Chương 248: 99. Immediate Redeployment 1

Once Tobita dropped "ten minutes, then we run it again" and turned away, nothing on the bridge resembled an actual break. What it looked like, instead, was the ghost crew of a ship that had just been sunk in simulation, granted ten minutes to catch its breath in place.

I sat at the tactical station, hand still resting on the edge of the fire-control board, staring at the dead tactical display for two full seconds before it caught up with me: right, I didn't have to pretend anymore that Parsifal and Tristan could drag my life back from the edge. Then I leaned back. The second my spine hit the chair, I realized my whole back was already soaked.

"... Shit." Very quiet. Barely a mutter. Jess, behind my left shoulder — fresh off Tobita's "you switched too late from helping the Tactical Officer fight to helping her run" — somehow still had the energy to turn her head my way.

"Cursing now? Bit late, isn't it, Tactical Officer?"

"I was busy dying with the ship," I said, voice completely hollow.

"Didn't have a window."

"And you have one now?"

"Now I'm checking whether my soul's still attached." The corner of Jess's mouth twitched, like she wanted to laugh. It didn't quite make it out. Rare. Which meant the sim had knocked something loose in her too. No one scattered. No one stood up for water, or a stretch, or to say any of the usual "it's fine, we'll get it next round" nonsense. The most dangerous thing about Tobita's debrief style is exactly this — he never raises his voice, never accuses anyone of anything.

He just takes every station apart, cut by cut, until you're left with absolute clarity: It wasn't bad luck. Every single one of us had been half a step late. And half a step, stacked across a whole crew, is exactly enough to sink a ship. Roy was still standing at the helm, hands hovering near the wheel, staring down at his own palms — like he was only now realizing that what he'd been holding wasn't a control surface. It was the ship's spine. Maki stood beside him, quiet.

She isn't the type to walk over and pat someone's shoulder and say it's fine. She just stood there, eyes still on the faint reflection in the main viewport, running back through every second she hadn't been fast enough, or hadn't been ruthless enough. Akari sat at Radar, arms crossed, expression a shade colder than usual. She probably doesn't hear "you weren't reporting, you were sounding a death knell" very often.

What was left on her face was the particular sullenness of someone who'd just had an unpleasant truth forced down her throat and had no way to spit it back out. Lan was quiet, as always — head down over the comms log, scrubbing back through it line by line, looking for the blade Tobita had said was hiding in what she'd filed as noise. CIC was slightly louder than the main bridge, but only at low-discussion volume. A different universe entirely from D's usual night-market energy.

"Told you that second wave read dirty," D said, keeping his voice down, hands still gesturing.

"It wasn't chasing our original course. It was chasing how we'd dodge."

"Everyone already knows that," Evelyn said, cold.

"What matters now is which second we should have stopped talking about suppression." Harvey stood by the projection, boxing off timestamps, voice as level as ever — like annotating a body that hadn't quite finished dying.

"When the main boiler hit 108 percent, the decision window was already under twenty seconds."

"From Engineering's first full report to the next main-battery charge spike, we burned nine-point-four seconds."

"Nine seconds is nothing at cruise. In a retreat, it's enough to die once." D looked at the number and, for once, didn't fill the silence with noise.

"Nine seconds," he said.

"Sounds so short. And it's genuinely enough to kill a ship."

"Why do you think Tobita dragged us in here to take this beating?" Evelyn said.

"I assumed it was a personality defect on his part."

"That's part of it too," Harvey said.... Fair assessment, honestly. I didn't join either conversation. Not because I was above it — because right now there were two versions of me arguing inside my own head, pulling each other's hair. One kept insisting: You didn't panic. First-wave countermeasures were right. Fire-control switching was right. Suppression wasn't a reckless call. The other said, colder: Correct. You didn't panic. You were still wondering if you could land one more clean cut.

The second one was more accurate. I looked down at the board. Every key sat there quietly lit, like nothing had happened. But the second my eyes crossed the mode-switch buttons, that exact moment replayed itself — Ash asking, if we turn back to suppress, how much does it buy us, and my first thought hadn't been no. It had been if we're doing this, how do I build it. That was the problem. Not that I couldn't retreat. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author.

Report it. That I hadn't been willing enough to let go.

"Shimo." I looked up. Maki had moved — I hadn't even noticed when — and now stood a step to my right. Not leaning in, not lowering her voice. Just standing there, close enough that it carved out a small, private space between me and the rest of the bridge.

"What."

"You're re-running the suppression call."

"... Is it that obvious?"

"Very." Thanks for that. I exhaled and let my head drop against the chair back.

"I thought if we bought twenty seconds of suppression, maybe we could've pushed those two destroyers back a little." She gave one nod.

"The idea wasn't wrong."

"Just the timing," I finished for her. She didn't answer right away. Two seconds, then, flat:"Not completely wrong." I turned my head.

"Mm?"

"If the drive hadn't been hit that hard, or the second wave had grazed shallower, suppression might not have been the wrong move," she said.

"The problem is you were still holding room open for what if we can do a little more."... She is genuinely infuriating. Because she always says it level, and always accurately enough that you can't pretend you didn't hear it. I picked at the console edge with a fingernail.

"You did the same thing."

"What?"

"What Tobita told you was accurate too," I said, low.

"You only said it once. You were holding room open for Ash to think." She looked at me. No denial. Which meant I'd hit it.

"... Mm," she said, finally. Watching her like that, I had the odd urge to laugh. Not at her. The strange, tired relief of realizing you're not the only one who leaves half an inch of slack when you shouldn't.

"What," she asked.

"Nothing." I shook my head.

"Just thinking — Tobita didn't put you at XO because you're the steadiest one."

"Then why?"

"Because you are the steadiest, and you still go soft in exactly the places that matter," I said. She was quiet a moment.

"And you?" she asked.

"Me?"

"He didn't put you at Tactical because you memorized the most weapons, either," she said, just as flat. My eyebrow went up.

"Then why?" She looked at me the way you'd state a known fact.

"Because you genuinely aren't afraid to pull the trigger."

"So he had to force you to learn when not to." I had nothing lined up for that.... Also accurate. Also annoying. Jess had clearly caught the tail end, leaning in from the side, tone unusually free of its usual edge.

"I had a problem of my own back there, actually." I turned to her.

"You're volunteering a confession?"

"Occasionally." She scooted her chair forward, hands folded on the console.

"I was still building you option lists. How to angle the kinetic rounds, whether we could still squeeze in anti-ship missiles, how to split CIWS without losing too much—""Isn't that your job?" I said.

"Right," Jess said.

"Too right. So right I forgot that what we actually needed then wasn't more what else can we do — it was someone to cross half the what we shouldn't do off the list first." I stared at her for two seconds. This woman's mouth usually comes pre-loaded with sparks. Watching her be this direct, without any of the usual performance, was almost disorienting.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Nothing," I said, honestly.

"Just checking whether that Emperor-class battlecruiser knocked something loose in your personality." She glared, then laughed, once.

"Get lost." Just that — and the air on the bridge loosened a fraction. Not much. But enough that it stopped feeling like everyone was nailed to their own failure, unable to move. Off to the side, Aida had been pulled over by Harvey and Evelyn to review the damage-control playback. She stood at the projection, face still flat, but her sentences had gotten noticeably shorter and harder.

"Here — I shouldn't have tried to hold both sides of the attitude band at once," she said, tapping the damaged sector.

"Once aft-port breached, I could only protect either the main trunk or attitude control. I was still fighting for both."

"What if you'd dropped the lower-left outer panel outright?" Harvey asked.

"Medical would've had to pull back ten seconds earlier," Aida said.

"Then junction two wouldn't have jammed later," Evelyn added. D, listening from the side, couldn't hold it in.

"Wait — so the chain failure wasn't just the enemy's aim being good? It was because we kept thinking don't drop this either?" Aida looked up at him.

"Welcome to how a ship actually lives." D went quiet for half a beat. He didn't make a joke. I glanced at Lan and Akari, running their own timeline in low voices — Lan had marked the residual traffic after cutting the surrender signal in red; Akari was stepping through the radar-refresh ticks right before the second re-emergence, frame by frame. The bridge had broken into small knots, each one chewing on its own corner of the same death. And I had a strange feeling settle in. Not defeat, exactly.

Not quite shame either. Closer to this: seeing, for the first time, how many people have to simultaneously trade I want to do this right for I will not do this wrong, just to bring one ship home. Not heroic at all. Genuinely ugly, if anything. But that's exactly what the Yukikaze exists to teach. I was still sitting with that when a signal light blinked on in the corner of the bridge. Small. Quiet chime.

But during ten minutes where everyone was deliberately keeping their voices down, it was more than enough to pull every eye at once. Lan looked up first, checked her panel, and called out, fast:"Captain. External comms." She said Captain looking at Tobita. Not Ash. Ash heard it and, without a shred of hesitation, stood from the chair, pulled off the borrowed officer's cap, and stepped aside. Maki moved with him, half a step back. The two of them flanked the empty captain's chair like guardians at a shrine door.

I almost laughed at my own brain for producing that image. This ship really has a gift for making you think absurd things in the middle of serious ones. Tobita walked back and sat, motion so familiar it looked bone-deep.

"Put it through." The main display split in two. The man on the left — my first thought was: this is the kind of man who talks about you the second your back is turned. Not malice. He genuinely looked the type. Long face, mouth pulled down at the corners, radiating a gloomy grey energy — the sort of person who could say "no objection" and still leave you certain he had three pages of them. The man on the right was the opposite creature entirely. My first thought wasn't naval officer.

It was some mutant variant of a Chief Engineer, drunk, still capable of slamming a table and laughing. Face flushed red, voice that probably didn't need the comms system's help to crack a glass. The one on the left introduced himself first.

"This is the Minazuki. Major Nakata, commanding." His tone matched his face exactly — measured, grey, and steady in its gloom. The one on the right was from an entirely different species.

"This is the Chikuma, and I'm the one running her! Captain Oshima!" That opener alone made me suspect the air on the bridge had physically vibrated. Then his eyes swept the room, landed square on our row of students, and he burst out laughing on the spot.

"Tobita! Since when did you start running a Boy Scout troop?! Hahahaha!"... Loud. The kind of loud that doesn't need an enemy ship — the volume alone counts as suppressive fire. Tobita's expression didn't move a degree.

"Captain Oshima," he said, flat.

"The Yukikaze is a training vessel." Then he glanced at us, and added, almost in passing:"And I'd say they're already capable of holding their own stations." Sitting at Tactical, I nearly choked. Not from being moved. From feeling brand-new pressure land on me from a completely different direction. Oshima didn't treat that line as anything worth dwelling on. He just waved one broad hand and dropped two sets of coordinates straight across the link.

"Is that right? Good luck, then." He laughed like a man who'd just finished a full bottle.

"One's the convoy's position. One's Pike-6. You'd better pray your Boy Scouts don't fly that thing straight into somebody's face! Hahahaha!" Then— He cut the feed. Clean. Like he'd logged on specifically to needle Tobita for thirty seconds and dump his workload on the way out. Major Nakata glanced at the now-dark half of the screen, then at Tobita — with the exact expression of a normal man who wanted no part of whatever this dynamic was — and cut his own feed without another word. The screens went dark.

The main display returned to standby. The bridge dropped into silence again. Not because we'd just died in a simulation. Because a man named Oshima had just tossed Pike-6 and convoy coordinates onto our faces like discussing the weather. And Tobita's "I'd say they're already capable of holding their own" still hadn't fully faded from my ears.