Chương 464: 219.Silent Running 1

If you asked me what the most reasonable follow-up scene should be after robbing a thirteen-deck luxury cruise liner that only takes noble bookings and has air that probably auctions by the liter, I would've said this: Bridge crew stone-faced, calculating patrol return windows, lane deviation, and our silent-running window down to the second. That is not what happened. Reality loves taking a shoe and slapping it across tactical common sense.

"—a private invitation from Countess von Bodelswitz." Jess cleared her throat and read it out in perfect formal diction, even drawing out the last half-second as if what she was holding wasn't a letter fished out of the donation pile, but an entry in the Imperial High Society Annual Recitation Contest. I stood next to her and felt a very specific pain start behind my temple. She clearly thought that pain was worth preserving. She flipped to the next one.

"—Baron von Rheinbaben's daughter wrote her private contact code on the back of a bond certificate." Another flip.

"—the young lady of the House of Solms-Laubach tucked a note with her home address into a stack of cash." Jess finally started laughing. She turned that particular note right-side up and lifted it to my face, helpfully, like a museum guide.

"Look. Comes with a kiss mark." I stared at it for two seconds and reached a quiet conclusion. Imperial nobles weren't insane. They'd just been comfortable for so long their biology had evolved some kind of advanced organ that allowed them to go into heat even during armed fundraising operations. On the Asgard's bridge, everyone was busy divvying up— I mean, tallying donations.

The difference between those two phrases is only a few words on the page, but in terms of political correctness and future courts-martial, they're about three star systems apart. So I very rationally picked the latter. As for why everyone's faces looked exactly like they'd just laundered a pile of dirty money, I decided to leave that question to the historians.

On the central table, cash, bonds, jewelry, named cards, and various personal items that absolutely should not appear in a war-prize ledger were laid out in neat categories. Lan handled the logging. Roy checked the numbers. Akari monitored traffic around the outpost and watched us with that expression that said you're all out of your minds, but I'll cooperate for now.

Hedwig sat straight-backed and elegant, as if attending an Imperial charity banquet; only this banquet table was covered not in desserts but in a row of potential diplomatic incidents. I had assumed Jess, once we were back aboard, would at least pretend to be normal again. Wrong. My expectations for her remained as naïve as a child's. She wasn't even counting money. She was hugging that whole stack of letters, opening them one by one, reading them one by one, like she'd just found a new career path.

Not damage control officer. Not assault team member. Part-time manager of a noble-lady heart recycling center.

"Shimo, you really could live off your face." Jess flipped through the letters and smirked at me, looking exactly like one of those nasty stall vendors who set up next to other people's social disasters to sell hot dogs. I took a breath.

"Jess, I'm going to count to three. If you're still holding a letter after three, you're dead." I meant it. I meant it so much that even I believed if she didn't put them down, I'd seriously consider stuffing her into a munitions lift for a ten-minute cool-down. Unfortunately, before the sentence even landed, a voice colder than vacuum arrived behind us. Not Jess. Jess was just narrating her own death like a news anchor.

The one who actually dropped the temperature to corpse-storage levels was the person who spoke next, from right behind me.

"Jess." Maki's voice wasn't loud. If anything, it was mild. That was the problem. Anyone who knew her understood that this tone was never a good sign. It meant she'd already moved past "I'd like you to stop" and into "I'm calculating how to clean up after you." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. I didn't have to turn around to picture her. Arms maybe folded, maybe not. Face calm. Eyes cold. Not ice-cold—that would've been kinder.

This was the kind of cold you get when meeting minutes, tactical tables, and school regulations sharpen order into an edge. Naturally, Jess had to stick a foot out and test the edge.

"Oh no, the wife's upset." She even waved the stack of letters. I closed my eyes for a second and observed a moment of silence for her last words. Maki didn't even bother with a sharp ending.

"Jess McCallow." She pronounced each syllable like a stamp being pressed down, steady to the point of frightening.

"Are you really so determined to make me throw you out there to stand punishment in space?" Jess stuck out her tongue. Yes. She actually stuck out her tongue. In that instant, I almost admired her. Not her courage. Her dulled sense of mortality. You could send that to a lab for testing as new armor composite.

"All right." The word left her mouth, and Lan's pen paused for half a beat. Roy turned his head away, his shoulders jerking—whether from suppressed laughter or future-incident-report grief was anyone's guess. Even Hedwig raised an eyebrow, wearing the expression of someone thinking, so the Federation's student discipline really is more entertaining than anything at court. As for me— It took effort not to laugh. Not because Jess was adorable—let's not get that confused.

Because there was something so very her about insisting on tap-dancing in steel cleats over the minefield, fully aware it was a minefield. In its way, that's a talent. Just not the kind you put on a résumé. It goes straight into the after-action report. In the end, Maki put the letters down with nothing but a look. No explosion. No fight. No one got kicked off the bridge.

But I'd put money on this: if Jess had read out even one more, she'd be the proud recipient of a very detailed, very Student-Council-flavored disciplinary sheet before the night was over—complete with itemized clauses and a scheduled execution time. Once she'd reined in the idiot who'd turned our loot tally into a love-letter mailroom, Maki cut back to business. She turned, and the speed at which she dropped personal irritation and snapped into combat posture was like a blade sheathing itself.

"Report. Both of you." Akari answered first. Her voice was as clean as ever, no spare emotion, like a crosshair etched over the world.

"Every patrol craft from the outpost is out. I'd say the whole map's crawling with them." The tactical display popped into my head on its own. All those points that had been sitting snug in their slots, meshing the patrol net like clockwork, were now scattered across the board, chasing the wake of our overly theatrical "charity event." In some ways, that was better than blowing them up. People make mistakes. People get agitated.

Keep them on overtime long enough and even their radar returns start to look like they're swearing at them. Lan followed up.

"No other chatter around the fortress." Her hand stayed on the comms board as she spoke, focused enough that she looked like she was running an ECG on the vacuum. No chatter meant that, for this short window, we'd actually hollowed out this patch of space. The outpost was busy chasing ghosts. The fortress couldn't be bothered with "civilian disputes." The board was falling exactly where we liked it—they were a mess. We were quiet. Maki listened, then looked at me. It wasn't a question. It wasn't a prod.

More like a confirmation. You're still with us, right? Of course I was. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be standing here next to a whole tableful of noble correspondence that technically existed because of me. Then she turned to Hedwig. Hedwig didn't answer at once. She gave the faintest nod—so slight it was almost stingy. The kind of nod a princess gives when she refuses to let agreement come cheap. But once she'd nodded, it meant the Empire's border-administration logic, at least for now, was still lined up on our side.

Only then did Maki decide.

"Looks like we can move." She turned back to me.

"Executive Officer, issue silent-running alert. Prepare the Mist of Niflheimr." Whatever traces of amusement were left on the bridge stripped off in an instant. I rose.

"Copy." I walked to the bulkhead phone, picked up the handset. The metal was cool, like warships always liked to use that temperature to remind you: jokes are for earlier. I pressed shipwide.

"Attention all hands. The Asgard is entering silent-running. Do not make unnecessary noise. Follow all safety directives." My voice went out through every corridor, hatch, engine room, and crawlspace on the ship. Whoever had been whispering about the Royal's loot a second ago now had to pull in their breath and their footsteps together. That's a warship for you. One minute it's a school trip, the next you're lying down in a shared coffin and doing your best impression of a corpse. Maki's next order dropped.

"Bridge blackout. Ship to red alert." I echoed immediately.

"Bridge blackout. Ship to red alert." Within seconds, the armored shutters along both sides of the bridge started to slide in silence. The open vista ahead shut down like eyelids, layer by layer. The light went with it; only the consoles and tactical projections stayed, cold and sharp, carving everyone's faces into harder angles. I went back to Tactical and sat, fingers gliding over the panel to expand the local-space overlays again. Roy's report came in as he worked.

"Mist of Niflheimr optical camouflage coming online." He handled navigation and took the main grapples off the rock we'd been anchored to. Feedback from the external hardpoints lit up one after another, like a cut wire dropping its beads neatly into your hand. Then came the most restrained thrust output you could manage on something this size. Not acceleration, exactly. More like easing an enormous hull loose from a dead stop without waking the neighbors. Yggdrasil's system voice spoke, level as ever.

"Mist of Niflheimr initiating. Prism-particle dispersion at thirty-five percent… forty-eight percent… sixty-five percent…" No emotion in that voice. Which, paradoxically, made everyone more tense. I watched the projection: the prism particles spread around us like a colorless fog. First clinging tight to the hull, then unfurling out. It wasn't simple invisibility paint. It was a coat that bent both sight and sensors around the Asgard, smearing our outline to the eye, turning our radar profile into nonsense.

Taking an already-too-large beast and folding it into a tailored hallucination. The numbers climbed.

"Seventy-nine percent… ninety-one percent… one hundred percent." The moment Yggdrasil finished, the external silhouette on my board dimmed. The Asgard switched from there to unseen. We hadn't disappeared. We'd just hidden. A needle swallowed by the dark—thin, cold, quiet, and absolutely lethal. My hand still rested on the panel. I could feel the almost-imperceptible shiver through the hull. Not nerves. Contained power. Force being pushed down, smoothed, bracketed by rules.

Around me, everyone held to their stations. Jess, who'd been mocking me a minute ago, had shut up, arms folded, watching the projection with bright eyes, like a troublesome cat that had finally decided to crouch. Maki stood in front of the captain's chair, shoulders straight, gaze steady. Hedwig's chin was tipped faintly up; she looked, if anything, mildly appreciative of this delicate threading of a needle under the enemy's nose.

For one brief second, I thought we really should've burned every last letter with lipstick on it. Not because they were embarrassing. Because we were a lot more dangerous like this.

"Go." Maki said it. Just one syllable. Enough to pull the whole ship's breath tight. Then she named the target.

"Objective: the Corridor Gap." On the star map, that thin crack we'd measured and recalculated into the ground—the one slit in an otherwise hopeless wall—sat waiting. I pressed my fingers more firmly to the board without meaning to.