Chương 261: 107. Emergency Recall 2

I fell asleep. Deeply. Deeply enough that afterward, thinking back on it, I genuinely wondered whether that love hotel had quietly pumped some kind of sedative through the AC. Because by any reasonable measure, after a room like that, a night like that, an atmosphere like that, I should have lain awake for hours — should have tossed and turned until dawn, dragging out every stupid thing I'd ever done in my life and putting it on trial one by one. That didn't happen.

Not only did I sleep, I slept in a position comfortable enough that I'd rather not admit exactly how comfortable it was. When consciousness finally surfaced, the first thing I registered wasn't light, and it wasn't cold. It was someone shaking me. Lightly. Not frantic. But persistent, in a way that wasn't going to stop.

"Shimo. Wake up." The voice was far too close, carrying a thread of urgency I almost never heard from her. I frowned, pressed my face deeper into the pillow, and tried to negotiate another thirty seconds with reality. Reality wasn't taking offers. The hand pushed my shoulder again. I forced my eyes open, deeply unwilling. My vision blurred for a moment, then slowly resolved. The first thing that came into focus was Maki's face.

She was leaning over me, a small strand of hair falling against her cheek, her expression nowhere near as steady as usual — carrying, for once, a very faint, very precise trace of alarm. On anyone else, that level of alarm would read as ordinary tension. On Maki Kushima, it landed roughly like an air-raid siren. I stared at her, half-asleep, for two seconds, felt something off near the corner of my mouth, and wiped it with the back of my hand — Great. Drool.

If the Academy ever found out that the final image of one of its carefully trained cadets, moments before an emergency recall out of a love hotel, was a sleeping face with drool at the corner of the mouth, they'd probably consider recalling my uniform for parts.

"... What," I croaked, voice still thick with sleep.

"What time is it?" Maki didn't give me the time. She just said:"Comm units." The second those two words landed, whatever fog was left in my head split clean open. I followed her gaze to the table. The next second, I was completely awake. The two wristwatch-style comm units on the table were vibrating in unison — a tight, continuous pulse. Not the ordinary rhythm for a message or a call request. A frequency that clearly didn't belong to daily life, the kind that made your nerves snap taut on instinct alone.

Worse — both screens were bleeding a deep, unsettling red. Not a gentle notification glow. The kind of red that tells you, before you've read a single word, that something has gone badly wrong. I was off the bed in one motion. Blanket thrown back, one foot hitting the carpet, nearly tripping over my own urgency. Everything from last night — the rain, the embrace, the breathing, the messy heartbeat before sleep — got forcibly ejected from my skull the instant that red light registered.

I snatched up one of the comm units. Four characters were all that showed. EMERGENCY RECALL Red background. Black text. Flashing. Flashing like someone had welded get your asses back here right now directly onto my retinas. I stared at it for less than half a second before my stomach dropped straight through the floor. This wasn't "a bit of trouble" anymore. This was the level that made everyone shut up without being told, wipe their expressions clean, and snap straight back into military mode.

"Move." Even my voice had changed. Maki was already moving. She was faster than I was, which meant she'd clearly run through at least one basic assessment cycle before she'd ever started shaking me awake. Comm unit, jacket, wallet, terminal, everything sorted the night before — grabbed, stuffed, secured, with the clean efficiency of someone who'd executed this exact kind of emergency teardown thirty times in her life already. I didn't dare drag my feet either. I grabbed my own things and started pulling them on.

Loungewear off, uniform jacket back on, hair pressed flat with one hand, comm unit snapped back onto my wrist. Whether I looked presentable at this point genuinely didn't matter anymore. At this recall level, you could sprint to formation wearing limited-edition Puni Puni Mouse Land pajamas, and as long as you weren't the last one there, the instructors would probably let you live. In under two minutes, Maki and I were standing at the door. She pulled the keycard first. The room lights dropped a notch.

The indecent warm glow and fragrance were still there, but now they looked like some hallucination left over from yesterday. The red text of the emergency recall acted like a bucket of ice water, washing away everything that had no business lingering. Maki pulled the door open. The corridor was the same corridor. Carpet thick with bad intentions. Wall sconces warm with zero shame. But right now, every detail that had felt like an accomplice last night had lost all its power.

What was left was just the pressure of time. We were just turning toward the elevator — Click. The door to the next room opened. I hadn't planned to look. Really. Under an emergency recall, a normal person doesn't have the spare bandwidth to care which unfortunate couple who'd failed basic social education had been staying next door. But the problem was, the door opened, and out stepped a man with slightly disheveled clothes — and someone with beautiful short hair— I stopped dead where I stood. Wait. Hold on. No.

It felt like someone had taken a wrench to the side of my skull. My gaze locked, then snapped back hard. A man with slightly disheveled clothes. Someone with beautiful short hair— Oh, fuck. Wait wait wait wait wait wait. The words came out of me on pure reflex:"Roy? Lan?" Both figures ahead of us flinched at exactly the same moment. The kind of flinch you get when someone yanks your soul straight back into your body mid-sleepwalk. Then, slowly, they turned around.

The second their faces came into focus, my brain had exactly one thought left in it. Fuck. It really is them. Roy Hartmann stood in the doorway, collar visibly askew. The usual meticulous, every-breath-scheduled tidiness he carried around like a second uniform was completely gone — today he looked like someone had taken the whole thing and folded it through a wringer. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

As for Lan Weiss — her usually sharp, clean-cut short hair was disheveled in a way that had no innocent explanation, and her face was climbing toward red at a speed visible to the naked eye. Her eyes had no idea where to land, and finally just gave up and settled on the floor. The picture was too complete. Complete enough that I didn't even have time to be surprised. I just felt a specific, highly unethical sector of my soul waking up at a genuinely dangerous speed. I practically became Jess on the spot.

"My, my. What a coincidence, running into you two." I heard my own voice come out sugar-sweet and highly punchable.

"Small world. Right next door, too." Roy looked like he'd been struck by lightning. His expression went blank for a full beat, and then he suddenly developed an intense, urgent interest in the recessed light fixture on the corridor ceiling — staring up at it with total focus, as if it weren't an ordinary lamp but the crowning achievement of Federal engineering, one that deserved an immediate eight-thousand-word field report. Lan's whole face was red. Not a light flush.

The kind of red that has no business existing on someone who normally runs cold enough to give people frostbite — the kind where the whole thing just catches fire at once. She stared hard at the floor, like if she concentrated enough, the carpet might take pity on her and crack open to swallow her whole. I could barely hold my smile down.

"By the way," I added, delivering the second cut with excessive friendliness, "that sound last night — Ahnn— — really did carry." I even paused, very considerately, leaving enough room for that trailing note to guarantee total social death. Lan's head snapped up.

"You — you—" She clearly had a counterattack loaded. The problem was, this particular battlefield was catastrophically unfavorable for her right now. Her usual clean, efficient cold-front firepower had dropped to roughly thirty percent, on account of being caught red-handed by the person from the room next door.

"You — you two aren't exactly—!" She tried. Really. But the second half of that sentence had no chance of forming properly. Because she knew as well as I did — biting back at someone right now would be about as effective as taking a paper knife to an armored vehicle. I nearly laughed out loud. Not an ordinary urge to laugh. The kind where you think: if I weren't currently being crushed under the weight of an emergency recall, I would stand right here and savor the two of you for a full three minutes.

But the exact second I was lining up the third cut, Maki spoke.

"Roy." Her voice wasn't loud, but it snapped the entire corridor's rhythm back into alignment in one stroke. Roy looked like he'd been waiting for exactly that word. He ripped his gaze off the ceiling fixture that had been saving his life and looked at Maki with the sincere, near-fatal gratitude of a dying soldier who'd just spotted a rescue boat. Maki's expression didn't move. Her tone stayed as level as someone reading standard operating procedure.

"We just happened to run into each other, on the way from the electronics district to the spaceport. Correct?" The air held still for a beat. Then Roy caught on instantly, nodding so hard it looked like he was trying to snap his own neck.

"Right. Exactly. We — we just happened to run into each other." His voice even caught, once. Beautiful. On-the-spot story alignment. Even in a scene like this, he still carried himself like a model clerk who'd just been flagged for a discrepancy in the books, frantically trying to reformat the paperwork before anyone noticed. Lan opened her mouth, probably meaning to say something, but in the end only produced a small, sharp intake of breath. The red hadn't faded from her face at all.

Her eyes made one quick circuit between me, Maki, and Roy, before she had the good sense to shut it. Right on cue, the elevator gave a soft ding. The bell of salvation. Maki didn't waste half a second. She caught my wrist and pulled me straight inside. Even as she dragged me in, I still managed to look back over my shoulder and deliver what I considered a highly faithful Jess-style smile at the pair outside — full of understanding, and malicious concern.

"Well then. We won't keep interrupting your — chance encounter." Lan's ears went visibly, measurably redder. Roy looked like he wanted to hand me a formal petition reading please, have mercy. The doors slid shut a second later. The metal panels cut off the two deeply unfortunate next-door neighbors, along with the entire scene of social death they were standing in. Inside, it was just me, Maki, and the two comm units on our wrists, still bleeding that unsettling red light.

I finally couldn't hold it in and laughed, low.

"... I think I genuinely understand Jess's happiness a little better now." Maki stood beside me, her expression already back in standard cold-front mode, though a very faint trace of resignation crossed her eyes.

"You talked too much back there."

"I showed remarkable restraint."

"You wanted to say more."

"Obviously." I said it with total conviction.

"A scene of that caliber — if Jess had been there instead, she'd already be taking witness statements." Maki was quiet for half a second.

"So it's fortunate you saw them first." I turned to look at her.

"Is that a compliment?"

"No."

"Then what is it?"

"Damage control." I stared at her for two seconds, then couldn't hold the laugh back.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"The way you just threw Roy that escape route — it really did look like handing a battlefield survivor an evacuation map."

"What else was I supposed to do?" She didn't even look at me.

"Leave you standing there running an interrogation?"

"I was just showing concern for my classmates."

"That's called kicking someone while they're down."

"I prefer the term emotional verification." Maki let out a very quiet breath.

"Once we're back on the ship, try not to let Jess see that expression on your face." I blinked.

"What expression?"

"The one that says I know something massive."

"... Was it that obvious?" Maki turned her head and looked at me. The look said, clearly: Do you really have to ask? I coughed and made a reasonable effort to flatten my mouth back to neutral. It lasted about two seconds. Because the next moment, my brain served up the image of Roy staring reverently at a ceiling fixture, Lan glaring red-faced at the floor, and that highly recognizable Ahnn— from last night. No. Genuinely too wicked. I pressed my fingers against my brow and forced the laughter back down.

Not because my conscience had suddenly grown three sizes, but because the elevator was descending, and the flashing red light on my wrist was still reminding me: this little slice of social comedy was a side note. The real problem was still ahead. Once the laughter drained off, what was left in the elevator was something heavier. I looked down at the red text on my wrist. EMERGENCY RECALL. The storm last night. This love hotel. Roy and Lan next door. Puni Puni Mouse Land.

Even the string of Jess-grade jabs I'd just delivered — all of it got shoved down a level under those two words. Something was wrong. Not the ordinary kind. The elevator kept descending. A strange feeling settled over me. A few minutes ago, I'd been the person who slept with drool at the corner of her mouth, waking up with half her brain still offline.

Now I was already standing back on that annoyingly familiar line — return to ship, shut everything else down, face whatever this was: an alert, an accident, or something bigger and worse. Only this time was different. Because all I had to do was turn my head, and Maki was standing right there. Last night hadn't disappeared. The way I'd woken up in her arms this morning hadn't actually been erased either.

We'd just both put it away for now — like sliding a knife back into its sheath, leaving the question of whether to draw it again for later. Maki must have felt my gaze; she turned her head slightly.

"What?" I looked at her for two seconds, then just shook my head.

"Nothing." She probably didn't believe me. But she didn't push. The elevator hit the ground floor. The doors opened onto the cold, damp air the storm had left behind. Once the shuttle came off the elevated ramp, the spaceport's main body had already dropped fully into pre-blackout readiness. The exterior lighting that usually stayed warm and camera-ready for tourists — even color-corrected for a premium look — had mostly been killed. Only navigation, ID, and essential work lights remained lit.

On the wide loading platforms, personnel moved faster than usual, but with less noise. Ground equipment threaded back and forth; mag-rail transport sleds slid past carrying sealed cargo containers; squads of fully-armed security troops stood at every gate, planted like iron stakes that had simply grown up out of the deck. And the Yukikaze sat right there. Her white-gray hull lay flat under the port lights like a blade laid on its side. On ordinary days, I looked at her and just assumed she had a bad temper.

Looking at her now, I realized she'd never actually looked like a vehicle at all. She looked like the word obedience forged straight into metal. The maintenance arms beneath her hull had mostly folded back. Only the last few external supply lines were still being disconnected. Her hull ID lights had switched over to standby color — quiet, like a beast with its eyes shut that you knew, without any doubt, wasn't actually asleep. The four of us crossed the boarding gate almost at the exact same moment.

The air changed the second it hit us. The smell of rain, oil, and the city's exhaustion was replaced entirely by the dry cold of metal, cleaning agents, and compressed air. An impersonal smell. And yet, somehow, reassuring — because it meant the rules were still here. The structure was still here. The ship was still here. On the main assembly deck, Jess and the other seven were already in position. The group was scattered across their marked zones, everyone changed back into semi-formal standby gear.

Some looked grim. Some looked blank. Some had clearly been hauled straight out of sleep, hair still showing the evidence. But no matter how wrecked their mental state, their positions had already sorted themselves out.

That's the most terrifying and most reliable thing about the military — your emotions can be a total wreck, your personal life can have gone completely off the rails, you can have spent the night in a hotel that would make your own ancestors show up in your dreams to yell at you, but the second the whistle blows, you're back on the line. Jess spotted the four of us first.

The fact that her face still had bandwidth, under these circumstances, to produce an oh, this is going to be good expression was a genuine insult to the entire concept of an emergency recall. Her eyes swept across me, Maki, Roy, and Lan in sequence, lighting up like an intelligence officer who'd just been handed a premium gossip sample.

"Well, well — you four wouldn't happen to have—""Quiet. Fall in." The words came down like an iron bar dropped flat across the deck. Sergeant Major Takenaka stood at the entrance to the forward passage. No telling how long he'd been standing there. His uniform was immaculate, his expression harder than the ship's interior lighting. The instant his gaze swept over us, I half-suspected even the Yukikaze's bulkheads would snap to attention.

Jess's four-person joke, which had been just about to spread its wings and take flight, died in midair — without dropping so much as a single feather. She shut her mouth and dropped back into position with a speed that fully confirmed human survival instinct will always outrank a sense of humor. The four of us slotted quickly into the formation.

As I locked into place, I caught, out of the corner of my eye, Roy quietly straightening his shoulder line, and Lan already back behind that the world owes me an apology cold expression. Maki, needless to say, was already Maki.

From the second she'd stepped aboard, it was as if she'd switched her private mode off entirely — posture so precisely straight that I found myself wondering whether the person who'd brushed the wet hair off my forehead in the rain last night had been nothing more than a ten-minute hallucination. A small, irrational irritation went through me. Not the shoujo-manga kind — oh no, why is she being so cold.

More like knowing perfectly well that something is government-issued equipment you can't take home with you, and still, the moment it shows you one small exception, catching yourself, with absolutely no dignity whatsoever, hoping for one more. Pathetic. I told myself off internally and dragged my eyes back to the front. Sergeant Major Takenaka walked the line, confirming headcount. Confirming identification. Confirming that every single one of us was still alive and at least approximately resembled a human being.

That kind of silence only makes sense to people who've lived inside a system like this — it isn't the absence of things to say. It's that every word waits until it's actually worth spending. The entire assembly deck had gone quiet enough that all you could hear was the low, steady hum of the ship's ventilation system. Then Sergeant Major Takenaka spoke.

"The Captain wants all eleven of you on the bridge. Now." **