we wouldn't be able to launch." I took the gun, and I could still feel the warmth left in her palm. That unlucky captain probably never dreamed that one day, to defend an Imperial warship, he'd be shot dead first by the Empire's Third Princess. Sometimes this world is fair in a way that's viciously ironic. I tucked the gun behind my waist and opened a channel on my terminal.

"Nikaido?" Freya Nikaido's voice came back on the open channel quickly — the tone of a woman who was obviously annoyed and yet had to admit I was busier than she was right now.

"What?"

"Send a few people over to take prisoners. We need to wrap up on the bridge — and bring a body bag and a cleaning bot." There was half a second of silence on the other end, then a very flat answer.

"... You're starting to sound like a professional crime boss."

"Thanks. Hurry." A short while later, Nikaido's people arrived. All second-years, all students yanked straight off the school trip roster into a ship-hijacking scene, and yet walking into the bridge, the look on every face — "have I already passed the point of no return?" — was worth commemorating. I handed the pinned bridge duty guards over to them and pointed at the captain's corpse.

"Tell Nikaido: after the personnel are cleared, before we launch, throw all of them out." I paused, then added one more line.

"Tie the living. Bag the dead. Don't let the Busgo bay turn into a cheap horror film." One of the disciplinary members twitched at the corner of the mouth, but nodded firmly anyway. Good. Once Nikaido's organizational compulsion was properly aimed, her efficiency was startling. Which is why, annoying as she is, I've never once underestimated her. Hedwig came over then with a holographic projection disc in her hands. Looked like she'd just yanked it out of the bridge's secondary station.

"Hoshino, you'd better get a quick read on this ship—" Before she could finish, the whole ship's base alarm finally went off, reluctant and grudging. The sound was pitifully late, like some vast institution finally jerking awake and realizing it was supposed to be at work, after every worst thing had already happened. The shrill alarm trailed down the ship's passages, and the lighting shifted from the earlier cold white to warning red. So. The group we'd chased out had probably finally run far enough to complain.

I glanced at the projection disc in her hand.

"We'll look later," I said.

"The controls are basically the same anyway." Jess clutched her head on the spot.

"Aaaah, don't remind me of Yukikaze."

"Relax." I answered as I walked toward the tactical station.

"This time I'm hoping we Busry less." Maki had already walked quite naturally to the captain's chair. In that moment, it was hard to describe why the image sat so easily with me. Maybe because she had the natural temperament for sitting high up and treating every single person as a pending item on a task list. Or maybe because she'd been so steady from start to finish today that the chair didn't look like something she'd taken — it looked like something that had been waiting for her.

She didn't hesitate even for an instant when she sat down. As if that seat had been reserved for her all along.

"All hands, stations," Maki said. She swept her eyes over the bridge, her tone as level as if this were a routine student council meeting, not an armed ship hijacking inside an Imperial naval port.

"Shimo, you take tactical officer. Jess, damage control and monitoring. Lan, comms. Akari, radar. Roy, you keep the helm." She paused, then gave orders to the second-year class leaders who'd just caught up.

"Class B, C and D leaders, get into CIC. You're on situation consolidation and section reports."

"Your Highness, if you'd start her up." Hedwig nodded.

"Mm." D stood off to the side with his axe, and his expression was very clearly a little wounded.

"Wait, what about me?" Maki thought for a second without looking up.

"Go help Freya hold the room." She added one more line.

"Or stop her from trying to kill people with dogma." D grinned.

"I like this job."

"I'm not at all surprised," I said. Hedwig walked to the bridge's main console, pressed both hands onto the sensor surface, and lowered her head slightly so the facial recognition unit could sweep her features. The next second, the entire main control ring lit up together. A female system voice — gentle enough that it was hard to believe it was about to help us fire on people — spoke in the bridge.

"System authenticated. Welcome aboard, Your Highness Hedwig von Wittelsbach. I am the Seventh-Generation AI-Assisted Command System, World Tree, Yggdrasil." Good. Even the name is Imperial. Hedwig wasted no time and gave the order directly.

"System, ignite engines, seal all outer hatches, prepare for departure."

"Warning." Yggdrasil's voice was still gentle, and gentle in a way that begged to be hit.

"Control tower has not issued a sortie order."

"Skip this verification and unlock weapons control." Hedwig looked back at me.

"Fire control authority goes to the tactical officer." I sat down at the tactical station, glanced over the weapons page that had just unfolded, and couldn't help a wry smile.

"Nice," I said.

"Some of this kit overlaps with Yukikaze. We can Busry a little less this time." Jess took the damage control and monitoring station, hooked into the ship-wide status panel, and snorted.

"I knew that sentence of yours wasn't going to be good news."

"It means I'm in a good mood," I said. On the bridge's main display, the external view and the port fire-control network spread out at the same time. The naval port's hangar doors, the central control tower, the ships in the near berths, and the three outer ships with pursuit capability all arrayed themselves in front of me like a revenge checklist waiting to be ticked. Good. Now this is more like it. I reached out and dragged Turret One onto the hangar doors.

"Turret One, target the hangar doors." Then I swung Turret Two toward the central control tower.

"Turret Two, target the control tower." The third cursor landed on the warship closest to us — and the most likely to bite first once we left port.

"Turret Three, target the nearest warship." Next I unfolded the vertical missile launch system and selected the heavy anti-ship missile sequence.

"Vertical launchers, load heavy anti-ship missiles, Parsifal. Lock the remaining three." Akari stared at the radar panel, her voice pitched a little higher with excitement.

"Lock complete." Roy put his hands on the helm ring, and the whole of him went quiet in a way that was rare. So some people only goof off because they haven't been put in the right seat yet. Maki sat in the captain's chair, looking at the naval port ahead — a view that was rapidly becoming very suitable for regret.

"Approved," she said.

"Execute." I smiled and pressed the firing trigger directly.

"Superheated plasma cannon, Muspelheimr. Fire." The next instant, the whole ship seemed to exhale a breath that was far too hot. The superheated plasma beam from Turret One burned straight through the spaceport hangar doors. The heavy metal gates went like a membrane pierced by a red-hot needle — first bright, then collapsing, then melting into a fire-colored wound that curled outward. Almost simultaneously, Turret Two's plasma beam raked across the central control tower.

It wasn't an explosion so much as an entire chunk of a high-rise being erased from reality in an instant. The silver-white heat stream punched into the tower's core, and the next second the whole control tower began to melt down from its midsection — command windows, comms arrays and outer armor disintegrating together, fire bursting out from inside as if forcibly squeezed. Turret Three was more direct still.

At the new ship beside us — the one that had counted as our nearest neighbor until a moment ago — one shot, straight through. It never had time to work out what was happening before its belly burned through on the spot. From the instant the fire burst out, it was destined never to catch anyone again. As for Parsifal. That thing has never been big on gentleness.

The vertical launchers flipped open row after row, and several heavy anti-ship missiles shot out almost at once, dragging long flame trails toward the remaining three ships capable of pursuit. Over the next few seconds, the whole Imperial naval port looked as if some deity in a very bad mood had grabbed it by the head and smashed it into fire. Missile hits, near-misses, debris clouds, secondary explosions, fuel fires, alarms, comms turbulence — all of it bloomed across the same display at the same time.

The Imperial naval port was instantly ablaze, wailing on every side. I even felt a little like observing a moment of silence for that colonel at the second control line. If he were still alive, and could still see this, his guts would probably be twisted enough to braid into rope. Unfortunately, this world has medicine for everything. Just not for regret. As I recalibrated the weapon charge cycle, I turned my head and glanced at Hedwig.

She sat in the seat half a step lower beside the captain's chair, saying nothing. And yet the posture really did Busry a strange pressure. Not a student council secretary, not a young princess forced into treason — more like someone who had already seen the future, someone genuinely seated at the edge of the Empire's core of power. Firelight brightened and dimmed across her profile, and she didn't move so much as an eyelash.

It suddenly occurred to me that if one day this woman really did take a higher seat, the galaxy would probably not be too boring.

"Maki, the restraint arms are released." Jess gave her an OK sign. Maki's eyes never left the front.

"Roy."

"Copy."

"Asgard, launch." Roy pressed both hands down on the helm ring. The next second, the whole ship's sense of gravity changed. The steel behemoth rose slowly on ventral thruster jets and main engine ignition, tearing free of the still-burning Busgo berth like a beast that had finally decided to stand up out of its chains. Outside were the hangar we'd smashed, the broken tower, the burning ships, and an Imperial naval port screaming across its whole length.

And we, just like that, trod on its fire and its mistakes and forced our way into the sky. CRITICAL ASTRAL - VOL. 3 [END]