Chương 455: 215.Space Pirates 1

After Kushima Maki left, the medical bay did not return to being a sacred, quiet, respectable place of healing. On the contrary, over the next hour or so it formally devolved into a kind of sightseeing route operating under the pretext of visiting the sick. First someone from Class D poked their head in, saying they'd come to check whether the XO had dismantled the bed.

Then someone was sent over from engineering, saying Harvey wanted to know whether I'd left my lungs outside Europa—because Asgard was very short on coolant right now, though not so short that it needed the XO as a spare part. After that, even the people who normally looked least interested in a crowd found extremely strained excuses to show up—"just happened to be passing by," "dropped in to check the material of the IV stand," "I only came to see whether Jess would get punched again."

Lan even brought a bag of energy bars scavenged from somewhere, standing in the doorway with a face that said "I'm sincere, please don't count me as an accomplice," trying to dilute the guilt of yesterday's white-sheet farce into ordinary classmate goodwill. And Jess, lying in the next bed, actually had the nerve to raise a hand in greeting to every batch of visitors, acting less like a patient and more like a problem student who'd just won some in-ship popularity poll.

I had intended to maintain the bare minimum of dignity appropriate to a patient. Unfortunately, in the course of one afternoon, being asked three times "Vice President, did you really cry?", twice "Did Jess nearly get punched back into the emergency bay?", and once—with extraordinary nerve—"Should we put the white sheet over her again so we can confirm the effect?", will grind the finest composure into powder. In the end, it wasn't patience that saved me. It was just the Class-C med team leader on shift.

That senior—usually a total robot of few words, but with a glare sharp enough to pin a chart to the wall—completely lost it on some unnumbered visitor trying to slip inside. The medical team leader yanked the door open first, then announced, in a voice colder than vacuum, that the medical area was not a school-festival stall, not a viewing hall for the deceased, and certainly not a laboratory for observing the XO's emotional fluctuations.

Thirty seconds later, the entire corridor was as clean as if it had just been purged. When I lay back down, I understood for the first time, deep in my bones, what it means that patients are people too. Just a little. The next morning, the Class C medical team scanned me from head to toe again. It wasn't a normal exam. It was the kind of strictness that carried a hint of revenge.

The scanner frame moved slowly from the top of my head to my toes, cold light sweeping over me layer by layer, fine enough to check whether I'd secretly swapped in a more durable body overnight. In the end, the medical team leader looked over the report and admitted, with a deeply reluctant expression, that while Hoshino Shimo's head probably still had a few problems, her physical readings at least were not among them. And so I was finally released back into the ship. As for Jess, she clearly wasn't so lucky.

Jess had a few more days of bed rest to go. Thinking about it left me with complicated feelings. On one hand, it meant the damage control officer couldn't go running around loose for a while, which was plainly good news for order aboard ship. On the other, the medical bay was probably in for no peace at all. Because even with Jess pinned to the bed, her mouth wouldn't stop operating. In a sense, that was more worrying than the injury itself.

When I walked onto the bridge, Asgard's interior had already returned to that rhythm of surface calm with a great many gears grinding away underneath. The main screen was spread with a starfield projection of the Europa area, several track lines crossing one another, data windows floating in the air panel by panel. Roy sat at the navigation station, spine very straight, as if leaning back even slightly would throw the whole route off.

Lan stood at the main comms station with several updated reports stacked at her side. And Akari, as always, looked as quiet as part of the background when she sat there—but the moment she spoke, it was usually the kind of remark that hit the vital point exactly. I had barely stepped in when Kushima Maki raised her eyes to me.

"Hoshino Shimo. Back on duty." She said it flatly, and yet it had the force of putting me back on my coordinates. I took two steps and stood beside my station.

"I'm back." The corner of Kushima Maki's mouth moved very slightly. The curve was brief—brief enough to pass for an illusion. Like a smile that had just shown its head before being immediately suppressed on the spot by Kushima Maki in her capacity as captain. A shame. Before I could recover any health from that scrap of precious expression, she pulled her tone back into business mode.

"Then take your seat." As I sat down, my gaze drifted to Maki for a moment without my meaning it to. Mm. Complexion normal, speech rhythm normal, collar still so neat it lacked any trace of humanity. She didn't look like the pitiful captain from yesterday who'd had to break off a meeting halfway through to go publicly execute a pack of patients and accomplices in the medical bay. Good. As expected of Kushima Maki.

Mental resilience and facial control both resembled the demonstration material a military academy would use to scare cadets. Maki turned to Lan and Akari.

"Continue your report."

"Yes." Lan picked it up at once.

"Classes B, C, and D have already begun collecting ice-core samples. The bio lab's water-quality standard has also been confirmed as passing. At this stage, both surface and shallow ice samples from Europa can enter the processing chain." The data windows unfolded in the air, several sets of composition ratios and purification flows rising into view. Akari picked it up from there.

"This ice can do more than make up the raw material the power reactors need; the great majority of it can also be converted to life support water. Harvey added one particular reminder just now." Akari paused, her gaze passing over a corner of the screen.

"What we're actually consuming the most of right now isn't drinking water—it's the coolant production line. Once that part is spent, it doesn't come back. It's a one-time resource." Engineering really is the place most skilled at grinding romance down into industrial nouns. Europa's ice had carried at least a little poetry for me in the abstract—survival at the edge of the universe. Now that Akari and Harvey had translated it, it became, immediately, "disposable life-extension fluid for a warship, do not waste."

Very practical. Very brutal. The way a warship stays alive really isn't that different from a person. Either you keep topping up, or you die quickly. Maki nodded.

"Understood. Pass the order down: all resources go to engineering first." The moment that sentence landed, the whole priority order was nailed in place. Nobody objected. Because everyone knew: in the current situation, engineering wasn't a department, it was the heart. Stop the heart first, and no matter how luxurious the ship, all that's left is a drifting coffin with an astonishing price tag. With the immediate crisis handled, the air on the bridge naturally pushed on to the next step.

Namely—where we were going next, and how we'd get there. Maki swept a hand, and the star map contracted again, the Europa area falling back as a darker, more complicated route was pulled into the center.

"According to the data Hoshino recovered from Europa," Maki said, "there appears to be a narrow passage inside the Corridor that even the Hohenzollern Fortress has trouble fully controlling." The moment that came out, the first person on the bridge to react wasn't me, and wasn't Hedwig. It was Roy. I saw Roy's shoulders twitch unnaturally with my own eyes. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Not simple nerves.

More like a navigation professional whose body had lodged its protest about future workload the instant the words "narrow passage," "large warship," and "enemy fire net" arranged themselves automatically in his head. I propped my chin on my hand and couldn't help laughing.

"Putting it like that, Roy looks terrified." I deliberately made my voice lighter.

"Which means Lan's probably going to need more time to comfort Roy tonight." The words had barely landed when Lan and Roy froze at almost the same instant. One standing at the comms station, one sitting at the navigation station, both faces coloring in sync—so perfectly matched it looked like a couples-only synchronization system. My mood improved immediately. Good. At least I'd gotten some payback for yesterday's white-sheet con in the medical bay.

Lan hadn't been the ringleader, but she'd been in on it, so she had no business walking away clean.

"XO, please don't write your personal speculation directly into the bridge report." Lan said it with a straight face, though her ears were still red.

"I didn't write it into the report." I blinked, all innocence.

"I'm looking out for the physical and mental health of bridge personnel." Roy cleared his throat, trying to rescue himself from the couples topic.

"If that narrow passage really exists, the question isn't whether we can take it—it's whether Asgard can maintain enough turning room in that kind of environment." Roy's tone recovered fast; clearly professionalism outranked shame.

"If the channel is narrower than estimated, or there's gravity turbulence, the hull's size actually becomes a fatal weakness." As expected of Roy. The moment this man enters professional mode, the romance-addled brain automatically drops to second string. No wonder Lan was willing to be with Roy. He looked a little dull normally, but in actual work mode he was remarkably reliable. Only, that reliability occasionally got used as a toy, because his reactions were genuinely fun.

Hedwig, who had been sitting silently in the command seat, finally spoke.

"On the Imperial side of the Corridor, there's a station near this narrow passage." Hedwig raised a hand, and the star map in the air contracted with it. It wasn't an ordinary gesture—more like the whole starfield was willing to obey her. Her fingertips traced two circles in the void, and the view cut immediately to a smaller range, several Imperial markers surfacing, positioned so precisely they might have been etched into her retinas in advance.

"Here." Hedwig touched a tiny point of light.

"Patrol Station AU-1206. Standard deployment of three light patrol boats." Hedwig's tone was very flat. And it was precisely that flatness that gave it an ominous edge.

"The troublesome part isn't how strong those three patrol boats are," Hedwig went on.

"It's the reporting speed. Since last year, AU-1206's comms link has been reinforced. The moment the alarm net trips, Hohenzollern can send a garrison fleet to seal the entire Corridor within ten minutes." Hedwig paused.

"Not a few hundred ships. Not a few thousand. Tens of thousands." The bridge went quiet for an instant. A number like that can intimidate more directly than a main gun. Because with a main gun there's still the illusion that maybe you can dodge, maybe you can block. Tens of thousands of ships offer no such illusion. It's pure, boring, utterly unimaginative, and extremely effective crushing.

"If we alert AU-1206, we're finished." Hedwig delivered her conclusion. I looked at Hedwig, unable to hold back my admiration.

"As expected of the third princess," I said.

"No wonder they say you can guard against the day and guard against the night, but never against the thief inside the house." Hedwig's gaze drifted over slowly. Those eyes were beautiful in a very Imperial way—that is to say, beautiful, but not something to trust easily.

"Your usage is off," Hedwig said.

"I'm not a thief. I'm saving myself. Since I've come aboard this ship, we share the same boat. Don't we?" Out of someone else's mouth, that line might have sounded a little pitiful, even like a way of giving herself a step down. Out of Hedwig's mouth, it tasted nothing like that. Hedwig wasn't asking for agreement. She was stating a fact she had already decided for herself. As if the moment a princess chose to set foot on Asgard, "sharing the same boat" stopped being a request and became a renaming of reality.

I smiled.

"As you wish, Your Highness." With that, I put my attention back on the star map. There were a great many markers around Hohenzollern—military routes, blockade zones, station nodes, so dense it looked like someone had deliberately woven a mass of killing intent into a net and hung it in space. But along the edge of that lethal structure there were a few lines that didn't match. Those lines were gold. Thinner than the military lines, and far more conspicuous.

I narrowed my eyes and pointed toward the fortress and several adjacent star sectors around it.

"What are these gold lines?" Hedwig followed the direction of my finger and glanced at them.

"Private yacht lanes for Imperial nobility. Or the fixed routes of luxury liners." I went quiet for half a second. And then a not particularly upright idea raised its head in my mind, entirely naturally. Private yachts. Luxury liners. Fixed routes.

In other words: people who had been carefully protected, carefully provided for, and carefully spoiled by civilization from birth, cruising at their leisure around the outer edge of a place like Hohenzollern in things that were extremely expensive, extremely superfluous, and extremely well suited to being exploited. To the Empire, that's called luxury. To me, right now, it's called inspiration. The kind that glows on its own. I could feel the corner of my mouth rising.

Not a polite smile, and not some protagonist-style confidence in justice. Closer to the smile that grows automatically whenever I think, "this is deeply unethical, and it might actually work." Kushima Maki had clearly noticed.

"Shimo." Kushima Maki spoke at once, her tone carrying a high alertness accumulated from past experience.

"You had better not—" Too late. I turned to Kushima Maki, smiling happily.

"Hey, Maki." Several pairs of eyes on the bridge turned toward me at once. Lan had probably already started regretting magnifying those gold lines. Roy wore the look of a man who'd had a premonition: "please don't let it be the kind of thing I have to fly the ship for." Akari didn't appear to move, but I strongly suspected she was already quietly calculating hit angles on certain highly improper routes.

As for Hedwig, Hedwig just watched me, that gaze seeming to wait for some proposal both rude and reasonable to leap out of my mouth. I laid a finger lightly on those gold lanes. Then I spoke.

"Let's play pirates." In that instant, the entire bridge went so quiet it felt as if even Yggdrasil paused briefly. The next second, Roy gasped first. Lan's hand went straight to her forehead.

"I knew it," Lan muttered.

"I knew nothing good comes of the XO making that face."

"Hold on." Roy spoke almost on reflex.

"The pirates you mentioned—if that's a metaphor, I'm willing to keep listening. If it isn't a metaphor, I'd like the bridge to first confirm whether our insurance clauses cover this." I spread both hands.

"Roy, use your imagination. This isn't a crime, it's a high-mobility disguised seizure operation."

"XO, dressing up ship-jacking like a project proposal title doesn't make it any more legal," Lan cut in at once.

"But it sounds better," I said. Akari actually put in a very serious remark at this point.

"If it's a noble's private yacht, the armament is usually light. Luxury liners prioritize comfort and comms over armor." Akari paused half a beat.

"Purely from a technical standpoint, it is indeed more sensible than forcing our way through AU-1206." I turned to look at Akari. Good. Professionals, as expected, know to raise an idea into a tactic instead of tossing it out as lunacy.

"Shimo." Maki looked at me.

"Finish it." The moment she said it, I knew: at least Kushima Maki hadn't vetoed it outright. That was enough. I raised a hand and pulled the gold lines and the area around AU-1206 into the center together.

"It's not really difficult. Or rather, there's no grand plan." Working the star map with one hand, I said it airily, in the tone of someone choosing a dessert for afternoon tea.

"Find a target... ahem, I mean, find a kind soul willing to donate generously. Hop aboard, then very gently ask them to hand over their money."

"And if they don't cooperate, help them tidy their hairline with a tungsten alloy battle axe?" Akari tossed that in without warning, her tone grim enough that she might already be picking angles on the victim's behalf. I tilted my head and glanced at her. Professionals really do understand. Maki leaned back in the captain's seat and tapped the armrest twice, lightly. That was her thinking. It was also the signal that she was holding back from throwing me out of the meeting first.

"And then." She looked at me, neither agreeing nor refusing, just levelly pushing the conversation onward. That reaction was actually the best. Because as long as Maki was still willing to listen, I knew the plan at least hadn't been sentenced to death. I overlaid the lanes and the station's position on the same projection layer and let them sit there, glowing quietly.

"If it were ordinary travelers, the Imperial military would mostly not bother," I said.

"But if the ones in trouble are Imperial nobility—""Or a whole ship full of Imperial nobility." Roy picked it up fast, his tone already carrying a hint of mourning for future overtime.

"Then the border patrol is going to hate us to death."

"Isn't that great." I smiled wider.

"Let them get a taste of what overtime really means." Lan frowned, looking at the routes on the star map.

"And if we really do bring the fortress fleet down on us?" That was a good question. Because that was the real boundary of the whole thing. Rousing the patrol into chaos was one matter; actually dragging the entire garrison fleet out of Hohenzollern was another. The former is called tactics. The latter is called being tired of living. From the command seat, Hedwig finally spoke.

"The fortress won't concern itself with mischief at this level." She raised a hand and drew a line in the void with a fingertip; several comms node markers surfaced at once.

"Within the Imperial system, this sort of thing gets classified as a civil dispute. The garrison fleet won't personally descend over a few attacked yachts. Moreover—" Her gaze settled on the Europa region, her tone calm to the edge of cruelty.

"We just destroyed the communications base there. This sector's signal transmission is already patchy at best. Whether a distress call can even get out, and whether it would be handled promptly once it did, are both unknowns." I nodded when she finished. Good. That meant there was even more room to work with than I'd originally thought. The Empire's response would lag by half a beat, while the patrol wouldn't dare stay still.

As long as we kept the rhythm clean, we could drag them around like a pack of dogs with their tails on fire—running everywhere and never biting the real target. Maki looked at Hedwig, then swept her gaze across the bridge.

"So what Your Highness means is—" Her tone was as steady as ever, steady like she was confirming an official military order rather than a farce that sounded more and more like officers dressing up as bandits.

"That this plan, which sounds like the entire crew collectively losing their minds, is actually viable." Hedwig smiled faintly. The smile was faint, but it carried a composure I disliked very much and had to admit was persuasive.

"It's interesting, isn't it." She looked at Maki like someone watching a performance that broke every rule and was nonetheless good enough to be worth it.

"Captain Kushima." Maki didn't answer right away. She just looked at the gold lines and the station on the star map, compressing the idea on the table—still carrying a trace of joke—into a clearer outline. Not for fortune. Not to be pirates. And certainly not to write ourselves into an Imperial wanted notice as legendary figures. It was to bite, one mouthful at a time—never hard, but annoying enough. Hit one ship, move to another sector. Rob once, move on.

Let the border patrol believe enemies are everywhere, exhaust them, let the warning line loosen on its own, let a blockade that had been sealed tight develop a seam we could pass through. And then Asgard slides through that seam. Quietly. Beautifully. Like a blade that has finally found the gap between bones.