Chương 459: 217.Black Cat Thieves 1

When Egersund II detached from the luxury yacht, I was standing in the aft cabin by the hold-frame, watching through the port as the freshly-shorn fat sheep drifted alone in the shipping lane—like a countess whose wig had just been publicly yanked off at a dinner party, still doing her best to hold herself together. Good. I hoped she'd bring that composure to the police report. Jess sat across from me, mask half-removed, still laughing.

Not ordinary laughter—the kind that rekindles itself the moment you think about Black Cat Thieves and your own contribution to that particular moment of shame. Her shoulders bounced, her mouth refused to stay flat, and I looked at her and thought: I could put her back in the medbay and add a note to her chart: patient stable, personality remains high-risk.

"Keep laughing," I said, dropping my mask onto the seat beside me.

"Next time you're the one who announces the name."

"Fine by me," Jess said immediately.

"I think I'd make a great deputy."

"Nobody promoted you."

"Team leader's fine too."

"Are you trying to fast-track your way up a pirate org now?" She laughed harder. That aggressively healthy energy of hers, so infuriating to witness, did something to the last of the dull pressure still sitting in my chest—loosened it, just a little. Annoying. As long as she still had the bandwidth to run her mouth, she was probably going to live a very long time.

D sat nearby, that strange surrealist mask already off, checking equipment with the kind of unhurried solidity that had nothing in common with the human battering ram he'd been thirty minutes ago. He glanced at me once and said simply:"First one went fine." I nodded. When D said fine, he wasn't complimenting the atmosphere or the creativity. He meant nobody had blown the op, nobody was short a limb, and nobody had let things slip sideways. Getting those two words from him was enough.

When we returned to the Asgard, there was no fanfare. The most satisfying thing about a well-executed piece of wrongdoing is that when it's done, the whole ship can close its doors like nothing happened, sink back into the shadow of the debris field, and look as if the group that had just gone out in balaclavas and opera-thief costumes to extort a countess had absolutely nothing to do with this quietly drifting royal flagship. When I walked back onto the bridge, I caught a familiar smell in the air. Not gunpowder.

Not coffee. The smell of a group of intelligent people waiting for results. The main display had already switched to the communications intercept net around AU-1206. Lan stood at the comms station, headset properly seated, fingertips moving between several decryption windows. Roy sat at navigation, staring at the full traffic flow chart with the look of someone who had been drafted to cover a shift for the universe's traffic authority.

Akari was at radar, expression unchanged—though I was fairly confident that if even one patrol craft's nose drifted half a degree in the wrong direction, she'd already know. Maki sat in the captain's chair. She didn't turn around. Just said, evenly:"Back."

"Back," I said, dropping into my seat and pushing the reputation-destroying cape off to the side.

"And it worked. I now personally understand why Imperial nobility always look like they're asking to be robbed." The corner of Maki's mouth moved, barely.

"Sit down," she said.

"The report's coming." I buckled in and looked up at the main display. Honestly, the feeling was strange. After a normal op, you wait for damage reports, resupply status, pursuit vectors, or the next order. This time was different. This time, we were waiting to see how the victim would package her own humiliation into a proper police report. That alone gave the whole thing a quality that was simultaneously deeply lowbrow and strangely refined. It didn't take long before Lan raised a hand.

"Got it." A new audio window opened on the right side of the main display, trailing interference noise. The comms log from AU-1206's duty station. Probably because the relay base on Europa had been reduced to rubble by us, the signal across this entire sector was drunk—choppy, intermittent, which somehow only made it funnier. The first voice was female, shaking with anger and still working hard to hold aristocratic diction together.

"... Repeat: I am requesting immediate dispatch of patrol craft. My vessel was attacked, my guards were subdued, my property was seized, and the attackers... the attackers left an identity statement." The bridge went very quiet, by consensus. Nobody spoke. Because everyone was waiting for the one line that mattered. The duty officer on the other end still sounded like he was trying to decide if this was a prank.

"Please confirm the identity of the attackers." The unfortunate countess was silent for two seconds. In those two seconds, I could almost picture her standing in her cockpit, having the first existential crisis of her life over whether reading that name aloud would constitute a second injury to Imperial dignity. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. In the end, she said it.

"... The Black Cat Thieves." The bridge held for one beat. The next second, Jess put her head down and her shoulders started going. I glared at her. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but the light in her eyes was completely out of control—the expression of a creature that had just dragged a scratching post into a military briefing and was proud of it. On the other end of the comm, the duty officer had clearly been struck speechless by that name.

"... Please repeat." The countess's voice had developed an edge of fury. Good. Getting robbed apparently sharpens one's tolerance for repetition.

"The Black Cat Thieves." This time, Lan finally couldn't hold it—she turned her head and bit down on her lip. Roy pressed a hand to his forehead, ears visibly reddening. As for Hedwig, she sat at the main station with an expression of specific, quiet satisfaction—like a professor who'd just received an absurd essay and found, to her own surprise, that it worked. On the comm, the duty officer made one last attempt.

"Please describe the attackers' appearance." This time the countess's pause was longer. I almost felt sorry for her. Whatever she said next wasn't going to make her look better. Sure enough, when she spoke again, her voice carried the particular hollowness of someone who had stopped trying to protect themselves.

"One individual in the lead, dressed like... a phantom-thief prince from an opera. The rest wore those goddamn Dali masks. Well-equipped, fast-moving, apparently trained in standard military procedures." Then a second voice cut in—a junior officer clearly taking notes on-site.

"Sir, there's one additional item in the supplemental."

"Go ahead."

"The victim reports that at some point during the operation, a member of the opposing team... produced a cat sound." The bridge actually detonated. Not out loud—the contained kind, where an entire row of people is suppressing it so hard the air starts vibrating dangerously. Lan raised her terminal toward her face in what appeared to be a professional gesture but was clearly a last-ditch attempt to stay functional. Roy's head went down; his shoulders moved in a way that was not natural.

Akari managed to hold, but a rare, almost-pleased flicker crossed her eyes. My entire face went hot. Not a figure of speech. Actually hot—hot enough that I half expected the collar of my uniform to start steaming. Jess put her forehead against the edge of the console and shook.

"Is this funny to you?" I said through my teeth.

"Not at all," she said, still shaking.

"I'm just very moved. Our brand identity is so complete."

"I'm going to destroy your brand identity." Maki lifted one finger off the armrest, then set it back down. Nobody needed the sound repeated. Jess swallowed the rest of the laugh; the bridge's attention followed her back to the screen.

"Results," Maki said. Lan drew a breath, cleared her face, and switched back to comms-officer mode.

"Confirmed: first report entered AU-1206's internal patrol system. They have not escalated to Hohenzollern's standing fleet. They've requested three local patrol craft and a rapid-response unit from the adjacent sector to investigate." She slid several new lines onto the star chart.

"In other words: they took the bait." Roy looked up and followed on.

"And they took it solidly. Looking at this deployment, AU-1206 pulled one of the patrol craft that was originally covering the corridor's outer edge. The two adjacent civilian lanes also had to increase their alert coverage. They're already splitting their attention." Akari overlaid the radar data.

"Comms lag," she said.

"From when the countess filed her report to when the patrol craft changed heading: two minutes, forty seconds. Europa's damage is still in effect. Their response is slower than Hedwig's original estimate." Hedwig finally spoke, quietly.

"Because a noble's complaint always carries two pressures at once," she said.

"They have to respond. But responding too visibly exposes the fact that border security has failed. Right now, what they most want isn't to destroy the Black Cat Thieves. It's to bury the embarrassment as fast as possible."

"Unfortunately," I said, watching the patrol lines begin to drift, "we're very happy to help make the embarrassment bigger." Maki watched the main display, eyes steady as a blade still in its sheath.

"Don't rush." She said it flat.

"First one worked. That doesn't mean the rhythm is right yet. We recalibrate from here." That was Maki. While everyone else was thinking about funny, interesting, and satisfying, she'd already started breaking the chaos into repeatable, predictable, exploitable beats. She wasn't the kind of person who let one success run her head. Which was exactly why the whole plan had somewhere to go. She raised a hand and marked several timing points.

"First: patrol lines start moving within two minutes of report receipt. Second: noble lane alert level rises, but not to fortress-tier. Third: Hohenzollern doesn't intervene. All three hold, which means our axis is intact." Lan picked it up.

"There is one issue." She magnified a signal branch.

"Because the first report's content was so... vivid, AU-1206 has already started asking incoming vessels whether they've encountered 'a masked phantom-thief' or 'balaclava-wearing armed personnel.'" Roy smiled faintly, pained.

"Which means after exactly one operation, we've already made our own visual identity into an official search keyword." I looked quietly at the discarded cape on the seat beside me. Damn it. Even that, Hedwig had calculated. A group with no distinctive features is harder to track than one with a strong visual signature, a consistent name, and a trail of absurd details. The more patrol believed they were dealing with a stylized repeat offender, the more instinctively they'd cast nets across every lane.

"So we adjust," Maki said.

"Not the axis. The granularity." I looked at her. Her fingers rested between several markers, voice even, more reassuring than any amount of excitement.

"Keep the name. Keep the basic visual impression," she said.

"Reduce the predictable details. Next time, no extra performance. Especially no audio signatures." I turned to look at Jess. Jess immediately raised both hands.

"I have an objection. Brand-building in its early phase inherently requires—""Overruled," Maki said. She didn't even give it a second. The atmosphere on the bridge eased a fraction. I watched the patrol points beginning to drift, and felt something settle clearly in my chest. It moved. Not our ship. The net the Empire had thought was stable—we'd actually pulled the first thread loose. And we'd done it humiliatingly. I leaned back and let out a breath.

"So right now, Imperial border patrol is busy chasing a fundraising bandit crew in balaclavas with unusual brand awareness."

"Technically, pirates," Jess said quietly.

"Technically, you're quiet," I said. Lan finally laughed outright. Roy shook his head, the corner of his mouth giving up the fight. Even Akari looked away slightly, as if she didn't want anyone to see that she also found the whole thing absurdly successful. Maki didn't laugh. Not on the surface. But I could see it—that extremely thin, barely-there loosening around her eyes. The specific kind of relaxation that only comes after a success has started converting into usable tactics.

She looked at me and gave a quiet order.

"XO. Log it."

"Log what?" I asked. Maki's tone was level.

"Black Cat Thieves, first confirmed report. Imperial patrol response time: two minutes, forty seconds. Preliminary assessment: effective." I stared at her for a second. Then I wrote it down like a good XO. Halfway through, I almost laughed. You really do encounter everything in a life.

Take me, Hoshino Shimo—Federation Academy Student Council Vice President, Asgard Executive Officer and Tactical Officer, Federation black-program test subject, currently sitting on a warship's bridge filling in the first case file for an organization that sounds like a villain from a children's picture book. The more absurd part was—it was actually working. I sent the log and looked back up at the main display. The patrol craft were still moving.

And we were still tucked in the debris field, quiet as if we'd never left. Good. First bite, landed. Next, as long as we didn't get too greedy and didn't get stupid, the Empire would learn fast enough what everyone eventually learns: some problems don't need to be large to make for a very long night.