Chương 457: 216.First Piracy 1

The Asgard was preparing for a wormhole jump. Destination: from Europa to the vicinity of Orion α. When those coordinates went up officially on the main display, my first thought wasn't romance, and it wasn't epic scale. It was: good—we're either about to become the first Federation students to successfully operate Imperial-exclusive jump technology, or we're about to become the most expensive pot of bridge stew in the history of the universe.

"XO. All hands, prepare for wormhole transit. Orange Alert." Maki sat steady in the captain's chair, giving the order in a tone that could have been arranging lunch service, not stuffing a thousand-plus-meter royal flagship into a spatial phenomenon the Federation hadn't even fully mapped in theory. I picked up the side handset and opened the shipwide channel.

"All personnel, this is the XO. Orange Alert, fleet-wide. The ship will jump momentarily." The moment the broadcast went out, I could picture the scene in every section. Engineering rechecking pressure and output. Crew locking down harnesses. Some unlucky soul who'd just poured a full cup of something, reconsidering that decision in real time. I looked at Maki. She gave a small nod. Brief. But steady enough to land—like a hand pressed once against your back. Not gentle. Not dramatic.

Just: follow procedure, and don't give me anything creative right now. I sent the last order down the line.

"Condition One immediately following transit." Then I dropped back into the tactical seat and buckled in. The harness clicked shut—a small, clean sound, like the final punctuation mark on whatever unnecessary optimism I had left. I looked forward.

"Roy. It's on you." Roy sat at the helm, spine straight, hands hovering near the main control ring. Not his usual cruising posture. This was the posture of someone who'd already accepted that his life, the ship's life, and probably his sleep schedule for the next few days were all locked into that console now. Unlike standard FTL, wormhole technology was an Imperial monopoly. It wasn't that the Federation lacked comparable theory.

The gap was between theory and actually sending an intact royal flagship several hundred million light-years in one go—a distance wider than the one between a Student Council budget sheet and an actual fiscal black hole. Hedwig had assured us of the safety more than once, with the ease of someone describing her own backyard. Which was exactly the problem. The more relaxed she sounded, the less reassured I felt.

Coming from an Imperial princess, "safe" probably just meant you won't die in a way that's too embarrassing under normal circumstances. The system voice came up on the bridge, level.

"Wormhole simulation generator Bifröst engaged. Time-dilation protection field active." Ahead of the main screen, a point of light began expanding without a sound. Then it took shape. In three-dimensional space, a wormhole mouth doesn't look like a "hole" at all. It looks like a sphere—perfect to a degree that feels wrong. No seams. No flaws. Nothing with the roughness human intuition expects from real things. It just hung there, quiet, like the universe had grown an eye that was far too calm.

The surface wasn't transparent, and it wasn't a simple mirror either. It looked more like reality bent under force—its face showing the starfield on this side, while simultaneously reflecting a distant night sky that had no business appearing here. Light from hundreds of millions of light-years away, folded and shoved close by some invisible hand, pressed flat into a surface that made depth stop meaning anything.

Just looking at it made my stomach turn, as if my eyes had noticed before the rest of me: this isn't something the ordinary world should be allowed to contain. Hedwig sat at the main station, expression calm to the point of arrogance. Infuriating. Also very Imperial. Maki didn't turn around. She just said, flat: "Enter." The next second, the Asgard stepped forward. I couldn't tell you afterward whether Roy shouted something, or whether Maki issued something more formal.

Because the moment the hull crossed the threshold, the whole world felt like it had been seized by something noble and violent at once. The starlight around us stretched, then warped. Not the lazy blue tunnel effect from cheap animation, not some rubber-band stretch of the view outside the window. What actually happened was closer to the universe itself being forced to bow at the waist.

Near and far lost their order; light slid along unnatural arcs under extreme gravity; the starfield behind the Asgard compressed rapidly into a blinding ring, like someone had lit a silent eclipse directly behind us. Inside the throat, both ends of the universe existed at once. The starlight from behind refracted off the narrow walls in layers of scattered, thin light; the new universe ahead approached inch by inch, like an unopened stretch of night pressing forward.

They crossed, reflected, overlapped in the same space—two entirely different maps stuffed into the same book, with neither page ever asked for permission. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. My stomach had opinions about all of this. Fortunately, the harness held, and I retained enough professional dignity not to have a public XO meltdown during the ship's first live use of Imperial-exclusive jump technology.

For those fifteen seconds, even time felt wrong. Not fast. Not slow. Dismantled. Some instants stretched long enough that you could count your own heartbeat clearly; the next was gone before it started. As if the wormhole wasn't just moving matter—as if it had also picked up your subjective sense of time, weighed it once or twice, and was deciding whether to give you back the normal version. Then it ended. Abrupt. Clean. The new universe ahead blew open all at once.

The Asgard cleared the throat and dropped back into normal space. The alert lights were still lit, but everyone on the bridge let out half a breath in that same second. Only half—because we weren't dead yet, and now we had to confirm immediately that we hadn't jumped straight into the crosshairs of somebody's guns. Maki spoke almost instantly.

"Engineering. Report." Harvey's steady voice came back over the comm.

"Engineering nominal. All four helium-hydrogen reactors stable." Maki went on.

"Contacts." At the radar station, Akari scanned the readout, then pulled up a summary.

"Odin's Eye shows no response," she said.

"Clear within range." The word clear finally let the atmosphere on the bridge settle back toward normal. I let a breath out quietly. Good. We hadn't scattered inside the wormhole, hadn't turned into some grade of royal cosmic debris, and hadn't come out staring straight into a patrol formation's muzzles. For a first live combat jump, that result was good enough to headline a résumé, with "survivor-verified" as the footnote.

Once the alert lifted, the mood shifted naturally from "confirm we're alive" to "all right, time to go do something we probably shouldn't." And this time, Hedwig officially joined the follow-up planning. She sat at the main station and pulled the star chart near Orion α in close, her tone carrying the ease of someone reading blocking notes she'd rehearsed dozens of times.

"A few things first." The map contracted fast, tagging a large debris field and the region around AU-1206.

"The Asgard will hold in the debris field closest to AU-1206," she said.

"This ship doesn't approach the prey directly. Once a target's acquired, it gets handed to the assault craft. You'll use those for the short-range jump and the actual contact." I blinked. I turned to look at her.

"Wait. The assault craft have wormhole generators too?" Hedwig looked more surprised than I did.

"Isn't that basic knowledge?" She said it with the same earnestness as if I'd just asked her why a princess's spoon wasn't disposable. I was quiet for two seconds. Then, very objectively, I admitted to myself: apologies, it seems Federation technology really is further behind than I'd estimated. Apparently on the Imperial side, the fact that even the small craft come with wormhole drives has already moved into the category of common sense.

If someone wrote a paper on this gap, the title would probably just be On How a Civilizational Disparity Can Instantly Remove One's Will to Speak. Roy coughed quietly, applying what felt like a weak tourniquet to the last of Federation engineering's pride. Maki didn't let the detour run long. She gestured for Hedwig to continue. Hedwig nodded, turned her hand, and the star chart shrank aside.

"Now. The disguises." Her gaze went to the side of the main station. I followed it and only then noticed a large cardboard box that had appeared there at some point without my noticing. Not a standard supply crate. The kind of container where, at a glance, you already know the contents are going to cost every legitimate armed operator in the room their last shred of dignity. Hedwig added, lightly: "Remember to wear them." I walked over and flipped the lid. The next second I made a very honest sound.

"... Oh no." Those weren't clothes. That was a full box of disaster that had been beaten senseless by Imperial noble aesthetics and had somehow, stubbornly, survived. Feathers. Sequins. Gold trim. Capes. Ribbons. Epaulettes exaggerated enough to carry three full seasons of opera. And a stack of jackets that clearly had no business anywhere near a real fight, and yet still insisted, against all evidence, that they had excellent taste.

The colors were their own event—deep purple pushed past dignified into decadent, red-and-black loud enough to start a fight on sight, and that gold-and-white combination that only the genuinely wealthy sincerely believe qualifies as "understated." All of it laid out neatly in the box, like a row of peacocks waiting to hear their sentence. I picked one up at random. My expression was already suffering.

"Is this supposed to get me into an opera?" Behind me, Maki went quiet for half a second. I didn't need to turn around to know she was deciding whether to let the smile all the way onto her face. Worse—the box wasn't just clothes. I picked up a mask.

It carried a very specific, very confident brand of tacky—black base, silver wire along the edges, the eye corners drawn out into an unnecessarily long arc, as if the designer had decided from the outset that the wearer needed to look mysterious, romantic, and like a serious social liability, all at once. I held it up, frowning.

"What in the world is this?" Hedwig glanced at the mask and answered with complete sincerity.

"That's my favorite masked phantom-thief prince."

"..." The bridge went quiet for a beat. I looked down at the mask in my hand, then up at Hedwig sitting at the main station, and arrived, for the first time, at a very clear, very specific understanding: this Third Princess might be even more trouble than we'd assumed, in ways that had nothing to do with politics or the military. Not politics. Not warfare. Aesthetics. Roy looked away.

Lan pressed a hand to her forehead, wearing the expression of someone mentally amending the entire operational risk assessment to add, right under "identity exposure": temporary tactical collapse due to excessive costume-related humiliation. Akari studied the box with total calm, apparently calculating whether, in the event of mission failure, being caught by Imperial patrol would be worse than being recognized by an acquaintance while wearing this. As for Maki— I finally looked back at her.

The corner of her mouth had definitely moved. Very brief. Brief enough to pass as nothing, if you weren't looking. I was looking. That was a smile—not the professional kind, not the captain's kind, but the specific, thin, unapologetic kind that means you absolutely deserve this box. Damn it. I lifted the mask a little higher.

"Maki," I said, very seriously.

"If you make me wear this on duty, I am going to consider deserting on the spot."

"XO." She pulled the smile back down and reset into her working voice.

"Please confirm the sizing first."

"That's not comfort. That's a follow-up strike." Hedwig, for her part, was in a visibly excellent mood.

"Don't worry." She looked at the mask in my hands like she genuinely meant to reassure me.

"The whole ensemble will look very good." That did nothing at all to reassure me. When an Imperial princess says "very good," it usually means ornate, over-the-top, expensive, entirely unnecessary, and burdened with some noble insistence guaranteed to cost a Federation Student Council member her remaining dignity. I looked back down at the box of costumes prepared to dress our tactical disruption—no, our crime—and understood something.

The hardest part of what came next probably wasn't the short-range jump, the contact, or running AU-1206 in circles. It was working out how to hold onto the bare minimum of XO authority while wearing this. Honestly. Compared to the wormhole, at this point I'd rather jump straight into that cardboard box and bury Hedwig's favorite masked phantom-thief prince myself.