Chương 253: 102. Planet Pike VI 2

Comm units in hand, rules delivered — Security's part was done. What actually started next was the three days themselves. Which meant that from here on, we were theoretically free to scatter and go handle our own supplies, food cravings, mental repairs, or whatever private business didn't belong on an official itinerary. Personally, I didn't have anything I really needed to grab. That's what I'd thought, anyway.

"I'm going back for a few things." Maki said it beside me. Flat. The kind of flat you'd use to state that the ceiling was still up there — a fact with no room for discussion. I'd been about to say I didn't have anything I actually needed. Three days off-ship wasn't a colonization run. Forgetting a toothbrush wasn't going to get me killed outside the port. But somehow, by the time the words reached my mouth, what came out instead was:"Oh — I'll go back with you, then." Maki glanced at me. Briefly.

Brief enough that if I hadn't already developed a genuinely unhealthy sensitivity to her near-total lack of unnecessary movement, I'd have written it off as a normal check-in.

"Didn't you just say you had nothing to get?"

"... Changed my mind. Is that not allowed?"

"It's allowed." She said it cleanly, no follow-up. Which somehow made it worse. If she'd looked at me one second longer, or asked what for, I could've bluffed my way through it. Instead she didn't push at all — just accepted an obviously flimsy excuse with total calm, which left me feeling like I'd personally stamped the word GUILTY across my own forehead. We turned and headed for the dorm block. The corridor lighting was the same aggressively rational white as the rest of the ship.

Deck plating underfoot, conduit runs along the walls, the occasional hatch number — all of it holding to the Yukikaze's usual character: functional, cold, without a single centimeter designed to be liked. But with leave finally close, even the air in the hallway felt a shade looser than usual. Voices drifted in from further down.

Some laughter, some low conversation, and from one direction, a short sharp cheer — probably someone finally confirming they were really getting three days off, and not just serving as a subject in one of Tobita's more advanced psychological experiments. Maki and I walked side by side for a stretch. Neither of us spoke first. With most people, that kind of silence would just mean nothing to talk about. With Maki, it had a way of turning into something else entirely. Not awkward. Not a dead patch.

More like neither of us had decided yet whether to bring certain things out into the open, so the air quietly held them suspended between us in the meantime. I broke it first.

"What are you grabbing?"

"Change of clothes. Charger. Some meds." A completely ordinary answer — ordinary enough that my question suddenly felt like it hadn't been worth asking.

"Meds?"

"Motion-sickness tablets. Painkillers. Topical anti-inflammatory." She paused, then added:"You should bring some too." I blanked for half a second.

"Do I look that fragile?" Maki didn't answer right away. She just looked at me — her gaze resting on my face for one brief second — then said:"After we came out of FTL today, your face was about the color of someone just pulled out of the water."... Great. So it wasn't that I'd hidden it well. She'd just seen the whole thing and said nothing.

"That's a normal physiological reaction," I said, with absolutely no conviction behind it.

"I didn't say it wasn't."

"..."

"It's just less trouble to have them on hand." That was Maki Kushima, in one clean sample. She always talked like she was correcting a procedure — and somehow she always corrected it at exactly the point I least wanted to admit. It wasn't comfort. It wasn't even particularly gentle. But because she never treated it like anything worth making a scene over, it was harder to deflect than if she had. We walked on a little further.

A corporal came down a cross-passage ahead of us, leading two cadets who looked considerably worse off than we did. Both sides traded a nod. No one said anything more. The ship's order was still intact — it was just the outer shell, the one pulled tight through the whole exercise, that had finally cracked open by a fraction. I glanced down at the comm unit on my wrist.

"That line from Takenaka — 'don't bring your relationship drama back onto the ship.' You think he meant it, or was that just him doing preemptive damage control on his own future workload?"

"Both."

"Fair." The corner of Maki's mouth moved. Very slightly. So slightly it barely qualified as movement at all. But I saw it. On Jess, a shift that small wouldn't even register — statistical noise. On Maki, it was enough to make you want to log the exact time and spend the next three days trying to confirm whether it had actually counted as a smile. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Besides," Maki said, "if someone really did drag their relationship mess back onto this ship, the first person to suffer for it probably wouldn't be them."

"It'd be Takenaka."

"Yes." I finally couldn't hold it in. I laughed — short, but real. Maki turned her head and looked at me.

"Funny?"

"A little."

"Which part?"

"I was just thinking — maybe the whole Federal system still works, and it's got nothing to do with the constitution, or military discipline, or people like Captain Tobita."

"Then what?"

"Maybe it's that every single unit has one person like Takenaka. Someone who's already fully prepared to strangle the next problem with his bare hands." This time, Maki actually smiled. Still faint. But clearer than before. For one second, a small and thoroughly useless part of my brain just went blank. Pathetic. All she did was smile, and I reacted like I was the one who'd just been thrown out of an FTL transition and hadn't managed to get my soul back into my body yet. We reached the dorm block.

Fewer people in the corridor than usual — most had probably already gone back to pack, getting ready to be something close to a normal human being for three days. Maki stopped at our door and swiped the access panel. The door slid open, and the achingly familiar air of a two-person cabin hit us at once — bunks, storage lockers, the desk kept scrupulously clean, and my personal stash, the one Jess would absolutely call a vacation supply kit on sight. All of it exactly where we'd left it.

Maki moved fast once she was inside. She was actually packing — not the kind of person who says she needs to grab something and then stands in front of an open locker for ten minutes doing nothing. Clothes, charger, a compact med kit, folding gear, personal items — she slotted them into her bag one after another, clean and efficient enough to look like a training demonstration. I stood off to the side, telling myself I'd just tagged along and had nothing to pack.

Then I watched her for a while, gave up, and quietly opened my own locker. Topical meds, spare clothes, charging cable, basic toiletries... then I paused, and added two cans of cherry cola. Maki glanced over.

"Only two?"

"What's that tone supposed to mean?"

"I assumed you'd bring at least four."

"... This is called restraint."

"I see." The way she said I see was so flat, so academically neutral, that it landed harder than anything Jess had ever thrown at me on purpose. I wanted to argue. I couldn't. Because if it weren't for bag space, I absolutely would have packed two more. Maki zipped her bag shut and looked at me.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

"Then let's go." I nodded, shouldered my bag, and followed her out. And the moment the door slid shut behind us, one thing became completely clear to me — Starting now, these three days weren't Yukikaze time anymore. The walk from the dorm block back to the disembarkation passage still held the ship's usual sense of order, but it was already losing ground to the sheer fact of shore leave. The corridors that were normally straight, silent, footsteps landing almost on a metronome — had noticeably loosened up.

People walked toward the exit with bags on their shoulders, talking quietly as they went. Someone passing us carried the faint trace of shampoo, like they'd gone back to wash their face first, trying to disembark looking marginally more human. The shipwide PA kept running on schedule. The lights hadn't changed. The metal bulkheads still wore the Federal military's same dead expression.

But somehow, just knowing I wasn't going to have to exist under Tobita's direct line of sight for the next three days made even those usual soul-crushing fixtures look a little more tolerable. Disembarkation processing went faster than I expected. Security checked comm unit IDs, personal identification, leave authorization — a few steps, and the boarding ramp opened ahead of us. A gust of air that had nothing to do with the ship's circulation system hit us in the face. Warmer than inside the Yukikaze. More alive.

The dry smell of sun-baked port structures. Oil and exhaust from transport trucks and supply rigs. Food, somewhere in the distance. And something harder to name, but instantly recognizable the second you step off a ship — the smell of a city being a city. Maki and I took the last few steps down the ramp together. The moment my boots actually hit the dock deck, something in me needed a second to adjust. Everything aboard ship carries a quiet, constant reminder: you're inside a closed system.

It belongs to the military. To order. To rules. Outside was different. One glance out here, and it was all light, noise, crowds, traffic lanes, storefront signs, moving cargo loaders, uniforms from a dozen different fleets, off-duty crew, families dragging luggage, and — leaning against a wall somewhere, smoking with an air of having run entirely out of patience for the universe — a port veteran who'd clearly stopped pretending otherwise years ago.

The military dock where the Yukikaze sat was enormous in its own right. The outer rings were stacked with steel platforms, boarding bridges, cranes, maintenance gantries, supply lines, and security checkpoints, weaving the whole starport into a dense, hard net of metal. Past all that was where it finally opened out into the real city streets. And right now was peak leave hour. A flood of people released from ship after ship, unit after unit, poured outward like a dam had opened.

Cadets, active-duty crew, support staff, technicians, port administration, local vendors — all of it mixed into the same air, loud in an orderly way, chaotic in a way that felt genuinely alive.

"... Loud," I said. Maki stood beside me, scanning the street block outside.

"It's fine."

"Do you just have a higher noise tolerance than normal people?"

"No."

"Then why do you look like this is completely normal?"

"Because it is." Right. Classic Maki answer. Technically flawless, and somehow it made complaining any further feel beneath you. The street outside the port fence ran on along the main road. Overhead: crossing pedestrian bridges, hanging signage, short-hop transit rail threading through.

At street level: an unbroken run of businesses built to live off military port traffic — cheap fast food, surplus gear, general supplies, hotels, bars, comm services, arcades, and a few places whose sign brightness alone confirmed they weren't meant for underage cadets. All of it crammed together without a shred of shame. A few storefronts had already put up digital banners reading WELCOME, PERSONNEL ON LEAVE. Touchingly blunt.

The most endearing thing about capitalism was that it always knew exactly how to convert military-grade existential pressure into food and beverage demand.

"Where first?" I asked. Maki didn't answer right away. She checked the terminal map.

"Didn't you want to restock supplies?"

"In theory."

"Then that's first."

"... That sounded exactly like you assigning a task."

"It is one." She said it like it was self-evident. I stared at her for two seconds, then gave up and followed. Strange. This was leave. We were off the ship. The street outside was loud enough that the whole city seemed to be throwing a collective party over the fact that it was briefly possible to stop being a soldier. And yet with Maki beside me, the rhythm never quite tipped into chaos. She didn't walk fast, but her sense of direction was exact.

Intersections, block layout, sequencing — all of it clean, like this wasn't her first time here at all, or like she was simply built to find the most efficient route through any unfamiliar environment without making a production of it. I walked beside her, looking up at the signs and the lights, and it hit me — a little late. I was actually on leave. Not a break between classes. Not a transition between drills. Not moving from one room to a worse one.

Genuinely off the Yukikaze — standing in a street outside the port, a bag on my back, a Security-issued comm unit on my wrist, with three whole days to drag myself back into something resembling a person. The feeling was strange. Strange enough to feel almost fake.

"Shimo."

"Hm?"

"Watch where you're going." I snapped back just in time to avoid walking straight into a street bollard.

"... I was watching."

"You were watching the signs. Not the road."

"How would you know that?" Maki looked at me.

"Because your face looks like it's the first time you've ever been let out of a cage."... That was completely out of line. And completely accurate. I couldn't come up with anything to say back, so I just pushed through with:"If the Federal military heard you describing a cadet that way, they wouldn't be thrilled."

"Isn't that what you meant?"

"I didn't say it that directly."

"That's your problem." I stayed quiet for a couple of seconds. Then I laughed. Fine. She wasn't wrong. A port transit car slid past the intersection ahead, ad panels on its side flashing — nothing sophisticated, just blunt leave discounts and meal deals. A shop nearby was frying something that smelled so good it bypassed logic entirely and went straight for the stomach.

Further down, a few young service members in other fleet uniforms stood at the curb, looking freshly off-ship themselves, still caught somewhere in the I can finally breathe phase, faces stamped with the same sincere kind of bewilderment. The sight did something to loosen the knot in my chest. So it wasn't just me. Apparently everyone, the second they stepped off a ship, turned into a fish hauled out of some institutional tank, having to relearn how to use their own limbs in a normal city.

Maki put her terminal away.

"Supplies first."

"Yeah."

"Then food." I looked over at her.

"You actually scheduled food?"

"What else would I do?"

"I figured you'd split the three days into Resupply, Recovery, and Return, and file eating under mobile replenishment."

"That works too."

"... You actually thought about that."

"Shimo."

"What?"

"You're loud." I walked on beside her, and a thoroughly undignified thought surfaced somewhere in the back of my head — These three days were probably not going to be quiet. And the real problem was, I could no longer tell which worried me more: whatever trouble was waiting out there in the port, or the prospect of Maki walking me through all three days of it, wearing that exact same calm face the whole time.