Chương 485: 229.Situation Changes 2

Not three hundred regular troops, not three hundred fleet crew, and certainly not names already written into some secret establishment plan.

And yet here we were, sitting inside a space warship named Asgard, driven all the way to the secret front door of Kushima Heavy Industries by a student council president, a vice president, a treasurer, a general affairs officer, a secretary, a radar operator, a damage control officer, a chief engineer, and a crowd of classmates whom the crisis had hammered into one post after another. Sometimes reality isn't a plot twist.

Reality is throwing you off a cliff first, then demanding you learn to assemble wings in midair.

"Terrain screening rising," Akari said. The asteroid's surface on the main screen began to change. What had looked like one cold, dead expanse of rock, covered in impact scars and the gouges of abandoned mining, suddenly showed the faintest optical distortion.

As if a very thin, very large membrane lay between the asteroid's skin and the surrounding debris field, fitting so seamlessly against the background that it was almost invisible normally — only when the lead ships cut in at a specific angle did a trace of something artificial leak out of the surface refraction. The next second, the asteroid split open. Not an explosion, not a collapse, and not a simple sliding of hangar doors.

Instead, an entire stretch of camouflage shell, fused into the rock-layer texture, withdrew silently to both sides along seams that could not be seen at all. The outer screening plates retracted; the inner anti-detection facets flipped; and a docking channel big enough for Asgard to pass through emerged from the asteroid's belly. I caught my breath without thinking. This was no ordinary entrance.

It was more like someone had hollowed out an entire asteroid, dug out its bones, replaced them with steel, rails, maintenance arms, and an energy-transfer skeleton, then stitched it back onto the world's surface under layer after layer of shell capable of fooling satellites, radar, and human common sense. If I hadn't watched that camouflage wall part to both sides with my own eyes, I probably would never have believed that a facility of this caliber could hide under the Federation's nose for so long.

"... Okay, this is way over the top," Roy said quietly. This time nobody mocked him. Because everyone was looking. The docking channel ahead of Asgard was wide — wide enough for this giant ship to pass, yet precise enough to be uncomfortable. Not a single guide light on either side was wasted; cold white bands of light stretched along the inner walls into the depths, lighting the whole entrance like the gullet of some enormous creature.

There was no water around, no wind — only a stable cavity carved out of vacuum by force fields and guide fields, with even stray dust kept to a minimum, clean as a black mirror laid out by calculation. Asgard glided on, and the view on the bridge's main screen unfolded bit by bit with the docking angle. The huge maintenance walls on either side lit up level by level, revealing row upon row of heavy maintenance arms folded against the surface like limbs.

Those mechanical arms were too thick to look like tools — more like organs built specifically to dismantle the skeletons of giant mythical creatures. Every joint was wrapped in thick armor and multiple sensing rings, and the end modules were broken down to an absurd degree: armor cutting, hull-plate welding, drivetrain service, deep probe interfaces into the ship's interior — everything.

Further back, elevated maintenance rails crisscrossed the upper space like a spider's web, with suspended transport bridges waiting quietly along them. They were all inactive right now, yet carried more pressure than when running — like a herd of silent behemoths crouched up high, waiting only for the foreign giant below to come fully to rest before swarming down together to take it apart, scan it, sort it, and reassemble it. And that was only the first glance.

"Identifying left-side block," Akari's monotone, in a scene like this, oddly resembled a calm ruler kept specifically to footnote the scale of enormous things.

"Shipboard craft bay. At least three levels of lift rails. Enclosed servicing deck. Capable of simultaneously holding multiple medium craft squadrons." I followed the area she'd marked with my eyes. Sure enough, several half-enclosed hangar mouths opened in the middle of the left inner wall, their edge lighting already on, revealing stacked craft berths and vertical lift structures inside.

Those structures weren't the simple storage you'd find in an ordinary civilian berth pocket — they were complete launch-preparation modules. Just from the rail width and the number of magnetic-lock interfaces, you could tell it wasn't built to park a few sightseeing boats. It was meant to rearm, remount, and return craft to combat status in the shortest possible time. The right side was worse.

There, an entire section was sealed off behind thick isolation walls, with hardly any extraneous labeling visible on the outer layer. Only from the heavy lock-bay structures and deep security doors set into the wall could you tell it belonged to a completely different class from ordinary storage.

"What about that side?" I asked. Akari marked the area red.

"Sealed arsenal," she said.

"And not the publicly disclosed type."

"That sentence of yours is very close to a tautology," Jess said.

"I know," Akari replied evenly.

"But its importance deserves to be stated formally once." I didn't cut in. Because she was right. That was no ordinary arsenal. An ordinary arsenal wouldn't make an entire stretch of bulkhead thick enough to double as anti-ship-gun armor, nor would it install double-layer automatic isolation gates and independent power lines on the outside.

What was in there was probably not standard gear for the escort detail's live-fire practice — it was enough to turn a ship from "mobile" into "combat-capable," and even into something where others had best not come test just how hard it could hit. I suddenly felt a little dry in the throat. Not fear. More like a delayed sense of reality, finally catching up with the voyage we'd been forcing through on willpower and chaos. Asgard was not a toy.

Nor was it some large shelter that drifting students had happened to pick up. It was a real ship. And the Kushima family had never been treating it as an accident to clean up after. Further ahead, the deeper maintenance core finally unfolded completely as we cut in further. There stood a central energy architecture whose vertical height was astonishing almost to the point of distortion.

Several thick energy-coupling channels ran like metal conduits thrust into a spine, rising from the lower base all the way to the top covering layer, wrapped outside in high-density insulation shells and layer upon layer of vibration-suppressing brackets. Beside each coupling channel were interface segments of different specifications — medium ship-grade, heavy ship-grade, all the way up to large special-order contacts clearly exceeding public military maintenance standards — all sitting there quietly in a row.

That quiet was terrifying. Because it was not an exhibit with no signs of use. On the contrary, it looked far too much like something that would be used. Like someone had long known that one day, something too large to belong in a normal school-world setting would be sent in here, plugged into the interfaces, and given maintenance, resupply, refitting — even rebirth. I stared, absorbed, and even the dull hangover ache still lingering in my temple got pushed down a little.

"Executive Officer." Maki's voice pulled me back. I looked up and saw her sitting in the captain's chair, her expression without a single unnecessary shift. That whole secret factory — enough to rob most people of speech for a while — seemed, in her eyes, to be automatically broken down first into something else: usable resources, permission boundaries, risk points, control points, and what to do next. That was the most terrifying thing about Maki Kushima.

While others were still stunned by the scale, she was already calculating how to fold that scale into her own rhythm.

"After we dock," she said, "I want Asgard's complete maintenance priority sequence. Bridge systems first, then main propulsion, then a restructuring of permissions for the internal living areas and sealed sections. Tactical Officer, you keep an eye on the armament and shipboard craft interfaces."

"Copy." I answered almost by reflex. No discussion. No consultation. She wasn't discussing procedure with anyone — she was forcibly dragging this factory, this ship, and everyone aboard who hadn't fully switched back from accident mode into the order she had decided on. Put plainly: Maki didn't look like a guest right now. She looked like someone returning to a chessboard that should have been hers to take over from the start. Just then, the dedicated guidance channel on the bridge's forward flank lit up.

Lan checked the permission ID once before routing the audio to the main comms layer.

"First Deep Maintenance Bay, Kushima Heavy Industries. Guidance Director Yagyu, reporting to the captain of Asgard." The screen stayed off, voice only. A middle-aged man — restrained, clean, with no excess emotion. The kind of voice you could tell at once belonged to someone who'd worked in high-security facilities for years; even his pauses seemed to have gone through internal review beforehand.

"Asgard has entered the reception zone," he said.

"All Class-1 maintenance lines and containment procedures are on standby. Please give your instructions." Not "may I ask." Not "do you require." But: please give your instructions. That was more like it. I exhaled soundlessly inside. Maki looked ahead, her tone level.

"Maintain full lockdown for now. All entry and exit permissions are frozen at captain and executive officer level for the time being. Kushima internal engineering teams may only touch designated sections; before any contact, submit personnel rosters, permission scopes, and operation modules in full."

"Understood."

"Student areas and core areas are to be strictly separated. Without my authorization, no one is to touch the bridge main system, the tactical vault, the shipboard craft data layer, or any internal logs we haven't organized."

"Yes, ma'am." Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Also," she paused, "let me ask. What is the situation inside the Federation right now?" The moment that landed, even Jess went quiet. Because everyone knew this was the real core this chapter was heading into. The maintenance arms, the arsenal, the craft bay, the energy channels ahead — all of it was just scale and stage. What would truly determine how we moved next was the outside world: what it had become during this voyage of ours. Yagyu's answer was short.

"Chaos." Maki didn't respond. She showed no surprise and didn't press him. She simply gave him room to keep going. And the man on the other end clearly understood — this wasn't a question you could settle with a single adjective.

"Ever since the entire second year of the Federation military academy vanished, and the Lunar City fell into combat status in the same window, the capital district and the Federation military have been locked in high-pressure imbalance. The academy, the General Education Directorate, the lunar autonomy authorities, the military, and every media outlet were all forced to mobilize. The problem is—" He paused.

"No one dares report a death first." My hand on the edge of the tactical console tightened slightly. Yagyu went on.

"The precedent of the Yukikaze still stands. That time, an early official characterization — deaths reported first, survivors reported later — tore the whole Federation apart once through public opinion and the families. Ever since then, the military and the education system haven't dared declare the worst outcome outright for large-scale student disappearance cases like this before it's confirmed." Roy clicked his tongue softly.

"Get a funeral wrong once, get your legs broken by public opinion, and after that you don't dare bring the coffin out first. Very Federation."

"Please respect the political precision of that summary," Jess shot back at the same volume. I ignored them. Because my attention was entirely on those words: the entire second year had vanished. After all, our group had been aboard Asgard this whole time, with far too much to do and crises far too dense, so a lot of the sense of reality that should have seeped in slowly had been pushed to the back.

But now, hearing it again through someone else's mouth, it suddenly became very concrete: We weren't out of contact for a few hours, and it wasn't some single class briefly going missing. We were an entire grade — three hundred people — vanishing as one block from the Federation's normal order, together with the combat in the Lunar City. A thing like that was enough to keep any polity sleepless night after night beneath a calm surface.

"There are several mainstream external accounts at present," Yagyu said.

"Some media speculate it's a large-scale kidnapping, some guess the Empire intervened, and some insist the lunar combat and the academy's disappearance were the work of the same terrorists. The military's public line is a mess, and the education system is soothing families on one hand while demanding that false information be blocked on the other. What the capital district lacks least right now is versions." Maki gave a very soft snort.

It was faint, but enough for me to hear how familiar she was with that old Federation disease. When they panic, they always scramble first. And after scrambling to the end, they try to piece together something that looks presentable out of the shattered public opinion and administrative system, then hold it up as order.

"Then let's give them a version," she said. No negotiating tone. No probing. The instant that sentence came out, I even felt the whole bridge steady a little with it. Because this was what she did. Since the outside was all chaos, she would stuff in an answer that worked and let the whole Federation paste it up. Yagyu didn't respond at once, as if waiting for her full order. Maki moved her gaze to the main screen, her voice level as if reading a clause that had long existed in her head.

"Unified line. The Lunar City was attacked by unidentified terrorists. Second-year students of the Federation military academy, under Student Council command, broke out of the combat zone and, amid the chaos, boarded a Kushima family transport ship, crossing the Empire's outer territorial corridors to return to the Federation." I blinked, slightly stunned. Concise, clean, frighteningly few holes. It didn't drag Asgard onto the table, nor did it expose Hedwig or the Empire's actual internal involvement.

More importantly, it left ample room for the narrative the Federation loved best — the Student Council, crisis response, private assistance, successful return. Once this got sent back, the Federation would love it. Because it wasn't like a disaster report. It was more like propaganda material.

"In addition," Maki continued, "the student roster, basic survival status, and minimal medical needs may be reported. Asgard is not to be mentioned. The Kushima family's secret maintenance zone is not to be mentioned. Core contact with the Empire is not to be mentioned. Anything beyond that line gets cut."

"Understood," Yagyu said. I glanced at Maki. She didn't look back at me, but as if she knew what I was thinking, she added:"The Federation's habit of turning funerals into celebrations — if you don't give them a version they can print as a headline, they'll just make up a dumber one themselves." Jess couldn't hold it in and laughed.

"That's so brutal there's absolutely no refuting it."

"Because it's true," Lan said. I didn't refute it either. Because I knew she was probably right.

As long as the whole second year could return safely to Federation-controlled territory, as long as most of the three hundred students were still alive, as long as the frontline disaster could be rewritten as the Student Council leading everyone out in a crisis — those upper echelons, having spent the night sleepless and nearly crushed by panic and responsibility, would very likely wipe their cold sweat and package the whole thing into the sort of model news story about Federation youth displaying resilience and unity in crisis.

Just thinking about it made my stomach hurt. Very Federation, too.

"What about the transport arrangements?" Maki asked.

"Already complete," Yagyu answered.

"Students will be transferred to Kushima family transport ships in batches. Taking off from this maintenance zone, following internal secure corridors into the outer ring of the Federation capital district — less than a day."

"Good." Just that one word. No thank you. No pleasantries. No "thank you for your hard work." Because this wasn't a social occasion. This was a takeover. Maki hadn't come to build a friendly working relationship with her own family's factory staff. She had come to haul the situation into an operable state and then decide how everyone would move.

"Student transfers prioritize by grade organization and physical condition," she said.

"Medical observation cases, the lightly injured, and the severely exhausted go first. The rest board per the list. Asgard retains a minimal core seal-up crew; I'll give the roster later."

"Copy."

"Also," she added at the end, "before we leave, I want a complete data package for the Federation-acceptable version, a public roster template, and the interface line for the first moment after landing in the capital district."

"Yes, ma'am." The comms cut. For a moment no one on the bridge spoke. Outside, the factory light bands still stretched deeper, and Asgard was still sliding slowly toward its designated berth. But something clearer than the docking itself had already been settled in those few sentences. The Federation side was a pot of water boiled into chaos. And our side had already begun writing the recipe to feed into that pot. It wasn't exactly glorious. But it was effective.

And, compared with letting the Federation cook on its own imagination, this was indeed far safer. Maki stood.

"All hands shift to reception procedure. Executive Officer, come with me. Everyone else, execute docking operations per your permissions." The moment she moved, the whole bridge seemed to be rewound at once. No one asked more questions. No one dragged. Roy handed main control over to the internal guidance system step by step while retaining Asgard's own correction authority. Lan began sorting the two sets of comms priority sequences, external and internal.

Akari switched to the internal structure scan page, feeding the marked zones block by block into the task tiers. Nikaido turned and left at once — most likely already intending to use discipline to shove three hundred students a stretch forward from freshly out of castaway-survivor mode toward please line up and board. And before I followed Maki, I took one last look back at the master seat. Hedwig had already risen from it.

She stood in that cold white light like this whole vast gray zone along the Empire-Federation border was simply meant to have a place for her. Her creamy-blonde hair slid down along her shoulders and back, her expression calm almost to the point of detachment — but I knew she was no bystander. She was just used to standing higher than most, watching the situation tilt of its own accord toward what she wanted to see. She held a hand out toward Maki. In it was a thin authentication card.

A transparent base with the faintest silver-blue conductive lines inlaid along its edges, as if some form of authority itself had been shaped to fit between the fingers.

"This is my duplicate authentication," she said. Maki stopped, looked at her, and didn't take it right away. Hedwig didn't press either, only holding the card between them.

"A mirror card of the master-seat authority," she went on.

"Enough for you, after I leave, to keep drawing all necessary data on Asgard's sealed, maintenance, and basic protection levels." Her voice was not loud. But what truly settled to the bottom of that sentence weighed far more than the three words authentication card. Because it wasn't a simple pass. It was more like her copying out a portion of the keys she had held in her own hand alone, and handing them to Maki. Hedwig looked at her, the corner of her lips curving very faintly.

"Asgard — please take good care of her, everyone." The instant that sentence fell, I had a strange feeling. As if she weren't handing over a ship. But quietly returning something she had walked beside us with for a time — something that shouldn't stay long in anyone's hands — to the people better suited to carry it. Maki finally reached out and took the card. She didn't say thank you. Nor any pretty words. She just looked at Hedwig once, then spoke very calmly.

"I know." Just those two words. But I felt that, for Maki, this was probably already equivalent to the most formal promise. After that, things moved fast, as if someone had pushed the entire schedule forward a stretch. Asgard finished locking down. Seal-off lines began to go up. The student-area broadcasts switched to tiered notification mode.

The Kushima family's transport ship docked in from the flank of the maintenance bay, like a silver-gray warhead built specifically to deliver three hundred students back into Federation territory, settling quietly into the transfer corridor. We didn't have much time to stand around getting sentimental. Because the situation never grants that kind of treatment. Following Maki off the ship and onto the transport, I could even feel that the touch of metal decking under my soles had changed.

Asgard's decks were heavy, thick, hard — stepping on them was like stepping on the back of a breathing thing. The Kushima transport was over-clean, its corridor lights so bright it seemed never to have received anyone truly bedraggled. The three hundred students were being guided aboard in batches. Some hadn't fully recovered from the long stretch of high pressure and sudden events, faces pale. Some finally relaxed, like the last load-bearing bone in them had been pulled out.

And some, seeing the standardized transport cabins and the clearly ordered traffic lanes, wore for the first time a dazed expression of "ah — so we really are going back." I stood in the side corridor, watching the flow of people move slowly forward. Yet my heart wasn't as light as I'd imagined. Or rather, it wasn't that I couldn't feel light. It was that something was still left behind.

"Executive Officer." I turned. It was a Kushima family data clerk. Young, clean, uniform so neat it looked like she'd just stepped out of a spec sheet. She handed me a data card with both hands, her posture so standard it could be printed into a training manual.

"This is a basic data copy of Asgard before sealing — main system overview, maintenance priority list, preliminary shipboard craft bay scan, armament lockdown status, and temporary permission mapping. The captain instructed that it be given to you for safekeeping." I took the card. It was lighter than I'd expected. A thin little thing, yet its edge had a hardness out of all proportion.

Light slanted down from above the corridor, and deep in the card's surface a thread of data flow flickered past — as if the whole of Asgard had been broken into invisible numbers, compressed, sealed, and finally sunk into this small thin sliver in my palm. The clerk saluted and stepped back. I looked down at the card and didn't move for a long while. For some reason, I suddenly didn't want to close my hand tightly.

As if, if I squeezed too hard, Asgard would really shrink to just this much in my hand and be left for now in the belly of that sunless asteroid, well looked after by maintenance arms, seal-off lines, and the Kushima system. While the rest of us would be repackaged and sent back to the Federation capital district — sent back to the place that would soon turn our survival, our escape, our return into something broadcastable, promotable, clip-able into short phrases.

To put it bluntly: We had been permitted to briefly own a dragon. Now the dragon had gone into its cave. And all I had left in my hand was a card with a dragon-scale distribution map on it.

"What are you thinking about?" Maki's voice came from beside me. I looked up and saw her standing on the other side of the transport corridor, still in the uniform she'd worn on the bridge, the whole of her clean, straight — like a single line cut hard out of the chaos. I looked down at the data card in my hand.

"I was thinking," I said slowly, "whether we've left too much behind." Maki glanced at the card. She didn't answer right away. She just came a little closer, stopped beside me, and watched the still-moving flow of people at the end of the corridor with me.

"Not left behind," she said.

"Put somewhere it can keep living." I turned my head to look at her. Her tone was very level — even more level than it had been on the bridge. And precisely because of that, the sentence carried a weight needing no extra embellishment. Put somewhere it can keep living. That was very Maki. More than sentiment, she was good at finding sentiment a version that could keep moving forward. I let out a low breath and flipped the data card over, tucking it into my uniform's inner pocket.

The cold card face pressed against my chest through the fabric, like a small compressed piece of the future. The transport ship gave a slight shudder. The thrusters ignited. I looked out through the viewport. Far away, the asteroid that had swallowed Asgard was gradually retracting its outer camouflage.

The huge camouflage plates closed again, the light bands going dark layer by layer, like some space monster that had just opened its mouth and swallowed a mythical creature, then buried itself back in the debris belt and the dark as if nothing had happened. In a little while, seen from outside, it would probably just be an uninteresting, silent, utterly unremarkable abandoned mining asteroid again. No one would know Asgard was inside.

No one would know that three hundred second-year students had once lived together aboard that ship through such a messy, absurd voyage — one that seemed like it shouldn't have been written into reality. And now, we were going back. Back to the Federation. Back to the capital district. Back to the place that would package disaster into a heartwarming tale, trim survivors into order, and nail chaos back into news headlines and administrative procedure. I looked at my reflection in the viewport.

In it, my face was still a little pale, with faint shadows under my eyes from not enough sleep, the headache not entirely gone either. However I looked at it, I was nothing like some hero who'd led classmates through a war zone, across the Empire's outer corridors, safely back to the Federation. More like someone just fished out of a storm, who hadn't yet learned to pretend she was actually good at storms.

"Shimo." Maki rarely called me that directly when others were around. So I blinked before turning. She looked ahead, not at me.

"After we get back — that's when the trouble starts." I couldn't help but laugh.

"Is that meant to be comfort, or a warning?"

"A statement of fact," she said. That made sense. And it was annoying. But for some reason, hearing it made me feel a little more secure. Because as long as she could still talk in that tone, it meant her mind was already moving to the next step. And when Maki started moving to the next step, there was usually only one thing I needed to do— Follow. The transport ship accelerated again. The capital district lay ahead.

And as I pressed against my uniform's inner pocket, lightly touching through the fabric the data card holding Asgard's data, I suddenly knew very clearly that my hesitation a moment ago had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go back. I was hesitating over this. When we really returned to the Federation and handed over that clean, pretty version— Would Asgard ever come back to us whole again?