Chương 456: 215.Space Pirates 2

"I'm going." Jess lay on the hospital bed with one hand raised, her tone solemn as if she were about to declare national independence the next second. I stood at the bedside looking down at her, unable to stop myself from wondering whether this one's ECG leads had been hooked up backwards. A normal person who'd just stopped by death's door to say hello should first learn to treasure life—for at least twenty-four hours. Jess was different.

She'd probably treated death as a free ride, and she'd only just gotten off and was already queuing for the next one.

"I know." I tucked the terminal away, keeping my tone as level as I could.

"I saved you a seat." Jess's eyes lit up at once. Not ordinary happiness—the pure delight of a family dog hearing the word walk, a pirate hearing board the ship, a problem student hearing classes are cancelled.

"Yay, great. I love you, Shimo. A kiss, mwah—" I clamped a hand over Jess's face and shoved away the mouth that was heading straight for me.

"Let's be clear first: the main objective is creating chaos." I held that punchable face steadily in place with my palm.

"Robbery is a side effect, not the goal."

"Okay." Jess answered extremely fast. Suspiciously fast. I stared at her for two seconds, then added, coldly, one more line.

"Okay my ass. You're practically drooling." Jess had not one shred of shame and kept trying to laugh under my palm. Her face was squashed a little out of shape, and yet her eyes were still bright like a brat who'd just received a combat authorization. I suspected she hadn't heard a single tactical point and had only registered "you can go." On the other side of the bed stood D, holding a get-well gift. Honestly, the sight of the Marine commander carrying a care package was oppressive in itself.

Other people visit the sick to bring concern; D looked more like he'd hauled in an entire ammunition crate and wanted to ask whether you needed an extra life. That tall, dark frame planted beside the bed made even the medical bay look one size smaller. I turned to look at him.

"D, how's the Marine training coming along on your end?" He laughed, open and easy. The laugh was thick, low thunder rolling straight out of his chest.

"Very successful," he said.

"I pulled about a hundred-plus people out of six classes to start. Basic formations, boarding, suppression, short-range breach—all run through once. This batch can deploy at any time." I ran the numbers quickly in my head. Good. Even a little better than I'd originally expected. You can't run this kind of leapfrog raiding by leaning on a handful of people every time.

What's truly fatal isn't hitting one ship; it's hitting one, moving somewhere else, hitting another, and still keeping the tempo so the patrol chases the wrong direction. Without enough people you can throw aboard at a moment's notice, this whole approach is just a fantasy. The number D had just given at least proved it was no longer only a fantasy. I looked back at Jess.

"If you can deploy by then, you have to be at tomorrow morning's operations meeting."

"Got it." Jess raised a hand and waved at me energetically.

"Wait for me." The whole picture was so much like an elementary schooler getting ready for a field trip that for a moment it was hard to connect her with the person who'd nearly handed over her life in vacuum the day before. When D and I left the medical bay, the corridor was much quieter than inside. The lights in the medical area always ran a little white, making everyone's complexion look poor.

Footsteps fell on the metal decking one at a time, very clearly, as if every stretch of calm inside the ship were only borrowed order. Out in the outer corridor, D turned his head and glanced at me.

"Hoshino. You doing all right?"

"Mm. Much better." I answered offhand, and then saw that on his usually blunt face there had surfaced, unusually, a trace of hesitation, something held back. That wasn't common. D normally isn't the type to swallow his words. If he wanted to hit someone, protect someone, or charge somewhere, he'd just say so. Being bottled up like this in a corridor made me uneasy instead. I stopped walking and looked at him.

"What," I said.

"Just say it." D sighed. The sigh was heavy, heavy like what he was about to drop wasn't a sentence but a slab of lead.

"Jess told us not to tell you," he said.

"But I think you have the right to know." I frowned. D raised a hand first to add something.

"Deal first: if I tell you, you can't sell me out, you can't go confront her, and you can't blow up on the spot." I looked at him.

"Talk," I said.

"I won't get angry." D gave me a look—roughly the look an adult gives a child who solemnly swears "I'll only have one bite," full of distrust. But in the end he spoke.

"Before you woke up, Jess actually flatlined once," he said.

"The Class C medical team kept resuscitating her and pulled her back." In that instant, the air conditioning in the corridor seemed to grow heavier. I didn't speak at once. Not because I didn't understand. Because the sentence was too bare—so bare there wasn't even time to play dumb. So it hadn't been simply nearly not breathing, and it hadn't been a misjudgment in the confusion on the recovery deck. She had genuinely stopped. Genuinely flatlined once.

Genuinely been dragged back to this side by other people's effort. I heard my own voice, calmer than I'd expected. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"How long was her heart stopped?"

"Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds." Having said it, D actually laughed first. The laugh wasn't flippant. It was closer to the kind of wry smile only people who have survived have a right to wear.

"Like a prank landing," he said.

"On the fourth minute, she woke up." I pulled the corner of my mouth up too. Very shallow. So shallow I wasn't even sure myself whether it counted as a smile.

"That's very like her." The moment that came out, I realized the hole in my chest—the one I thought yesterday's white-sheet farce had covered over—had never actually closed. Jess, that idiot, had only pasted over it in a more idiotic way. Now that D had torn the truth open, I could see the wound underneath again, still hot. So she really had come that close to not coming back. So that flare of rage in the medical bay hadn't just been me losing control after being played, and it hadn't been simple wounded pride.

My body had known first—known that person had genuinely slid a little way toward the other side—which is why I got that angry. Angry enough to hit her. Angry enough to drag her bodily out of the white sheet. Angry enough that even the strength I was cursing with carried a tremor in it. At the corridor junction, D and I were about to split up. He nodded to me and was turning to go when I suddenly called him back.

"D." He looked back. I looked at the man standing under the cold white light, like a wall and like a tower, and said it with complete sincerity.

"Thank you." D didn't say much, only waved a hand at me. The gesture was casual, but I knew he'd understood. Sometimes the rarest thing on this ship isn't someone who's especially good at pretty words. It's someone who knows a sentence might cause trouble and still chooses to let you know the truth. Early the next morning, Jess appeared on the bridge looking so refreshed it was as if the medical team had reassembled her overnight.

When I first saw her, for one instant I even wondered whether yesterday's flatline had been something D made up on the spot to test my temper. Because the person in front of me walked with a spring in her step, greeted everyone along the way, and looked so energetic she might have just come back from a holiday at some aristocratic hot-spring resort rather than been released from the medical area.

"Morning, everyone." Jess waved, face bright as sunlight.

"Today's another fine day for border charity work." Lan rolled her eyes. Roy quietly moved his gaze off her, clearly not wanting to be dragged into her rhythm first thing in the morning. Akari sat at her station with no particular change of expression, only giving Jess a light glance as she passed, as if assessing whether that body could still withstand a high-speed boarding. Maki stood before the command position and waited until everyone had assembled before formally pulling the meeting onto the topic.

"One confirmation first," she said.

"The main objective of this operation is to draw off the patrol force around AU-1206. How much we take, how much wealth is involved—none of that is the point. The point is to create chaos in multiple places, wear them ragged, and make them misjudge our position." On the main screen, the gold lanes and the markers around AU-1206 lit up together. Looking at that map, I felt a subtle satisfaction in my chest. Not because I was about to go robbing people.

Because the whole plan had finally grown from an unethical little seed in my head into an operational plan formally laid on the bridge's meeting table. In a sense, that was more of an accomplishment than the crime itself. After all, not everyone can package "becoming pirates" as an official mission requiring the whole ship's cooperation. Maki raised her eyes and continued.

"Second. This operation has a clear bottom line." The atmosphere on the bridge tightened along with it.

"We absolutely do not harm unarmed people," she said.

"You may frighten, intimidate, apply pressure—but you do not actually lay hands on anyone. Any act that would directly cause casualties among unarmed targets is forbidden." Jess, still wearing her smile, finally let a little disappointment show—"oh, so there are rules after all." Maki acted as though she hadn't seen that small sulk and went on to add the second item.

"Also. No taking by force." That one made even me raise an eyebrow. Meeting several gazes, Maki explained calmly.

"Since the cover story is voluntary donation, we can't turn it into plain violent plunder. That isn't only an image problem, it's risk management. The more the other side believes they've run into a pack of annoying but methodical lunatics rather than pure killers, the harder it is for them to slam the alert level straight to maximum." I nodded. This was something I'd actually discussed with her last night. What we want is chaos, not catastrophe.

We want to force the patrol into overtime, not force the fortress to flip the table. Cross that line once, and the Empire's response escalates wholesale—and every carefully calculated bit of mischief we'd done would turn into a live-streamed suicide.

"But." I spoke up, pulling out several planned engagement nodes as I did.

"We can persuade them." Jess laughed the moment she heard it.

"Like walking them up to the airlock and then very politely saying, please donate generously?"

"Correct." I nodded very seriously.

"But we can't actually throw them out." Jess laughed even wider. I stared at her and added one last line.

"We're bandits, not butchers." Lan muttered from the side, very quietly.

"We're students, not bandits."

"Student Council first, bandit's a side job," Jess picked it up at once.

"If you submitted that side-job résumé, the Disciplinary Committee would probably summon you for a talk on the spot," I said. Nikaido wasn't present today; otherwise she'd probably already be drafting corrective regulations. I'd even thought of the title for her—Supplementary Ordinance Concerning the Prohibition of Student Council Members Describing Border Harassment Operations as Personal Side Work.

After the laughter, Maki cleared her throat and dragged the meeting back to another equally sensitive core question—one that would clearly hold Jess's attention much better.

"Next is distribution." Jess sat bolt upright at once. It has to be said: when it comes to money, her reaction speed is sometimes faster than when she hears a boarding alarm. Maki went on, expression unchanged.

"All the loot from this operation..." She paused, as if weighing whether to use that word. Then she corrected herself as if nothing had happened.

"... I mean, all donated proceeds, split thirty-seventy."

"Huh?" Jess's hands stopped dead. That "huh" contained shock, disbelief, betrayal, and a profound disappointment in the fairness of the universe.

"Only thirty percent?" Maki didn't move an eyebrow.

"Seventy percent goes to someone else," she said flatly.

"And getting the thirty depends on the princess's mood." Jess blinked.

"Whose mood?"

"The princess."

"The princess?" Jess repeated it, as if her brain were still doing a final confirmation on that key word. The next second, her whole face changed. The change was a curious one—like being told the big dinner she'd arranged for today was being replaced with ration biscuits, and like suddenly discovering that the heroic entrance she'd rehearsed for ages was going to have to end on Article Eight of the court etiquette code.

"I came all this way," she said, eyes wide.

"Just to read the princess's mood?"

"Correct." Maki answered with absolute calm.

"I finally hijack a ship, get to be a pirate for once."

"Correct."

"And I can't hurt anyone, can't take anything by force."

"Correct."

"And I have to read someone's mood."

"Correct." Jess looked at her, her whole face saying "has the world gone mad, or am I just the last to notice?" Then, in a tone close to grief and indignation, she left the meeting its first line worthy of the ship's internal quote collection.

"Then aren't I just a fucking beggar on my knees?" The bridge went quiet for a second. The next second, I very considerately drove in the final knife.

"If you don't want to beg on your knees, you don't have to go." Jess turned to look at me with an expression that suggested she wanted to leap across the seat and bite me twice, except that she was in the wrong and could only swallow half the emotion back down. This was actually something I'd worked out privately with Maki late yesterday.

Everything we got our hands on would pass through Maki's hands first, then be converted into more presentable categories and distributed evenly to everyone in the form of scholarships, subsidies, mission bonuses and the like. That way the recipients wouldn't feel the psychological burden, and wouldn't actually start thinking of themselves as successfully career-transitioned border pirates. When it comes down to it, what we're doing is a tactical operation to bypass an Imperial blockade, not a startup.

The only person who'd genuinely care about "only thirty percent" was probably Jess. Or rather, only Jess would convert "morally ambiguous border harassment mission" into a personal income ratio at the first opportunity and then voice her dissatisfaction on the spot. Thinking that, I found myself glancing at her again.

Jess was still there nursing her grievance, muttering things like "risk, labor, psychological compensation" under her breath, as if about to open a discussion with the captain on grassroots pay in the pirate industry. Watching her bounce around, so full of life in her indignation, the coldness D had reopened yesterday finally receded a little. Good. Complaining about the split means she's still alive. Griping that thirty percent is too little means she's alive with plenty of energy left. That's enough.

Maki had probably noticed that glance too. She said nothing, only let her gaze rest on me for a very short moment before the next item began. Faint enough to be an illusion, but I understood it anyway. The meaning was roughly—all right, stop staring at her, the meeting isn't over. I quietly pulled my gaze back to the main screen. Fine. She's still here, and her mouth is still that insufferable, so she probably won't die anytime soon. What I had to worry about next was no longer whether Jess could get out of bed.

It was how on earth we were going to run the Imperial border patrol in circles without killing anyone, without taking anything by force, and while pretending to be extremely polite. Honestly. That's a lot harder than actually being pirates.