Chương 448: 212.Sortie 2

In hindsight, sealing off the entertainment facilities in advance had been the right call. No—it had been very right. Throughout human history, the things that truly move people have rarely been high-minded slogans. Freedom, democracy, equality, fraternity—all genuinely great, but they usually need a few other things to be true first: your stomach is full, your clothes are warm, you're not dying tonight, and tomorrow you might get to soak in a hot spring. Given those conditions, ideals have room to bloom.

Otherwise, most of the time, the things that actually lift people are much simpler. Hot food. A bed. A hot shower. Or, on the Asgard—an artificial beach. The moment that news went around, the effect was immediate. Students who'd been going gray from extended low-consumption cruising, Europa prep, and being dragged into meetings by Maki and me at odd hours suddenly walked a little lighter, carrying the faint hope of: if I make it back, I get to put my feet in that sand. Human civilization really is simple.

Offer a reward big enough, and you can drag people back from the edge of collapse. Of course, we didn't mention the genuinely high-risk items. The bar—The Flag Officers' Club, per Hedwig's correction—stayed a closed secret between the three of us: me, Maki, and Hedwig. No system, however good, is entirely immune to the odd violation. Jess McCallow was the concentrated essence of that exception. Over the following days, she attempted to breach The Flag Officers' Club and the recreation rooms three separate times.

First attempt: a maintenance-crew jacket. Intercepted at the corridor corner with surgical precision by Freya Nikaido. Second attempt: disguised as cleaning staff, pushing a cart with zero cleaning supplies and a suspicious amount of spare clothes and snacks. Caught by Nikaido again. The third attempt was the dumbest. Jess acquired a pair of sunglasses from somewhere and claimed she was "just passing through to familiarize herself with the royal deck's traffic patterns."

She didn'teven make it to the sensor gate before Nikaido was standing in front of it. The precision was uncanny. It was almost as if the Disciplinary Chair had installed a radar tuned specifically to Jess's criminal impulses. In the end, Jess was sentenced to stand outside the mess hall. For three full days. No food. Cruel enough that I reasonably suspected Nikaido had studied Jess's psychological structure before selecting the punishment guaranteed to cause maximum damage. For Jess, being yelled at was nothing.

Three days without touching a tray was full personality collapse. Day one, Jess still had the energy to deliver speeches on Equal Access to Recreational Facilities to everyone who passed. Day two, her voice had thinned considerably, and she'd started staring at other people's bread with the look of someone who'd seen through the illusions of the material world. Day three, Jess was a hollowed-out ghost. Only her mouth still moved.

"XO..." She leaned against the wall, voice drifting like it might get carried off by cosmic background radiation.

"I would trade a lifetime of glory for one bowl of hot soup right now."

"Your lifetime glory account was never well-funded," I said, standing in front of her, assessing the situation without an ounce of sympathy.

"And this is entirely self-inflicted."

"People shouldn't be treated like this for pursuing a better life."

"They can be. At least within Nikaido's jurisdiction."

"Nikaido is the system..." In the end, it was Hedwig who personally resolved the issue. Not out of softness. Quite the opposite. She looked at Jess, who was nearly starving to the point of losing basic social functionality, and said, calmly:"Restore Jess's meal access." Nikaido's brow creased, but she didn't object immediately. Hedwig added the second half.

"Starting today, Yggdrasil will reclassify the royal recreation section and The Flag Officers' Club as Tier-One restricted zones. Anyone approaching without authorization from at least one of the following—the main station, the Captain, or the Executive Officer—will trigger a compartment lockdown and personal identification alert." Jess froze. So did I, briefly. This is what makes Hedwig frightening. Maki writes the rules. Nikaido enforces the rules.

Hedwig turns the rule into the environment itself—something that simply can't be argued with. She doesn't outwit you. She doesn't fight you. She doesn't discuss whether it's fair. She just looks at the problem, and then erases it—along with the possibility of it happening again—at the structural level. Jess was quiet for several seconds before finally producing a shaky observation.

"... Your Highness. You're worse than Nikaido." Hedwig took a calm sip of her tea.

"Thank you." Watching all this, I felt my understanding of Hedwig get recalibrated, layer by layer, over those few days. Hedwig was formidable. Not the wow, she can fire a main gun one-handed kind of formidable. Not purely firepower. Not entirely political, either. In the matter of decision-making alone, Hedwig was brutally, unreasonably strong. Cold. Clean. No drag. And the frightening part: she wasn't cold in order to prove she was cold.

She'd simply accepted something earlier and more completely than most people do—that once you're sitting in that chair, some decisions simply have to be made by someone. In the Empire, that made her a future Empress. In the Federation, she'd end up Council Chair—the kind who could reduce an entire opposition bloc to chastened schoolchildren inside a single meeting. I didn't arrive at this from watching Jess nearly starve. It was the prisoners.

The dozen or so Imperial soldiers and officers held in the Asgard's lower isolation section. Hedwig had gone down to speak with them herself, more than once. Not to dispense mercy. Not for a dramatic surrender speech. Just to lay out, calmly, a handful of ways to survive, and let them choose. They refused. They preferred death to surrender. Better a shattered jade than an intact tile. Some of them, standing in front of her, spat curses through their teeth—traitor, fallen princess, the Asgard defiled.

I'd expected Hedwig to wait longer. Try once more. Give at least one more door. She didn't. She looked at them and said, in a tone as level as a course correction:"Jettison them." I still remember the quiet that followed. No shouting. No righteous "this is too much." Even Maki—who usually bent over backward to find a reason for every life to survive—said nothing this time either. Maki was just silent. And that silence was heavier than agreement, heavier than objection.

Because everyone understood: this wasn't a Seitokai vote. Not a moral seminar. This was a warship being hunted by an Empire, carrying a dozen enemy combatants who refused to surrender and refused to cooperate. Europa lay ahead. Hohenzollern's shadow was closing in, inch by inch. At that point, a risk you couldn't contain was risk itself. I stood at a distance and watched the lock cycle open and close, and felt something in my chest twist once. Not pain. Just pressure.

The most frightening thing wasn't that Hedwig was ruthless. The most frightening thing was that no one objected. Including me. I hope humanity finds peace. The line surfaced from somewhere deep in memory. I remembered Hedwig saying it back on Lunar City Copernicus. At the time I'd been half-skeptical—too neat a phrase to fully trust. Now, standing in the Asgard's metal corridor, on the other side of a silent execution, all I could do was hope— That she'd meant it.

Because if even Hedwig hadn't genuinely wanted peace, then the only meaningful difference left in this universe was who killed more efficiently. But time doesn't stop for my sentimentality. It certainly wasn't going to reward a sudden pacifist impulse by letting Europa shut down and surrender on its own. Soon, we saw Jupiter. The gas giant filled more than half the main display, orange-brown and cream-white bands rolling over each other, like some ancient, bad-tempered god coiled in the center of the system.

It was big enough to trigger something instinctive—the bone-deep recognition that we were actually here. Which also meant it was time to execute that damned insane plan. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Maki called another meeting. By the time I walked in yawning, she was already at the main display. Lan and Akari held intel and sensors.

Hedwig sat at the main station, quiet as a sheathed blade, and it was almost easy to forget that she had sent a dozen lives out an airlock not long before.

"Please," I said, dropping into the tactical seat, sincere enough to be begging the universe for a meal.

"Tell me there's good news." Maki didn't turn.

"Good news is something you make yourself." She paused, apparently deciding one line of motivational torture wasn't enough, and added, perfectly calm: "You'll be seeing Europa soon."

"That's a countdown, not good news."

"Same thing, to the people doing the work." My under-eye circles were probably rivaling Jupiter's storm bands by now. Akari handed over a deep-blue jumpsuit.

"Hoshino. You and Jess wear this down there." I took one look and my expression got opinions.

"This is the school-issue all-environment combat suit," I said.

"We wore this at forest camp. Reviews were bad. Stuffy, heavy, and whoever designed the waistline had a personal vendetta against aesthetics." Jess leaned over and immediately agreed.

"Seriously. Putting this on feels like a vacuum seal working very hard to strip youth of its dignity."

"That's an environmental issue," Lan said, flat, like she was defending a repeatedly misunderstood industrial product.

"As a dive suit, this performs well. Pressure-resistant, insulated, joint seals hold. You'll each get a DPV too."

"DPV?" I looked up at the display. Lan pulled the schematic without ceremony. A small underwater propulsion unit unfolded in the holo—streamlined, a nozzle and grips at the tail, exactly the kind of gear built to drag you into serious trouble with real professionalism. My eye twitched.

"You mean Diver Propulsion Vehicle—that DPV?"

"Correct," Lan said.

"Fine. I accept the gear." I stared at the display, then asked the question I least wanted answered and couldn't avoid.

"How are we getting down there?" Lan didn't answer. Akari didn't answer. Jess blinked, and her expression carried a trace of anticipation I didn't trust at all. Finally, from the captain's chair, Maki dropped the answer with excessive calm.

"You'll find out when it's time." I was quiet for two seconds. Then, very civilly, very culturally, in a manner entirely befitting an Executive Officer's dignity, I swore in my head— fuck. This sounded bad. Not ordinary bad. The specific kind of bad where everyone had silently agreed not to tell me in advance, because if I knew ahead of time, there was a real chance I'd strangle the captain across the table. I looked at the deep-blue suit. Then at the DPV schematic.

A very strong premonition settled in: on this Europa run, the first casualty wasn't going to be the Empire, or the ice sea, or the submarine. It was going to be my sanity. Jess, for her part, had none of my pessimism.

"This sounds fun," she said, stroking the suit, eyes bright.

"XO, don't you think? Underwater infiltration, sub hijack, blow up a platform and an antenna array, then get pulled out at high speed—that's premium field trip material."

"You use the word premium with absolutely no shame."

"You don't get it," Jess said, entirely serious.

"Once a human gets close enough to death, they automatically reclassify everything as youth."

"Then you go be youthful. I'd like to stay alive." Maki tapped the table once, pulling everyone back on track.

"Final stage. Once we reach Europa's outer perimeter, the Asgard holds low-consumption stealth. Outer teams take up positions under their class reps. Hoshino, Jess—prep for water." The moment that sentence landed, the air on the bridge dropped half a degree. I put the suit in my lap and stared at Europa's projection for a few seconds. Ice shell, ocean, antenna array, platform, submarine—every element of the insane plan, present and accounted for. Then I realized I didn't actually want to back out that badly.

Not because something was wrong with me. Because once you've come this far, there's really only one direction left. Europa ahead, the Empire behind. Between them: the Asgard, the students, Hedwig, Maki, Jess, and one stolen royal monster we were trying to bring home. At this point, hesitation was the single worst value proposition on the table. I let out a slow breath and picked up the suit.

"Fine," I said.

"If I really die in the ice, make sure my last words are written with some literary dignity."

"Relax," Jess said instantly.

"I'll write you an epic."

"I'm more afraid you'll write me a bodice-ripper."

"XO, you deeply underestimate my literary range."

"No. I know your lower bound very well." Hedwig spoke then, from the main station.

"Hoshino." I looked up. Her gaze settled on me, still, steady, everything extraneous pressed down under a layer of royal composure. Which was exactly why the line landed as clean as it did.

"Come back alive." Four words. No flourish. No padding. Not even much warmth in the delivery. But that was exactly what made it sound like her. I blinked, then forced a lopsided smile.

"Your Highness, phrasing it that way makes it sound like you're actually worried about me." She didn't shift her gaze at all.

"I am worried about you." The bridge went quiet for a beat. Jess drew a sharp breath beside me, her expression that of someone who'd just watched the main gun fire indoors. Maki looked away, very slightly, choosing tactical silence over commentary on something that clearly wasn't up for discussion right now. As for me— My pulse skipped a beat, embarrassingly. Great. We were about to go into an ice sea, and this woman still had the bandwidth to run interference on my nervous system.

"... Got it," I said, clearing my throat, forcing my voice back into a functional range.

"I'll try not to let Your Highness's concern go to waste." Hedwig didn't say anything else. But I saw the corner of her mouth move. Barely. Faint enough to be a trick of the light. I saw it anyway. Which made me want to swear again. Not at her. At myself. Because I'd just realized that at this exact wrong moment, my brain had still found room to file away the sound of her saying I am worried about you. I was done for. Genuinely past saving.

The operational meeting broke up faster than I expected once we got back to the bridge. Simple reason: once a plan has reached the level of insanity required to stuff two students into Europa's subsurface ocean to steal an Imperial submarine and use it to torpedo a platform and an antenna array, a meeting stops being about finding a saner option. It becomes about giving everyone one last chance to formally claim their share of the chaos before it officially starts. Jess and I were sent to change.

The "changing room" was a tactical gear bay off the Asgard's aft section, walls lined with equipment that only ever showed up in training modules—professional-looking, dignity-destroying to actually wear. The centerpiece was the deep-blue all-environment suit.

"I still want to lodge a protest," I said, zipping up to my collarbone, frowning at my reflection—vacuum-sealed like premium frozen food.

"The designer of this thing absolutely hated teenage girls."

"Agreed." Jess was adjusting her wrist seals, nodding hard.

"The cut of this suit is a full and complete expression of the Federation education system's hostility toward the female body."

"You manage to make that sound like a parliamentary inquiry."

"Because I mean it sincerely." She sighed and patted her side.

"Also, this thing has one very magical effect."

"What effect?"

"The moment you put it on, you become convinced you're definitely about to do something incredibly stupid today." I thought about it. Annoyingly accurate. The suit itself wasn't hard to wear. The problem was the texture, the way it wrapped around you—it reeked of mission prelude.

Every joint seal that clicked, every neck ring that locked, made you feel like you'd been dropped into a low-budget recruitment video, the score about to swell into something rousing that the person wearing the suit really just wanted to skip.

"XO." Jess leaned over, grinning badly.

"You actually look pretty good like this."

"Where."

"There's an aesthetic to it. Someone who's usually great at yelling at people, finally getting grabbed by fate and dunked in ice water."

"Your taste always lands exactly on the spot where I want to hit you."

"That's called honesty between teammates."

"That's called asking for it." I locked the last fastener and rolled my shoulders. The fit was better than the forest-camp version—at least it didn't feel like my bones and the fabric were suing each other every time I crouched. Probably because this application was more specialized. Lan hadn't been wrong: as dive gear, this made a lot more sense than it ever had for wilderness training. Provided you accepted that you were actually going into the water.

Right now I was in the delicate state where my brain had accepted it and my emotions were still trying to buy a refund. Once suited up, we were directed to the Asgard's aft section. Nothing like the royal living quarters we'd toured before. No star dome. No hot spring. No Senpai Officers' Club for Jess to drool over and plot revolution against.

The air back here held only metal, lubricant, low-frequency vibration, and the specific, unornamented smell of nothing here is for pleasure, everything here is for staying alive. Conduits ran the walls and ceiling; indicator lights blinked in rows; maintenance crew and engineering students hurried past, glancing at Jess and me with expressions somewhere between respect and pity. Honestly, I preferred to assume it was respect. Lan and Akari were waiting at the aft prep platform.

"Suited up," I said, walking over, tugging my collar.

"Now will you two Houdinis finally reveal the answer?" Lan didn't respond immediately. She traded a look with Akari. The next second, both of them pulled the heavy cover sheet aside.

"Ta-da," Jess supplied her own sound effect. I saw the silhouette first. A second later, the whole thing was fully visible, and my expression got very complicated. It looked like a cross between a mini-sub and something a bored engineer had stitched together from a torpedo casing and an escape pod, then handed off to someone with a taste for dangerous toys.

Long, narrow hull, gray-black, a transparent observation dome up front, short stabilizer fins folded along the sides, and a set of clearly modified high-pressure jet thrusters in the tail. Sized for exactly two people, with a little room left over for fate to laugh at. I stared at it for three seconds.

"... What is that."

"Short-range assault craft," Lan said, as naturally as introducing a new coffee machine.

"D dug it out of storage."

"Is D raiding supply closets or doing archaeology?"

"Probably both," Jess said, cheerfully. Akari had already thrown up the 3D map. A semi-transparent cross-section of Europa rotated over the platform—ice shell, passages, ocean, platform, antenna array, layered cold enough to hurt your teeth to look at.

"You put on the outer suits and get in," Akari said, tapping the entry point on the map.

"Short-range propulsion runs on high-pressure nitrogen. Once you're in Europa's surface zone, follow the outer vent trace we've marked. Find the vent opening—that's your way in." I blinked.

"Wait. Did you say vent?"

"Yes." She zoomed the image. A hairline fracture with artificial reinforcement showed up on the ice.

"Per Yggdrasil's corrected data, there's a maintenance conduit here that runs straight down below the waterline. The Empire built it for pressure equalization and emergency access." Lan picked up.

"Once you're below the surface, switch to the DPVs. They've got sonar guidance—it'll get you to the submarine in the inner ocean." She said it lightly. Lightly enough to sound like: take the school bus down the hill, turn the corner, there's the convenience store, follow the signs, don't worry. Except we weren't going to a convenience store. We were going into an Imperial military installation's subsurface ocean under Europa's ice, using two diver propulsion vehicles to find a submarine.

I had a brief, sincere wish to know how this had cleared committee with a straight face. Then I remembered I'd been at that table. And nodded. Right. So one of the culprits was me. Akari walked over to the craft and knocked on the hull.

"There are weapons stowed inside," she said.

"To make sure you don't lose anything critical mid-transit, Maki had us fix the kit into the cabin in advance."

"That sounds rude, you know," I said.

"Risk assessment, based on historical data."

"Whose data?" She looked at me.

"Mostly Jess's." I shut up immediately. Because that sentence had no gaps in it. Lan handed over a waterproof pack. It nearly took my wrist with it when I caught it.

"Oxygen masks, spare filters, a few sets of underwater charges," Lan said.

"Don't dig around in the craft. Check it once you're in the water."

"Why is don't dig around also directed at me?" Jess protested.

"Because you have priors."

"When did I—""Last exercise, you hid snacks in the gear bag."

"That was tactical resupply!" I wedged the pack into the craft's fixed slot and looked over the cockpit. More complete than I'd expected—tandem seating, a compact but fully instrumented panel: attitude, pressure, external readouts, all present. Emergency weapon slots and magnetic mounts on both sides. Not a toy. Which meant this thing could genuinely deliver us to hell, and do it with real polish.

"During the operation, the Asgard will hold at a concealed point in the nearby debris field," Akari went on, "minimizing heat signature and profile. Once you're done, Class F's pickup route will adjust to the platform's fire pattern."

"Sounds reliable," I said.

"That's because you haven't seen how they plan to fish you out," Jess murmured beside me.

"... I regret asking." Akari ignored our mutual spiraling with practiced patience. She just nodded, plainly.

"Good luck." From most people, that phrase is politeness. From Akari, it sounded more like: you are about to experience several things common sense cannot process. Medical extends its condolences in advance. Jess and I looked at each other. Her eyes were bright in a way that reassured no one. Mine were working very hard not to look like I was signing a high-risk organ-donor form. We climbed in. The cockpit was narrower than it looked.

With both of us inside, the sensation was immediate: good, now you've been loaded into a shell casing. When the harnesses clicked, I heard the hull give a solid, settled lock—and some part of me that had still been resisting clicked shut right along with it. Lan checked us from outside—neck ring, oxygen feed, pressure valve, cabin interface, one by one.

"Comms check," she said.

"Hoshino Shimo. Still alive," I said.

"Jess McCallow. Mental state concerningly good," Jess said.

"That's normal, then," Akari said, without mercy. I hadn't finished mourning Jess's dignity before Maki's voice slid into my earpiece.

"Time." The air in the cabin tightened.

"Jess. Start the engine."... Hm? I froze for half a beat. Then whipped around.

"Wait." My voice, thanks entirely to sincere terror, cracked slightly.

"Jess McCallow—you know how to fly this?" Jess already had her hand curled around the stick, her profile in the cockpit's low light carrying a confidence I did not trust. The wrong kind of confidence. Not the steady kind. The finally, my turn kind. Just looking at it made the back of my neck prickle. Jess hummed, smug as someone about to perform her signature party trick at the school festival.

"Please," she said.

"Do you know what they used to call me at the arcade?" My stomach dropped—not the ordinary kind of drop, the kind where you hit psychological rock bottom before the depth gauge's even started counting.

"... What." Her mouth curved.

"Space Cowboy." I detonated.

"I knew it!" I grabbed the harness, my voice blowing straight through every ceiling an XO's composure was supposed to have.

"I should never, ever have trusted my life to someone whose confidence comes from an arcade high score—!" The next second, the craft's high-pressure nitrogen thrusters fired. The whole vehicle lurched forward like it had been kicked by a god with strong opinions about human fate. My scream took a sharp turn inside the cabin and nearly merged with the warning tones into one language.

The prep platform lights fell away behind us; Lan's silhouette, Akari's projection, the black lines of the Asgard's aft hull, all smeared into streaks. And Jess— Jess was actually laughing. Not a villain's laugh. Not bravado.

Pure, delighted, punchable joy—like she'd been waiting past the point of patience for exactly this, like the more dangerous the universe got, the more naturally she lit up, like the ice sea, the Imperial base, the submarine, the torpedoes, and my screaming were all just the opening sequence of an extremely high-difficulty amusement ride. I locked both hands on the grips and gritted my teeth against the shudder of acceleration. Wonderful. Perfect. Looked like the first enemy on Europa wasn't the Empire.

Wasn't the ice sea. Wasn't the submarine. It was Jess McCallow's taste in piloting.