Chương 481: 227.Secret Meeting in Bar 2

There's no day or night in space, so it wasn't until the day–night chime rang that the Asgard finally began to feel like a ship with a nightlife. The daytime beach had roasted the entire year into a crowd of tourists who'd briefly forgotten they'd nearly died in open space yesterday. By night, with the lights dimmed and the corridors dark, the ship reverted to the mode where metal, discipline, silent-running systems, and secret meetings all sprout easily.

Maki had, "in passing," scheduled the core-staff meeting in a private room at The Flag Officers' Club. I have always had strong objections to the phrase in passing when it comes to her. On ordinary people, it means grabbing a glass of water, closing a door, reminding you to hand in a report.

On her, it usually means that after spending an entire day handling beach staggering, bridge protocol revisions, suggestion-box triage, joint holding structures, and cabin reshuffles, she still has capacity left over to slot in a night meeting—the way some people order dessert after a full meal. The group was small: Maki, me, Roy and Lan, Akari, Jess, and Hedwig. Harvey and D were both on duty and couldn't leave their posts.

Fair enough—however much this ship resembled a school trip, you couldn't treat the engine room and defense command as background scenery that ran itself once everyone's nerves settled. Someone would pass along the minutes and orders later. The private room turned out to be an even more unhinged power apparatus than I'd expected. Dark wood-grain table, thick carpet, low-hanging lampshades, a liquor cabinet, real leather sofas, and a few pieces on the wall I couldn't tell were reproductions or originals.

The whole atmosphere was perfectly suited to a room full of cadets discussing "what to do with everyone's enormous allowance"—a topic that had no business existing in any sane civilization. Sitting down, I had exactly one thought. The Asgard was very good at education. Not the kind that teaches you to be an adult. The kind that throws you straight into adult-scale problems and watches whether you grow the bones for them yourself. Once the door shut, Maki didn't waste time.

She skipped pleasantries entirely, set her terminal in the center of the table, and the moment the display lit up, every still-active problem from the day lined up in front of her like students called to attention.

"First, confirm today's results," she said. Her voice wasn't loud, but in that closed room it landed more like a command than it ever had standing on a mess-hall table.

"The beach schedule's posted. First batch of suggestion-box slips is in. The revised bridge watch protocol is active as of now. Officers' club and rec-room crowd control begin trial tonight." Jess's hand shot up immediately. Not the polite kind of hand-raise—the I'm talking regardless kind. Maki looked at her.

"Go ahead."

"Let me be clear, I'm not objecting." Jess leaned back, swirling a glass of something clear she'd acquired from somewhere, looking like she was attending a symposium slightly more formal than a Seitokai meeting and slightly less dangerous.

"I just think it's remarkable that you actually got three hundred people to follow a class-rotation beach schedule today. That alone is unbelievable." Lan cut in beside her.

"What's unbelievable is you spending this morning at the front row teaching everyone how to fight over shade."

"That was a risk demonstration."

"That was risk creation."

"But it worked." Jess spread her hands.

"At least Disciplinary knows who to watch first." Freya wasn't there, but I could practically picture her adding high-risk demonstrative behavior to the supplementary rules if she'd heard that. Maki skipped the tangent and moved the agenda forward.

"The serious-to-absurd ratio in the suggestion box was better than expected." She swiped a finger; several sorted tags floated up.

"Medical, oversight, post-withdrawal equity, family emergencies. Those get priority." Hedwig sat diagonally across from her, hands folded, posture immaculate enough that the sofa didn't seem to dare crease under her. She scanned the tags, her tone carrying that particular blend of refinement and precisely aimed cut that only she managed.

"Meaning Federation students remember to ask about the system before the astronomical number arrives."

"Only some of them remember." Akari sat toward the back, her drink barely touched. Under the warm light her dead-fish eyes looked even more like someone who'd already reached a verdict on the world, her flat delivery carrying an unusual note of pity.

"The rest are asking about commemorative bonds." The room went quiet for a beat. Then Jess laughed first.

"Right, when I saw that one I almost thought we weren't setting up a holding company, we were taking ourselves public." Roy pressed his fingers to his temple.

"At this point, any word related to financial instruments makes my stomach hurt."

"Get used to it," I told him.

"This ship's probably going to keep hurting you." He gave me a look full of and why does that sound like you've already accepted your fate?

"Because I never took an elective called How to Design an Asset Structure for Your Entire Grade on a School Trip."

"Consider this the makeup course," Lan said, smiling, sounding exactly like someone thrilled about a new cohabiting arrangement while selectively ignoring her boyfriend's mental state. Roy clearly wanted to answer that, but Maki cut in first.

"Then let's just run the numbers." She looked at Roy.

"Most conservative version. Say it once, cleanly." Roy went quiet for half a second, wearing an expression I already knew well: since I'm the one stuck doing the actuarial math for this disaster, I might as well make sure every one of you sees exactly how insane it is. He dragged his terminal to the center of the table. Columns of numbers unfolded.

"Premise first," he said.

"This isn't the optimistic version. No high-yield allocation, no aggressive investing, no hyper-growth fantasy dreamed up by a waterlogged brain. This is: take the portion that can be carved out, put it into the lowest-yield conservative bonds and funds available, subtract maintenance, holding, risk reserves, and necessary liquidity, and work down from there." He paused. I had a very bad feeling. Not because the number would be small.

On the contrary—when Roy set things up in that tone, what followed was never bad news. It was the kind of news that snapped human common sense clean in half. Sure enough.

"Per student. Per month. Minimum allowance." He glanced at the column.

"At least 3. 3 billion." The entire room went silent. Not quiet. Crashed. Even the air seemed to stall. I looked at Jess and realized she wasn't metaphorically frozen—she looked like someone had physically hit her in the back of the head with a math textbook. Mouth slightly open, eyes blank, expression caught somewhere between did I mishear that and if this is real, how am I supposed to live my life now. I wasn't doing much better.

I was just better at wrapping shock in something that still resembled a human reaction.

"... Fuck." I stared at the numbers, then at my own hands.

"I genuinely never thought I'd live to see the day I had to worry about having too much money to spend." I grabbed the nearest glass and took a sip. The next second, something burning sliced down my throat like a red-hot blade. I nearly sprayed it back onto the table, forced it down on the last scrap of academy pride I had left, and ended up with my eyes stinging.

"The hell is this?" Jess finally rebooted, but her first reaction wasn't concern for me—it was the pained look of someone watching a villager use a priceless antique as a doorstop.

"You're wasting it," she said.

"That's Yvandon 22-B whiskey. You have no taste."

"You poured whiskey into a water glass. Who exactly was supposed to appreciate it?"

"It's called lowering defenses." Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"It's called an ambush assassination." Lan ducked her head, muffling a laugh. Akari, in her eternal flat delivery, added: "Judging by the results, highly effective." I set the glass down, feeling like my throat had briefly visited the surface of a star. Roy had no attention left to spare for our alcohol incident. He was staring at his terminal, scrolling through more columns, looking increasingly like a man managing civilization's side effects.

"This is why I said it's not about how much each person gets anymore." He looked up at Maki.

"At this scale, simple holding and distribution is wasteful. Given this much capital, why not just open our own bank?" That line nearly gave my half-recovered throat a second incident. But the most alarming thing was that nobody at the table dismissed it as a joke. Because everyone here had already been trained by far too much absurdity today. Once 3. 3 billion a month in allowance already existed, let's just open our own bank had started to sound dangerously reasonable. Jess recovered first.

"Wait—you're serious?"

"More serious than you explaining joint holding structures in a swimsuit this morning," Roy said.

"If all we need is somewhere to park funds, run internal clearing, handle trust distributions, and process the public fund and emergency expenses, we don't need a full retail bank. A non-public private banking system that only serves the core structure is enough." Hedwig tapped her glass lightly with a fingertip, her eyes carrying the look of someone thoroughly enjoying watching these Federation students graduate from how to spend money to how to grow our own financial organ.

"Imperial noble houses at this scale certainly don't leave their assets sitting in someone else's vault," she said.

"Compared to the assets themselves, what's genuinely valuable is settlement authority—and the power to decide who's allowed to move them." Hearing that, I suddenly remembered the suggestion slips about oversight, emergencies, and post-withdrawal equity. Something in me that still felt like a student got quietly pressed down by reality. Right. At this scale, the money itself wasn't the heaviest part. The heaviest part was who holds it, who decides, who signs, and who lies awake at three in the morning.

Maki set her cup down. A small, clear sound. Everyone went quiet on instinct.

"Approved," she said, as naturally as agreeing to extra ice.

"I'll have my family handle the bank." Jess's eyes went wide.

"The way you say that is genuinely infuriating."

"I know." Maki showed not a shred of remorse.

"Target: a non-public VIP private bank. Scope limited to parking funds for the joint holding structure, trust settlement, public-fund disbursement, and internal beneficial-rights management." Roy nodded fast enough to be moving. Not because he was relieved—because he'd just realized part of this financial disaster could be outsourced to people who actually operated at this altitude. I leaned back and looked at the ring of glasses on the table, suddenly wanting to laugh.

This morning we'd stood in the mess hall telling the entire year: it's not that we aren't giving it to you, it's that we aren't letting the money take you apart first. Tonight, the core staff meeting had evolved into a serious discussion, in an officers' club private room, about how to structure a private bank. The flow of time on this ship clearly didn't belong to the same universe as a normal campus. By rights, the meeting should have wrapped up here. By rights.

Unfortunately, by rights carries limited authority once you add an officers' club, good whiskey, a monthly allowance of 3. 3 billion, and a full day of accumulated exhaustion. The one who actually derailed the meeting was Jess. She stood up abruptly, glass in hand, announcing with the energy of someone about to unveil a global revolution:"I propose!" My head hurt at the opening alone.

"Propose what?" Lan asked lazily, her face already flushed with alcohol and general good cheer.

"Given that today we successfully set up joint holding, staggered beach access, new bridge watch regulations, and incidentally acquired a future private bank—" Jess raised her glass high.

"This one's for the entire second year. For this absurdly expensive ship. For 3. 3 billion a month. And for the fact that we haven't scared ourselves to death yet." The toast was crude, but genuinely alive. Somehow, everyone bought it. Even I lifted my glass.

"To you finally saying something halfway decent," I said.

"That count as a compliment?"

"Barely." The glasses touched, a thin, clear ring. And that was when the room truly began sliding in the direction a drinking table is supposed to slide. Lan took one round from Jess and went soft with laughter, still not forgetting to drag Roy down with her. He tried to hold onto his last shred of I'm the finance officer, I must retain my judgment dignity, until Lan flattened it with: "You're already designing us a bank—one more drink isn't going to bankrupt you further." He surrendered, resigned to his fate.

Akari's drinking style was the most unsettling of all. Everyone else went round by round, noisy about it. She looked at her glass like a potentially lethal reagent, drank it with total calm, and delivered her review with the same calm.

"This one tastes like wood."

"That's the barrel."

"Barrels shouldn't be consumed." Then she took another sip. Hedwig held onto her full Imperial-princess-grade restraint and elegance for a while—the way she held her glass belonged in an etiquette textbook, and even her barbs carried a civilized, well-pruned edge. But the contagion level of a Federation student drinking table shouldn't be underestimated; eventually even she got pulled into a few rounds by Jess and Lan together. She never lost control. That was the most infuriating part.

Her eyes just got a little brighter, her speech slowed by half a beat, and the smile she usually kept buried surfaced a bit more often than usual. As if the ice layered over her had finally been melted, just enough, by the alcohol—letting the more dangerous, more entertained person underneath breathe a little. As for Maki— She didn't drink the most. At least, not at first. The problem was that nobody at that table was willing to let the Seitokai President off easy. Lan toasted her for building the system.

Roy toasted her for saving his financial sanity. Jess toasted her for pulling everyone back from the edge of a collective one trillion each self-destruction. Even Hedwig raised her glass at one point, her tone smooth as a formal proclamation.

"To tonight's consensus," she said.

"Thoroughly Federation, and thoroughly efficient." Maki looked at her, and still lifted her glass. Sitting beside her, watching her take one round after another, the bad feeling in my chest started to take shape. It wasn't that she couldn't hold her liquor. It was that she'd simply been too exhausted today. And when a person's that tired, alcohol works faster than politics. Time in the private room started to go strange.

We circled back over the beach schedule, the bank structure, whether we actually had to answer the suggestion slip about front-row lounge chairs, how to get D and Harvey caught up on the minutes, whether the next person who mentioned mercenary work should just be sent to the engine room to haul supplies until they learned to be human. By the end, even who's responsible for being the first one sober tomorrow morning had become an agenda item. Nobody reached a conclusion.

Nobody looked like they could vouch for themselves. It ran until the small hours, until even the officers' club itself seemed to radiate a particular exhaustion: however high-class this venue is, it wasn't built to survive being used like this by its future shareholders. By the time we broke up, nobody quite looked like their daytime self. Jess had laughed herself nearly off her feet and still insisted she had one more toast in her.

Lan glowed like she'd just cashed in some major life victory early, dragging Roy half-willingly out the door, murmuring things I was too tired to catch but that would definitely make him want to bury himself the next morning. Roy had fully entered will I regret being alive tomorrow territory, but still clutched his financial terminal to his chest, like the last piece of professional dignity proving he wasn't just a drunk. Akari was the most incomprehensible case of the night.

She'd clearly been drinking too, but her steps stayed perfectly straight. At the door, she just looked back and said, in her usual flat tone:"If there's another meeting tomorrow, I'd suggest nothing before noon." Then she left. I strongly suspected she was the most sober person in the room all night. Hedwig rose last and gave Maki a small nod—a gesture halfway between courtesy and a test, or maybe those two things had never been that distinct to begin with. Before she left, her gaze passed briefly over me.

Like she wanted to say something, or like she was simply confirming something she'd already decided in her own mind. It was very faint. Faint enough that I might have written it off as the whisky playing tricks. Once everyone had scattered, the room finally went quiet. When I stood up, the world tilted. Not dramatically, but enough—enough to know that two more drinks would have turned me into a permanently preserved specimen of the Seitokai Vice President. Maki wasn't beside me by then.

I remembered her being called away once by the club's service system, or maybe she'd stepped out to handle something herself. My brain was too saturated with whisky for high-precision tracking, so I hadn't followed to ask. The only impression left was that her steps had still been steady when she left, her back carrying that same refusal to let anyone see her sway. I made my own way back to the room, alone. The corridor went on forever. Genuinely forever.

Long enough that I started to suspect the Asgard had secretly grown two extra hull sections while we were drinking. By the time I got the door open and shut behind me, I was tired enough to want to just fall onto the bed and deal with the rest later. Head spinning, ears hot, the absurdly expensive burn of the whisky still lingering in my throat, as if the entire day's absurdity had been distilled and poured straight into my bloodstream. I braced against the desk edge and managed to peel off my jacket.

Just as I was about to lie down, the door opened again. I turned. The figure in the doorway swayed slightly, silhouette pulled unsteady by the corridor light. That particular quality—alcohol on board, but still holding a sense of direction—matched exactly the familiar shape already sitting in my head.

"... You're only just back too?" My voice came out thick. She didn't answer right away. Just closed the door and walked in slowly. She carried the scent of alcohol too, but not the sharp kind I'd just accidentally ambushed myself with—softer, fainter, like something kept hidden deep in the night. I didn't have the energy to think any further. From morning to now—the beach, the schedule, the bridge, the private room, the bank, the 3.

3 billion, the suggestion box, the watch regulations—it had all churned through my head once already. At a moment like this, for someone to walk into my room and approach with a rhythm that made me drop my guard on instinct, my brain only had one way left to classify her. Which was: whatever, it's her. By the time she reached the bed, I was already half-sitting, half-collapsed on the edge.

She looked down at me for a moment, as if she wanted to say something, but in the end just reached out and touched my hair, very lightly. The motion was slow and steady, nothing like the clinking glasses and toasts back in the private room—quiet, as if the whole night had finally agreed to end right here.

"... Just glad you're back," I think I said. Or maybe I didn't. Because the next second, alcohol and exhaustion pulled me down together into something soft and deep. All that was left in my vision was the light, the edge of the bed, the shadow drawing closer, and the familiar, settling weight of the mattress dipping. We went down like that. No dramatic exchange. Neither of us had the strength left to hold up the day's logic and order.

Just two equally drunk people, sinking into the bed one after the other, like two malfunctioning parts the ship had finally cleared for shutdown. I remember, right before sleep took me, edging a little closer on reflex. She didn't pull away. She just caught the movement, quietly, in the dark. And then I went under. Completely. Deeply. Gone.... Right before sleep closed over me for good, I thought I heard a very faint sound. Not a glass. Not the door.

Something small and metallic, set down on the nightstand without much thought. Very thin. Very brief. But for some reason, even at the bottom of my drunkenness, it made me frown. Maki didn't usually carry anything that made a sound like that. I almost opened my eyes. Almost. But in the end I couldn't make anything out clearly. Only in the last instant before the dark closed in completely, I caught a blurred impression—moonlight falling across the edge of the bed, catching on a thin line of silver.

Not like an earring. Not like a hairpin. More like some kind of ornament I'd never seen on her before—too delicate, and too cold. Then everything cut out.