Chương 447: 212.Sortie 1

Back on the bridge, we did something very important, and very political. Selective disclosure. In simple terms: throw out the parts that lift morale, and press down hard on the parts that would send the entire student body into collective meltdown. So we called in the class reps and, with full ceremony, informed them that the Asgard's royal living section contained an artificial beach. The effect was stronger than I'd expected.

For a moment, the bridge stopped feeling like a combat center and started feeling more like a hotel lobby that had just announced the infinity pool would be open all night. The class reps' eyes lit up in unison. Fatigue, tension, sleep deprivation—all of it flipped straight into an expression that said: we didn't hijack a warship, we stole a fractional timeshare in heaven. Someone immediately asked if the sand was real. Someone asked whether the water was actually salty.

Someone very seriously asked if there was a simulated sunset to go with the simulated beach. Watching a group of normally responsible student officers fall apart on the spot, I thought, very calmly: thousands of years of human civilization, and the single most powerful crowd-control tool might still just be a resort amenity. As for the bar—sorry, per Hedwig's insistence, the Senpai Officers' Club—we very agreeably said nothing. Table tennis, billiards, the golf sim, bowling—also unmentioned.

There was a solid reason. By Maki's decree, until the Asgard officially entered Federation space, no alcohol on board was to be touched by anyone. When she said it, her expression was more law code than the actual statute book. I was honestly convinced that if anyone dared crack a bottle, she'd personally drag them down to Engineering and have Harvey sober them up using the reactor's heat-exchange system. As for the hot spring. That corridor was, for the time being, Seitokai exclusive.

Maki's and my reasoning was very simple, and very noble— Let us soak for a few days first. This was not selfishness. This was necessary stress management for Senpai staff.

"Vice President, your face is getting a little ugly," Jess muttered beside me.

"Shut it," I said, without blinking.

"It's called an authority dividend."

"I'm technically Seitokai too."

"You're Damage Control. That doesn't come with hot-spring priority."

"This organization is corrupt," she said. Maki, arms folded nearby, added without looking up, "Jess. Keep talking, and I'll cut you off from the beach too." Jess shut up immediately. Good. On the Asgard, real authority was still functioning as intended. Once the crowd's mood was soothed for the moment, the bridge lights dimmed again and the main display unfolded.

The whiplash from hot spring scheduling back to behind-the-lines infiltration planning reminded me, again, that our field trip had been off the rails for a long time. At this point, if someone said tomorrow's breakfast meeting would include an item on seizing a planetary-scale port, I'd probably just ask if there was coffee. With the royal authorization Hedwig had just parceled out, we now had deeper access to the Jovian system intel. Its first function was to punch a hole straight through our earlier optimism.

"Hoshino, updated data on Europa." Lan stood at the main display, a flick of her fingers unfolding several layers at once.

"Earlier, working off low-tier access, we merged the Europa and Ganymede outer installations into a single model, and assumed the base was directly under the ice on Ganymede. We were wrong." I looked up at the projection. The image showed cross-sections of ice shell, and a structural shadow blurry enough to pass for cosmic congee.

"Those inverted trusses aren't the base," Akari said, flat, tapping to mark several hanging structures in red.

"They're large-scale antenna and radar arrays. The actual base isn't in the ice. It's on the inner ocean—a floating platform." The hologram rotated. I finally saw the shape. Beneath the ice shell, a dozen huge suspended antennae hung like inverted metal stalactites, dropping straight toward the deep. Farther down, a massive, flattened platform floated on black water—an entire naval port shoved under the ice and irresponsibly labeled a "concealed facility."

"So," I said slowly, staring at it, "you want me to take out an entire platform and a dozen large antennas at the same time?" I pulled one corner of my mouth up.

"Even if I had James Bond possessing my body, I couldn't blow up two places at once." Jess cut in immediately.

"You're more like the on-site temp they send to make Bond's day worse."

"Thanks. I reject that casting."

"But it fits," Maki said. My head came up. Her face was calm. A little too calm. Like she was about to assign me something wildly unreasonable and had already completed the internal legal review to justify it. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Terrifying woman.

"Which is why," Maki said, looking to the class reps she'd called in, "I asked B, C, D, E, and F Class reps to join us." Backs straightened simultaneously. The air on the bridge tightened with them. Whatever buoyancy the artificial beach had bought us went straight back underwater.

"Five to eight from each class," Maki said.

"Not necessarily your strongest, but no dead weight. This isn't a frontal assault. Your job is to disperse, disrupt, and jam the outer platform's operations—keep the platform and the antenna cluster from supporting each other." She said it very calmly. Calmly enough to sound like assigning festival booths, not planning a sabotage infiltration under an ice shell. Class B's rep frowned.

"So we're not the main strike—we're the chaos?"

"Exactly," I said.

"You don't need to punch through the base. You need to tear their attention apart so the ones actually doing the hitting get a window."

"The ones actually doing the hitting?" Class C's rep asked. Lan didn't answer. She just opened another layer. A long, low, sullen little vessel surfaced in the holo. If the Asgard's upper decks were pure decadence, this thing was the opposite—narrow, flattened, its hull shaped like a weapon with no patience for aesthetics.

"Imperial atmospheric submarine," Lan said.

"Hoshino. You and Jess are taking this." I raised a hand.

"Just confirming. Am I supposed to take that into a naval fight, or—""Of course not," Maki cut me off. And then, in a tone of complete matter-of-factness, said something worse than a naval fight.

"You and Jess insert from underwater. Board it. Seize control. Then fire her torpedoes and erase the platform and the antenna cluster in a single volley." The bridge went very still. So did I. Then I pointed at my own chest.

"I'm not special forces." Maki didn't even pause.

"Aren't you?" Her eyes were cool, precise, like an auditor here to collect.

"Intelligence Department part-timer." Damn it. She was still keeping the tab. For a second, every rotten side job I'd ever been press-ganged into came flying back into my head like unsolicited mail. Maki looked calm and impartial on any normal day. The second it was time to collect, her memory upgraded itself to the Federation's top-tier archive.

"Captain, this is abuse of office," I said through my teeth.

"No," Maki said.

"This is optimal human resource allocation."

"That's worse than Senpai Officers' Club." Jess raised a hand.

"What does that make me?"

"Accomplice," I said.

"Ooh, I love that title."

"Your taste is genuinely broken."

"XO, you just monopolized the hot-spring corridor. You've forfeited the right to critique anyone's taste."

"... That was a management measure."

"Sure it was." I decided to skip her and go for the real problem.

"Fine. Say I actually get Jess in from underwater." I pointed at the sub and the platform in the holo.

"What about extraction? Who's pulling us out of that place?" Class F's rep raised her hand at that. Her expression carried a trace of eagerness that gave me a very bad feeling.

"Let our class handle it?" she said.

"We've got several people with combat-craft piloting experience." My face probably went half-pale.

"... Combat-craft piloting experience?" Those words translated instantly in my head into something much closer to reality: don't worry, we can drive small high-speed vehicles straight into Imperial ice-sea crossfire and fish you out of the wreckage. I stared at her, my voice starting to drift.

"Hey—you're not seriously—that's under the ice! Underwater! People die doing that!" Class F's rep looked at me, completely earnest.

"Not if we're fast enough." I nearly came out of my seat.

"Bullshit!" The word was barely out before someone on the bridge tried and failed to hold back a laugh. I glanced around: Jess had pressed her mouth into a suspiciously flat line, Class B's rep's shoulders were shaking, and even Akari—usually reliably cold—had looked away for half a second, granting me the bare minimum of dignity. Maki had no intention of helping me. She glanced down at the chart and added, pleasantly, "Don't worry, Hoshino."

"I am in no way reassured, thank you."

"Class F's combat-craft record is the best of all the classes."

"That is not a comforting reason."

"You don't have another extraction plan."

"..." That's what I hate most about people like her. She doesn't argue with you. She lays the facts out one at a time and lets reality do the work of shutting you up. Two seconds of silence. Then, reluctantly, I had to admit—no, there really wasn't a cleaner extraction plan. Underwater insertion. Board the sub. Torpedo volley. Platform and antenna cluster gone in one pass. Meanwhile, the class teams outside keep the defenders too busy to concentrate all their fire in one direction.

Then Class F's combat craft dives in for pickup. The plan sounded insane. The problem was, it was efficiently insane. I hated that.

"XO." Jess bumped my elbow, grinning like she'd already started looking forward to it.

"See? You really are special forces material."

"I'm more like the unlucky temp everyone pushed in to test the water depth."

"Don't say that," Jess said.

"At least I'm going in with you."

"Not comforting."

"That's team spirit."

"I'd rather have insurance." Then Hedwig finally spoke. She'd been sitting at the main station the whole time, watching the plan get dismantled and reassembled, like she was weighing whether we were genuinely brave or simply too young to understand the word fatal. Only now did she let her gaze settle on the projection, fingertip brushing it once. Yggdrasil expanded the energy-flow data under the subsurface platform.

"If the Asgard fires directly on the platform," Hedwig said, "the success rate is very high. But the cost is that the entire region goes to maximum alert immediately. Hohenzollern will receive the signal." Her tone was even. Which made the problem land harder.

"So what you need isn't simple destruction. It's destruction, followed by making the source unidentifiable for as long as possible." Lan nodded.

"Exactly. Which is why we're stealing an Imperial submarine, rather than letting the Asgard intervene from outside."

"Then it has to be fast," Akari said.

"Fast enough that the platform hasn't reacted before the outer antenna array starts coming apart in a torpedo chain." I looked at the hanging antennae in the projection, then at the subsurface platform, and finally let out a long breath.

"Fine," I said.

"I accept that the world has gone insane." Jess raised her hand immediately.

"So do I."

"You accepted that too fast."

"Because underwater infiltration, sub hijack, torpedo strike, explosion, combat-craft pickup—" Jess counted them off, eyes brightening with each item, "—that sounds incredibly cool."

"That sounds incredibly lethal."

"Cool and lethal are always next-door neighbors."

"That's too accurate for me to argue with." Maki cleared her throat, pulling the meeting back on track.

"All right. Confirming assignments." She looked around.

"Classes B through E, prepare your outer diversion rosters and specialty placements. Class F, finalize your combat-craft pilot list and pickup routes. Lan, complete the subsurface comms-suppression plan. Akari, cut the sensor blind spots between the antenna array and the platform finer. Jess—""I know, I know." Jess tossed off a sloppy, half-serious salute.

"Go be an underwater ghost with the XO."

"You're executing a mission, not playing spy games," I said.

"Right, which makes it more exciting." I gave up correcting her. Because some people are just built that way. When you're calculating survival odds, they're calculating cool factor. When you're counting the years you might be losing off your life, they're treating it like a premium off-campus excursion. Infuriating—but undeniably, sometimes exactly the piece a mission can't do without. Otherwise everyone would suffocate under their own stress before they even launched.

The meeting broke up gradually, class reps heading off to draft rosters. Europa kept rotating on the projection—ice shell, ocean, antenna array, platform—layered like a white trap laid open for inspection. I leaned against the tactical station and stared at the platform for two seconds. Then Maki walked over.

"What?" I didn't look up.

"Any new revenge assignments to hand me?"

"No," Maki said. I turned my head. Her expression was faint—not the flatness from earlier, when she'd been treating me as a disposable tool. More like: you've confirmed you'll take the job, so I don't need to push anymore.

"You'll pull it off," Maki said. I blinked. This is what I hate most about her. She can make you furious enough to want to hit her with a datapad, and then, right at the end, drop a line that isn't quite comfort and still lands like it.

"The way you talk," I said, quietly, "really does sound like you're conscripting people into dying for you."

"Because it works."

"Not something to be proud of." Maki made a soft, amused sound and turned back to the captain's chair. I watched her go, and finally sighed. Fine. There was really no dodging this Europa run. And I, Hoshino Shimo—Federation Seitokai Vice President, Asgard Executive Officer and Tactical Officer, and apparently a long-term victim of my own Intelligence Department side-work—was going to take Jess into an Imperial ice sea, steal a submarine, and stuff its torpedoes into an entire base's face. Field trip. Wonderful.