Chương 440: 208.Thor Hammer 1

"Ahead slow, both sides." Roy's voice was level. Like nothing had happened. If I hadn't been watching the Asgard's hull—black shading into a deep, bruising blue—sliding inch by inch out of the Imperial military port's steel gate, I might actually have believed he was just backing a festival display boat into a parking berth. On both lateral monitors, Imperial soldiers had finally chased their way to the dock's edge.

Chased, in the sense that they'd reached a distance precisely adequate for staring up at their own failure. Some were leveling laser rifles, spraying fire at a hull already half-way into open space. One of them had even brought out a man-portable recoilless launcher, apparently intending to use infantry equipment to persuade a 1, 350-meter special construction ship to reconsider its life choices. I watched it and found myself genuinely moved by the Imperial military's educational philosophy.

At least they'd managed to fully commit to dying loyally, even when there was absolutely no chance of winning. From this side of the equation, though, that particular virtue had another name: a fundamental failure to respect reality.

"Hoshino." Maki's voice, cold enough to cut.

"Clear those flies."

"Copy." Fast reply, faster hands. The Hecatonchires control interface opened in front of me, a row of cold-blue engagement brackets lighting up along the hull's outer edge. The close-in weapon system—designed to shred missiles and attack craft—I rerouted to suppression mode without a moment's moral hesitation. I'll be honest: I've always had mixed feelings about the Imperial aesthetic for military hardware.

They had a talent for making things that were fundamentally tools for killing people look like royal jewelry, sacred relics, or collector's pieces too expensive to touch. But in this particular moment, I had to admit: managing to fuse elegance and excessive force to this degree was, in its own diseased way, a genuine civilizational achievement. I pressed confirm. The next second, the monitor feed was cut apart by dozens of precise, interlocking lines of fire. I won't go into detail about what it looked like.

For one thing, I was busy. I didn't have time to moonlight as a war correspondent. For another, at this range, anyone caught in a Hecatonchires lock didn't leave behind enough material to write a coherent review. The effect was sufficient. The Imperial soldiers who'd been charging forward on adrenaline and orders froze like someone had poured ice water straight through their bones. The survivors scrambled back behind cover and didn't test the Asgard's patience with their bodies again.

"Good." Maki sat in the captain's chair behind me, voice flat as if she'd just asked someone to close a curtain. Her Imperial uniform caught the bridge's dark gold and deep blue light with an almost unreasonable crispness. I was aware, even in the middle of all this, of a stray thought: she looks like she's delivering a toast at a high-table dinner, and the toast is about eliminating pests. The fact that my brain had bandwidth for that probably meant my mental state was more resilient than I'd given it credit for.

The Asgard was now more than half-clear of the dock. Deep space ahead. The Empire's alarms and fury behind us. We weren't running. We were ripping the crown the Empire had built off their own heads.

"XO, contact port side—Imperial warship." Akari's voice, clear and bright. XO. The word landed, and nobody on the bridge disputed it. No hesitation, no correction, no polite silence of isn't this a bit fast. Just acceptance. Something in the back of my head, the part that had been making noise all day, went quiet for a second. Akari's identification projection expanded fast. Three red markers surfaced in the tactical window.

"Classification confirmed. Dreadnought-class—Müllheim, Schopfheim. Plus one Emperor-class battle cruiser, Freiburg." I stared at those three names, and my first reaction wasn't threat assessment. It was: the Empire really does name its weapons like a mythology dictionary that got drunk and started doing lottery draws. I pushed that thought down.

"All hands, battle stations. Everyone to combat positions." I drew a breath, steadied my voice, and gave the order cleanly.

"General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations." Saying it out loud, standing here—I had a brief, absurd moment of awareness. A few hours ago I was a second-year Federation student — and the Vice President, at that. Now I was standing on the bridge of an Imperial special construction ship, calling General Quarters against an actual Imperial fleet.... Life really does have no respect for the concept of gradual progression.

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"Confirmed. All ship, Red Alert." Jess's fingers came down across the console in sequence. The next moment, the bridge changed. Not the cheap version—lights dimming, atmosphere shifting. The whole space moved, like some enormously arrogant creature finally deciding to show its real teeth. Before, the bridge had been an obscenely luxurious observatory. The great arc of the viewport forward, no crowded control banks, just a straight obsidian central walkway extending toward the stars.

Vaulted ceiling, columns, dark gold filigree, and the galaxy spread open beneath it all—a space built less like a command center than like a private salon where a princess could sip tea and decide the fate of several star systems. Not anymore. With a low, structural sound, the main platform began to descend. The viewport's outer layer surfaced in overlapping shield-field textures, the expansive, almost arrogant starfield buried under tactical overlays.

The walls on both sides split open; holographic modules nested within the columns rotated out, cold blue light panels rising like scripture at an altar—or blades set upright at the edge of an execution platform. The central walkway lit up with thin blue-white guide lines. The recessed combat stations on both sides came alive level by level as the platform reconfigured. The warm gold light was gone. What replaced it was colder, thinner, and had no interest in sympathy.

If it had been a royal observation throne room before, it was now a killing temple built on the Empire's highest budget. I stood at the forward end of the walkway and felt something genuinely absurd wash over me. So when you have enough money, even entering combat readiness becomes a ceremony designed for power.

"... This is a bit much," I said, quietly.

"Not to your taste?" Maki glanced over.

"No, I'm just starting to understand why the Empire is in decline."

"Focus." She said it flat, but the corner of her mouth moved, just barely. I filed that away. I wanted to remember this moment—not the bridge transformation, but Maki Kushima responding to my commentary during a Red Alert. That kind of rare event might be worth more than a stolen warship.

"Müllheim is firing!" Akari's voice snapped me back. On the main port projection, a high-energy beam tore the darkness open and came straight at the Asgard. I pulled the defense page up on reflex.

"Counter-beam? Where's the—usually there's something—shield deployment, deflection screen, emergency redirect—" I was flipping through the interface fast, getting more frustrated with every screen. Nothing. Nothing. Still nothing.

"Hoshino?" A thread of suppressed tension had finally entered Maki's voice.

"I can't find the counter-beam—""Direct hit! We've taken a hit!" Akari's call landed almost simultaneously with the impact. The Asgard shuddered. Once. Just once. Not the catastrophic, glass-shattering disaster-film kind of shudder. More like someone had been extremely rude and knocked on the temple's outer door—and the temple itself couldn't be bothered to acknowledge it. I stared at the panel for half a second. Then another half second. No alarm cascade. No compartment depressurization.

No fires, no hull fractures, no bulkhead failure, no red warnings flooding the screen. The whole thing looked like the beam had been the Empire's attempt at emotional communication, and it hadn't quite landed.

"Damage report?"

"Reporting. No damage." Jess answered with a calm so complete she sounded like she was noting that afternoon tea hadn't arrived yet.

"... How is that possible?"

"This vessel's outer hull uses Nano-Reconfigurable Armor, Svartálfaheimr." Yggdrasil's voice, unhurried, smooth, and deeply irritating, filled the bridge.

"Configured for high resistance to beam and kinetic impact. The enemy vessel's attack did not reach threat threshold. No additional defensive protocols were triggered." I turned to face the main display, and felt my blood pressure do something civilization generally discourages.

"Fuck, you could have mentioned that! I nearly had a stroke just now!"

"You didn't ask." Yggdrasil replied. Steady delivery. Steady tone. Steady enough that it was very hard to prove the timing was deliberate. I was silent for two seconds.... This system has a personal grudge against me. It must. We only started working together today, and it's already managed to make me want to pull its voice module. Whoever designed the personality core for the Empire's Seventh-Generation AI-Assisted Command System clearly did not retire peacefully.

"Hoshino." Maki looked at me sideways. Not a heavy look. But more effective than any warning. No frown. No raised voice. Just the simplest possible reminder that this was not the moment to argue with an AI.

"Focus."

"... Right. Yes." I exhaled, pulled my scattered attention back in, and looked at the main projection again. To port, the silhouettes of Müllheim, Schopfheim, and Freiburg were spreading into formation. Three red identification brackets, steady in my vision like nails driven into the display. This time, my hands were calm. I pulled the main battery and secondary main battery controls forward, letting engagement geometry, energy levels, cooling cycles, traverse angles, and fire solutions lay out in front of me.

The Asgard's armament list was beautiful in the way that made it look less like a warship's loadout and more like a deranged member of the royal family had walked into the weapons bureau with a mythology index and said I want all of these. Thor Hammer. Muspelheimr. Parsifal. Fenrir. Hecatonchires. Naglfar. Good. Extravagant, ostentatious, dangerous, and offensively expensive. Exactly what I needed right now.

"Yggdrasil." I fixed my eyes on the Müllheim's silhouette and started talking.

"Give me course projections on all three hostiles, armor weak points, beam charge cycling, and optimal fire solutions for this vessel. All of it."

"Confirmed." It answered fast this time. Probably because it had finally remembered that the emotionally volatile acting XO in front of it was genuinely capable of going after its voice module post-battle. Data flooded across my field of view. Numbers, trajectories, enemy postures, and predictive lines layering over each other—a neural map of the galaxy, vast enough to be nauseating. And yet, strangely, the pressure was making me calm down. Maybe because the options had finally gotten simple.

There was no going back. No let's wait and see. No maybe we can negotiate. No hold for reinforcements. We'd stolen an Imperial special construction ship, blown out their port gates, and run over their dignity in the process. What came next was almost clean in its simplicity. Win. Maki was still in the captain's chair. She didn't touch me. Didn't say anything more. Just held her shoulder line steady next to mine—the most economical, most reliable way of saying: you give the order, and I'll be right here.

Something restless in my chest settled. Good. If the President had implicitly accepted me as this ship's acting XO, I at least had to look like I deserved it. Anything less would be embarrassing. Embarrassing in front of her. That was a different tier of problem—the kind where you might want to crawl back from the dead just to delete the record. I raised my hand and locked Muspelheimr's forward engagement arc onto the port-side targets.

"Don't touch Thor Hammer yet," I said.

"Firing the main gun first would be like inheriting a mansion and testing the load-bearing walls with a sword on day one. Use the secondary batteries to read their response."

"Target: Müllheim." Akari was already on it.

"Enemy posture prediction applied."

"Course deflection correction complete." Roy's voice, quiet and even.

"Port attitude stable. You have your firing angle."

"Fire control synced," Jess said.

"Maki." I said it low. She looked over.

"If my first shot misses—what do you do?"

"Hold the line until you correct." No hesitation. I hadn't even had time to let that land properly before she added, perfectly calm:"Then, once it's over, settle the account."... Right. That's the Maki Kushima I know. Reliable, composed, sharp—and doubling as a precision psychological weapon. I couldn't help it. I smiled, just slightly.

"Then I really can't afford to miss." I set my hand on the firing confirmation. Under the Red Alert, the combat bridge felt like a dark temple waking up. Cold blue panels layered alive at the edges of my vision; the enemy silhouettes held steady in their lock brackets. The Asgard's bow was fully clear of the dock's shadow now, like a black lance finally drawn from its sheath. Then I gave the order, quiet.

"Muspelheimr—port forward, batteries one and two. Those ships that were too slow to run but fast enough to fire—" I watched the Müllheim, and let the corner of my mouth pull up.

"Burn through them."