Chương 477: 225.Three-Hundred Trillion Proposal 1

Later I found out that after I'd passed out cold last night, Maki had gone out again. Not the kind of going out where you catch some air and stand in the corridor for a minute. She simply opened my door back up, made one round trip in the middle of the night, and did it carrying an aura that said something along the lines of: fine, if the whole ship has decided I don't get to sleep easy, then nobody else gets to sleep easy either. I had no idea at all.

Admitting that is embarrassing, but there's nothing to be done about it. If a person goes through a battle, a meeting, a hot spring, a sauna, a hot-stone bath, and then a night in which she drags the Student Council President into her own room — and still manages to maintain some high level of vigilance afterward — she probably doesn't belong in young-adult fiction. She should be transferred straight to a military research division. Anyway, By then I was dead asleep. Dead asleep with dignity.

Too dead to even roll over. So when she came back, she didn't go straight back to bed. I never saw how the desk lamp in the room came on. But half-asleep as I was, I remember the light, and I remember the sound of paper turning. It wasn't loud. It was quiet to the point of excess — nothing left but the fine scratch of a pen tip across paper, and then the pauses, when even the air seemed to be making decisions. I didn't fully wake up. I just had a vague sense that she was sitting at my desk.

That chair was where I dumped clothes. I hadn't cleared it off properly when I came in last night. Given her usual habit of straightening a single crooked sheet of paper on sight, she'd probably run through one silent round of criticism first, then moved the stuff aside and sat down. I shouldn't have known a detail like that. But I did know it.

Once you know someone well enough, you remember the angle of her frown, how long her silences last, which corner of the page she presses down first out of habit when she turns it. Not on purpose. Your body just learns it first. I didn't open my eyes. Partly out of laziness. Partly because the feeling was strange.

There was another person in the room — and not just anyone, but the person who could straighten everyone around a conference table with a single sentence — and yet the whole space felt quiet, as if only she and a pile of numbers had been left in it, fighting a war. And it was very clear that the numbers were losing. She must have been calculating for nearly an hour. At least, measured by a consciousness drifting on the surface of sleep and occasionally rising up for a quick breath, it was a long time.

Long enough that for a while I wondered whether she meant to just sit at my desk until dawn and, while she was at it, merge Asgard — hull number, door handles and all — into the portfolio of some corporation. Then the desk lamp went out. The moment the light disappeared, the room seemed to sink all at once. Then something light settled at the edge of the blanket. She slid in as naturally as anything.

Not probing, not careful, and not the kind of approach you get in novels where touching the pillow triggers three pages of blushing and a progress bar. She moved with the ease of someone for whom this had been on tonight's agenda all along — it had just been interrupted by a capital operation of unusually large scale. When that bit of warmth pressed up against me, I finally managed to fish a little awareness back out of my dead-asleep state.

"What's going on?" My voice was so mush-mouthed I disgusted even myself, as if I were speaking with the words still tucked inside the blanket. Maki didn't laugh at me. She just reached over and stroked my head, her palm landing very lightly, like someone soothing a small animal that's too sleepy to open its eyes but still insists on checking whether the environment is safe.

"It's fine." Her voice was low, still carrying the dullness of someone who'd just pulled herself out of a thinking state.

"I've taken care of everything." That sentence was dangerous. Because when she says something like that, it usually doesn't mean "it's fine." It means "it's still there, but I've already pushed it up to a level ordinary people can't read yet." But at that moment I had no spare energy at all for high-grade warning signs like that. I just mumbled twice, edged a little closer to her, and fell asleep again. Completely pathetic. And completely at ease. Until now.

The communicator by the bed suddenly screamed, as if afraid it wouldn't survive the day. The sound jabbed through me first, and before I'd worked out whether this was morning, an alarm, or retribution, the person beside me had already reached over and opened the channel. She moved too fast to be someone who'd just woken up. It was instinct.

"Hoshino." Lan's voice came through from the other end, the background a little noisy, as if at least one or two people were standing beside her — people who had no business joining the commotion at this hour and yet would absolutely turn up on time.

"Have you seen Kushima? I called her room and nobody picked up." Before I could answer, Maki leaned against my pillow, wearing a face just fished out of sleep, and spoke with a calm that suggested there was nothing here worth being surprised about at all.

"I'm here." The line went quiet for half a second. Not an ordinary half second. The kind of half second where somebody's brain goes blank first, and only then does it occur to them what they just asked. Then Lan's voice caught, visibly.

"Huh? Ah — I see. Sorry about that—" Halfway through, a short but highly recognizable intake of breath came through in the background. Jess was almost certainly standing right there. And I didn't need to see her face to guess what was on it. That excitement — "I knew this would happen, but hearing it for real is still highly valuable data" — had to be glowing from her eyebrows all the way to her earlobes by now.

I buried my face in the pillow and sincerely concluded that one of human civilization's greatest mistakes was the invention of real-time communication. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Maki didn't even move an eyebrow.

"I was discussing something with the XO last night." Her tone was lazy, like she was reading the weather forecast aloud.

"And I happened to stay the night here. Any problem with that?" A colossal lie. And delivered with such self-righteous confidence that not even a punctuation mark was going to feel guilty. I nearly choked on my own breathing and turned to look at her. Her face held the calm of someone who'd just woken up, wearing that natural expression of "well, isn't it true?" From a certain angle, she wasn't entirely talking nonsense. Last night she really had been discussing something in my room.

Whether what she discussed was me or that ship falls under the category of language arts. Lan went silent for a moment on the other end, clearly using a lifetime of breeding to hold down the urge to turn around and strangle Jess. Then she just barely dragged her tone back into work mode.

"The artificial beach opens today. If you want to say a few words—""No." Maki answered very fast. Fast, like she'd predicted this call last night and had her excuse ready in advance.

"Have the XO do it." She paused, as if it had finally occurred to her that it was still morning, then added one last line without changing expression.

"Good night." The next second. Click. She cut the channel outright. The room went quiet again, and I was left sitting on the bed with my brain a full half-lap behind reality, feeling like I'd just watched an extremely short, extremely absurd, and yet remarkably efficient demonstration of abuse of power. I stared at her. She didn't stare at me at all.

She'd already retreated back under the covers, burying herself as a thoroughly self-justified strategic bed-lingering unit, leaving only half a face and one tuft of hair sticking out — hair that, thanks to sleep, looked especially unreasonable.

"Shimo." She called my name with her eyes closed, her voice as lazy as a cat sunning itself.

"That sheet of paper on your desk — bring it over. If it turns out to be needed, just read from it." It took me two seconds to digest that. It took two more seconds to understand that "needed" here probably wasn't a simple opening address, but something that would blow the whole morning into a fresh round of meetings. So I threw off the blanket and got out of bed.

My feet still felt soft when they hit the carpet, and I stayed in that awkward state where the soul is awake and the body is still petitioning for another half hour of sleep. I walked to the desk and picked up the sheet she'd folded and pressed under the folder last night. The words at the top of the page were very clean. Clean the way an announcement about to cost you a clean life is clean. I opened it. And the title alone landed on me like a punch. New Asgard Acquisition Plan My breathing skipped a beat first.

I read on. Budget: Three hundred trillion. I froze on the spot, wondering whether I hadn't actually woken up yet, or whether last night's steam atrocity in the sauna room had already done irreversible damage to my cranial nerves, so that I was now hallucinating even Arabic numerals.

"Three hundred trillion?" My voice knotted up on the spot, and the tail of it even lost a little of the dignity a Vice President ought to have.

"Are you serious?" The person in the bed finally cracked one eye open. She still looked sleepy, sleepy enough that she could drop back under the next second. And precisely in that state, she could still use an utterly matter-of-fact tone to say a number big enough to make thirty generations of some ordinary family's ancestors sit up out of the family tree, as if she were discussing whether to add one more egg to breakfast.

"Obviously." She even waved a hand, like shooing off a bird that was reacting too slowly.

"I'm Seigen Kushima's granddaughter, and the next head of Kushima Heavy Industries. Do you think I'd joke about something like this?" She buried her face a little further into the pillow, her voice muffled, and yet still as precise as a capital bombardment aimed at someone's forehead.

"This amount isn't even one percent of the group's net profit." I went silent. Not because I was convinced. Because when the human brain faces information too far outside common sense, it first enters a very civilized blank state. Put simply, the brain politely crashes first, then decides whether to reboot. I looked down and read the page again. There was more on it than numbers.

There were entries, annotations, cross-referenced arrows, section-by-section explanations — and even, for each different option, the legal risks, the maintenance costs, the wording to use with the Federation's regulatory authorities, the rights appeasement students might demand, and the framework for converting the confidentiality agreements afterward. All of it had been taken apart, sorted, and reassembled by her over a single night.

This wasn't the before-sleep rambling of some rich young lady having a random fit. This was a plan you could genuinely use to bludgeon people with — and quite possibly bludgeon to death. My eyes slid all the way down, and when they hit one particular column I nearly suffocated again. Student Collective Risk Compensation Reserve. It was followed by a string of numbers that looked like the hybrid offspring of accounting and a horror novel.

Last night I'd been thinking that the whole ship's crowd were just trading Asgard like a futures contract. Then Maki, first thing this morning, showed me the master board and informed me: No need to trade. The house itself slept next to you last night. That feeling is very hard to describe. It's roughly like sleeping through the night with your arms around someone, then waking at dawn to find she's casually written a warship into the candidate column of her family's asset allocation.

When intimacy and capitalization hit you in the face at the same time, your first instinct is to ask heaven who exactly you're dating: a Student Council President, an heir to a conglomerate, or some supernatural phenomenon capable of completing a corporate merger in her pajamas.

"You went out last night for this?" Holding the page, I turned my head to look at her. Maki had already closed her eyes again, looking even more than before like she'd re-entered dormancy. But she still answered.

"Mm."

"You worked it all out in one night?"

"Not all of it." Her voice carried sleepiness, and still kept that infuriating precision.

"I just locked down the framework that could be locked down first. To actually push it, I'd need to get Roy and the others..." She stopped and frowned slightly, as if pulled at once by sleepiness and logic, then corrected herself.

"I'd need Roy to recalculate the cash flow, the maintenance amortization, and the holding costs. This is only a first draft." Only a first draft. I looked down at the thing in my hands and suddenly wanted to copy those words out, frame them, and hang them over the heads of every ordinary student still pinching every coin of next month's allowance — so that everyone could understand what it looks like when the class gap gets printed out onto paper.

"A three-hundred-trillion first draft." I repeated it under my breath.

"If you said that out loud in public, someone would pass out on the spot."

"Then don't show it to people who pass out easily." She answered very flatly. I stared at her, and finally couldn't help laughing out loud. This woman really is excessive sometimes. Not the annoying kind of excessive.

The kind where you know perfectly well that her lazy, curled-up-in-your-blanket look right now is adorable, and you know she was probably so tired last night that she shouldn't have gotten up to handle any official business at all — and yet the moment she opens her mouth, she can describe the entire world as if everyone else just hasn't caught up to her schedule yet. I carried the plan back to the bedside.

"So then, Madam Student Council President." I deliberately pitched my voice like I was giving a morning briefing.

"You're now planning to have me — with sleep-mussed hair and a three-hundred-trillion warship acquisition plan in hand — go host the artificial beach opening for you?" She finally opened her eyes and looked at me. There was still leftover fatigue in that look, but also a very faint, very obvious smile.

"You can fix your hair first." She said.

"As for the rest, just read it as written."

"Your definition of 'the rest' is very broad."

"Because I have faith in you." That line really is her specialty. The first half sounds like passing the buck. The second half sounds like a reward. Mixed together, the two are just enough to make it hard to refuse on the spot — even when you know perfectly well you're being pushed to the front line. I looked at her and suddenly found I had no way to deal with her.

Yesterday she'd squeezed three hundred people's confidentiality agreements into order at a meeting, gone out at night to write an acquisition case for a warship, and at dawn casually drafted me as her artificial beach opening proxy — and now she could still curl up in my bed wearing a look that said, "Mm, everything's more or less arranged, so the world can hold off on bothering me." A person like this not being written into a novel would be a sheer waste of reality.

The problem was that she was right there in my room, lying on my bed, under my blanket, and using my pillow. And I was holding three hundred trillion. At that thought, it struck me that last night's students, trading Asgard like a futures contract, had actually been fairly conservative. At most they'd been imagining whether this ship was worth money. Maki had gone straight to deciding to fold the thing into her own future life plan. I folded the page back up and let out a long breath.

"All right." I said.

"I'll go see how else this ship plans to scare people today."

"Thank you for your trouble, XO." She tossed the line at me indistinctly, the tail of it as lazy as a whine for attention. Then, before I had time to talk back, she'd already shrunk back under the blanket, her breathing evening out, as if she meant to treat the remaining sleep as some kind of lawful subsidy and claim it straight onto today's books. I stood by the bed watching her for a few seconds, and in the end still tucked the corner of the blanket in for her. Nothing to be done about it.

Because the person who'd just used three hundred trillion as a good morning greeting now happened to look, asleep, as quiet as if she'd done nothing at all. As I turned and headed for the door, I glanced at the page once more. The string of numbers under the title lay there quietly, like a meteorite that had no business belonging to a morning. And outside the door, the artificial beach was probably about to open.

I suddenly wanted very much to see what expressions would show up on the faces of Lan, Jess, Roy, and everyone aboard Asgard who'd spent last night busy calculating how much they'd get — when they heard "new acquisition plan, budget three hundred trillion." At that thought, my sleepiness finally cleared out completely. Some mornings don't wake you with an alarm clock. They wake you with a market cap.