Chương 461: 217.Black Cat Thieves 3

"They're chasing," Akari said. The moment she said it, I almost thought I'd misheard. Her usual delivery always carried that quality of someone who would probably just note the blast radius and file it if the universe exploded tomorrow. But this was different. That sentence had something in it—faint, real, like a blade that was always cold catching a flash of firelight on its spine. She raised a hand and circled three new moving points.

"Three Imperial patrol craft have left Outpost AU-1206." She kept her eyes on the radar projection, fingers adjusting the trajectory model quickly.

"Based on current acceleration and heading, nine chances in ten they're heading straight for the scent we left."

"Good." Maki sat in the captain's chair, and that good didn't carry a trace of impatience. She wasn't the type to celebrate a fish biting the hook. She was the type whose first reaction was to check whether the hook had actually set. She turned to Lan.

"What are you picking up?" Lan threw a freshly intercepted audio clip onto the main display, the corner of her mouth not quite under control.

"AU-1206 has confirmed dispatching three patrol craft." She said it, then turned specifically to look at me.

"Also—they're currently debating whether to include the cat sound in the official log." The bridge held for less than half a second. The next second, Jess went straight over the armrest laughing.

"I knew it." She slapped the chair back, shoulders heaving.

"They were always going to argue about this. You can't run something like that through the Imperial civil service without at least thirty minutes of committee review." I pressed two fingers to my temple. That meow had now officially become a permanent stain on my career, the kind that would be archived and verified by Imperial military records.

When we eventually survived this entire farce and came out the other side, I was never going to be able to pretend I hadn't worn a phantom-thief prince costume, or that a group of nobles hadn't filed my team name and a cat sound into the same patrol report. Thank you, Jess. Jess, for her part, had absolutely no regrets, and actually looked a little proud. Like she hadn't just helped execute a border disruption operation but had successfully launched a brand's first wave of word-of-mouth coverage.

Maki raised a hand and tapped the armrest once. Not hard. Enough. Jess pulled half the laughter back in, and the bridge's attention came with it.

"Next target." The main display shifted. The comms intercept window shrank to the side; a new vessel projection pulled to center. The moment it appeared, I swore internally at the sheer extravagance.

"Luxury liner—Royal," Maki said, even.

"Thirteen decks. Oversized tourist liner. No private security escort. External defense is a handful of security robots." She opened the ship's structural breakdown, deck by deck, like a sliced cake laid out for inspection. Central atrium, observation deck, banquet hall, suite level, upper private leisure section—the whole vessel wasn't built for travel so much as to prove that wealthy people, even drifting in space, needed twelve distinct formats for their excess. Hedwig spoke from the main station.

"This ship is restricted to noble booking only." She said it as evenly as reading off a supermarket membership policy. The content, however, was considerably less approachable.

"Some of them have never once looked a commoner in the face, let alone a bandit." That line was good. Because it changed what the ship was, in one sentence. If the first target had been a fat sheep, this wasn't simply a fatter one. This was an entire shipful of high-grade glassware, carefully packaged by the Imperial upper world. They hadn't been sheltered from danger because danger had been defeated—danger had simply been kept so far away it only existed in reports, rumors, and military news.

Jess cracked her knuckles, practically glowing.

"Time for some field education."

"Jess." Maki said only her name. Not heavy. No extra adjectives. But Jess swallowed the rest of the sentence anyway. Maki looked at her and added, flat:"Rule one." Jess still had the smile on, but she raised both hands in surrender.

"I know," she said.

"No harming unarmed people. I'm not kicking anyone off the observation deck. I just want them to experience a different side of the universe."

"Your 'different side' usually isn't particularly healthy," I said. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Jess turned to look at me.

"Whose side are you on today?"

"The rules' side."

"Liar." She narrowed her eyes.

"You're on the 'interesting but don't let it get out of hand' side."... Damn it. She understood me with a precision that was genuinely unfair. Maki didn't engage with our sidebar and just kept pushing the rhythm forward.

"This one doesn't need to be a repeat of the last," she said, pulling the Royal's external outline and route markers together.

"First: no private security, which means lower boarding resistance. Second: precisely because the passengers are all nobles, panic will spread faster than on the last ship. Third: the security robots have fixed response patterns—disable the primary control node and they're just expensive furniture that walks." Roy looked down at the lane with his brow knitted.

"The problem is the size," he said.

"A thirteen-deck tourist liner isn't a private yacht. If we board at the main hull section, the interior space is too wide—information will spread too fast. Better to cut in from the upper-middle decks, lock down the control hub first, then push the passengers down." Lan followed on immediately.

"I can jam the internal broadcast system," she said.

"Once I have the channel, they won't be able to receive coherent instructions for a short window. Passengers on a ship like this, the moment they stop getting unified announcements, they just panic harder."

"Good," Maki said.

"Then this time it's not suppression—it's control." D leaned back, arms folded, and said in a low voice:"So my team doesn't lead with the ram this time." I looked at him. There was a very specific, very mild note of disappointment in that line. Apparently yesterday's charge had felt quite natural.

"Don't give up yet," I said.

"If some countess on board happens to have guards with unusual conviction, you'll still get your moment." D laughed once, honest and short.

"I'll wait for it." Once the meeting had its shape, everything after was the more reliable kind of work. Equipment check. Stun weapons recalibrated—non-lethal, but guaranteed to be fast enough and unpleasant enough to produce immediate compliance. Assault team swapped to magnetic boots and light-load rigs to avoid turning the Royal's excessively tasteful interior into a social incident. Lan started pre-loading the liner broadcast jamming package.

Akari marked several backup escape lanes around the Royal's immediate area. Roy handled the timing window and approach angle. Harvey sent up a message from Engineering in a style that was entirely consistent with Engineering: short-range jump chains were fine, but don't treat the small craft like fireworks. When I got back to the staging area, Jess was already there. With the mask in her hand. I had an immediately bad feeling.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping you put it on," she said, perfectly naturally, like she was performing an entirely ordinary service for a teammate.

"Yesterday was a soft launch. Today we're going after the premium market. Presentation matters."

"Thank you for the market analysis."

"You're welcome." Jess stepped in front of me and held the mask up against my face. I'd looked at that thing once yesterday, and looking at it again today did nothing to improve my feelings about it. Black base, silver wire, the eye corners extended into that unnecessarily long arc—a perfect example of the kind of aesthetic crime only the Imperial upper class could sincerely appreciate. The problem was I had to wear it, and wear it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

If my life had come to this point, the Federation Intelligence Department probably owed me a very long conversation.

"Lower," Jess said. I tilted my head down, reluctantly. When she tied the straps behind my ear, her fingers were quieter than usual. Probably some residue from yesterday's near-miss. This time she didn't push the joke too far—just smoothed the cape's edge and said, in a tone still pleased with itself but not quite over the line:"Relax, Shimo. You look good." I looked at her.

"You used that line yesterday."

"Yesterday it worked."

"Yesterday I was too busy to argue." Jess's own outfit this time was toned down, comparatively—closer to a working first mate than a stage lead, mask trim finer, jacket better fitted. Paired with her talent for delivering serious things as jokes, it suited her. Infuriatingly. Which only made it worse. She got to look like she'd been living this life all along, while I got cast as the protagonist of a crime against taste. I gave up debating aesthetics and shoved the other item into her hands.

"Yours." She blinked.

"I'm not wearing the deputy-team look today?"

"No," I said.

"Maki just updated it. Second op, the visible identifiers get dialed back. If you keep being that conspicuous, Imperial records will be noting whether you walk pigeon-toed or duck-footed inside a week." Jess was genuinely disappointed. Not performed disappointment—real. She looked down at the plain black balaclava in her hand like someone had just cancelled her stage role and handed her an extra's number.

"This is too much," she said quietly.

"Suppressing core talent during the brand's growth phase."

"Shut up and put it on."

"Yes, yes, management is so cold." Someone nearby couldn't hold back a laugh. I didn't react, just finished checking my own loadout. Non-lethal weapons, restraint lines, short-range comms, emergency cutter—nothing optional. This one was different from the last ship. The Royal had no hard security, but it had more people, more fragile people, more panicked people, more people who could cause a very large amount of trouble. Which meant we had to be more careful. No injuries. No chaos.

Still intimidating enough to work. That was the hardest part. Doing bad things wasn't difficult. Doing bad things with appropriate limits was exhausting. Before we launched, Maki walked over. She didn't comment on the costume—not the way Jess had. She just reached up, naturally, and pressed a slightly misaligned gold ornament back onto the shoulder line of my cape, then re-seated the magnetic lock on the right side. Short motion. More distracting than anything she could have said.

"Don't let it get big," she said, low. I looked up at her.

"You should say that to Jess."

"I'm saying it to you too," Maki said, steady.

"Once you feel like something's working, you start wanting to do a little more."... She knew everything. I let the corner of my mouth move and gave her the answer she deserved.

"Understood, Captain." Maki pulled her hand back but didn't step away immediately. She looked at me once more, very briefly.

"One more thing."

"Mm."

"The mask is ridiculous." She paused.

"But... it doesn't look bad." I froze for half a beat. By the time I came back to myself, she'd already turned and walked away. Damn it. Dropping something like that at a moment like this was a tactical ambush. I stood there with my ears warming, and Jess—who had just pulled her balaclava halfway on—had seen the whole thing through her three holes with perfect precision. She took two full seconds. Then, softly:"Vice President. Your face is redder than yesterday's meow." I turned and swung at her.

Jess stepped back immediately, pulled the balaclava all the way down, and showed nothing but a pair of eyes that were smiling very badly. Good. If she could still walk back on her own after this op, I was definitely going to settle up with her. Gear ready. Positions confirmed. Short-range jump parameters loaded. The Royal's three-dimensional outline rotated slowly in the assault craft's forward projection—an elaborate, deeply foolish enormous cake, sitting calmly and waiting for its first slice.

I stepped onto the assault craft and glanced back once. The hatch toward the Asgard's bridge was already shut. The whole ship sat quietly in the debris field—cold, expensive, steady, looking like nothing had happened, and like it could do anything. Good. The first ship had put them on overtime. Now it was time for the Royal to give the Empire's border patrol night shift one more thing to write up.