Chương 262: 108. First Sortie 1

Captain Tobita stood at the front of the bridge, in the exact spot that always looked like it was reserved specifically for people capable of giving other people stomach ulcers. On an ordinary day, he already looked like an iron spike driven straight through the center of the Yukikaze. With the lighting pressed low now and the main screen washed in cold white, he looked even more like some provision of military law that had taken on physical form — the kind that accepted no negotiation.

Maybe it was the sight of the eleven of us piling in, looking exactly like we'd been swept up from eleven different disaster zones and dumped into the same recycling bin. Tobita skipped even his usual token pleasantries. He lifted his eyes when we came through the hatch and went straight to it.

"You're here. Sorry to interrupt your leave. We have an emergency." No. The first half of that sentence and the second half had never met each other. Sorry? People who are genuinely sorry don't haul you up onto the bridge while your shoelaces are still untied and half your brain is still stuck back in a love hotel corridor and an elevator, processing the residue of last night's social death. That tone was more like a surgeon saying this might feel a little cold right before opening you up from sternum to navel.

Tobita ignored whatever anyone's face was doing and kept going.

"Four hours ago, Parker-6 was hit by heavy electromagnetic interference. Two hours ago, the unmanned patrol craft deployed in the Corridor lost signal." The bridge went so quiet that even the low hum of the machinery seemed to flatten out. I frowned without meaning to. Parker-6. The Corridor. Heavy EM interference. Patrol craft gone dark. Any one of those terms on its own would just cost a duty officer their second cup of coffee instead of their first. Strung together, this wasn't a bit of trouble anymore.

This was your leave has just been officially pronounced dead. Tobita raised a hand, signaling the crew behind him to switch the main display.

"Feed from a long-range surveillance satellite. One hour old." The instant the screen lit up, I heard someone nearby draw a breath. Not a dramatic gasp. The kind of sound a body makes on the brain's behalf, before the brain has finished processing something it really doesn't want to see. The footage was grainy — long-range satellite, signal already degraded by interference, the edges thick with noise like someone had thrown a handful of sand at the lens.

But even with the resolution shot to pieces, it didn't diminish the presence of what was sitting in the frame. Black, spindle-shaped hulls. Like a cluster of blades slowly surfacing out of deep space, resting silently against a starfield distorted by interference. Once the recognition outlines were magnified, traced, and overlaid, the Federal database returned a verdict with brutal efficiency. Brutal, the way a slap to the face is brutal. Someone murmured it first, low.

"... Imperial forces..." Then those two words spread across the bridge without a sound, like an infection. Nobody actually started whispering. It was that every single expression in the room updated on the same beat. Whoever had still been holding onto some sliver of maybe it's just equipment failure got their head shoved straight into ice water by reality, all at once. I stared at the screen, a slow, deeply unpleasant chill crawling up my spine. Well, hell. The steakhouse owner had actually called it.

At the time, I'd figured he was just another border-town lifer who'd developed a habit of always guessing worst-case first, so that on the rare occasion he turned out right, he'd look impressively well-informed. Looking back now, that wasn't folk wisdom at all. That was a wild-grown early-warning radar, calibrated by years of getting beaten up by reality. And worse — Tobita's next line sent my bad feeling detector straight into overload.

"As you're all aware, this ship has been running below full complement," Tobita said, flat, like reading out a financial deficit everyone already knew about and nobody wanted to own.

"And with those middle schoolers here on their observation tour, personnel are critically short." Great. The sirens in my head went from a murmur to a full scream. Below complement. Middle schoolers. Critically short. If those three phrases show up in the same sentence, what follows is never so everyone gets to go home early. It's so some things that were never supposed to be your problem are now, officially, your problem.

Sure enough, Tobita looked at us the way you'd look at a batch of spare parts that had happened to be stacked in the corner of a warehouse, finally useful for an emergency, and delivered his conclusion flat.

"Therefore, under Federal military law, I — as Captain of the Yukikaze — am hereby conscripting all eleven of you cadets into immediate service." For one second, I genuinely wanted to raise my hand. Not to challenge the law itself.

I just wanted to confirm whether there was a specific clause somewhere reading: When regular personnel are insufficient, and the enemy happens to surface from the shadows of known space at the same time, the Captain may lawfully conscript students freshly recalled from leave and social catastrophe, and require them to learn the meaning of adult responsibility in real time. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

But the bridge was clearly not the venue for critiquing statutory drafting precision. Even as Tobita spoke, support crew had already started moving, stacking equipment cases in front of us with an efficiency that made it obvious this had been planned well in advance. In that instant, I decided Tobita's earlier sorry to interrupt your leave had been nothing but a courtesy-shaped fraud.

"From this moment," Tobita said, "you will be issued wartime rank and uniform." Beside me, Jess drew a small, sharp breath. Roy straightened on reflex. Lan's jawline visibly tightened. Maki just watched Tobita, expression so level it made you wonder whether even her heartbeat ran half a beat behind everyone else's. I glanced down at the case being handed to me, then back up, and couldn't help myself.

"What happened to the radar operator — the one with the glasses?" I asked. Tobita glanced over.

"Captain Manny... ate something that disagreed with him. He's in the infirmary." The bridge was quiet for half a beat. So was I.... Wait. Food poisoning. Hospitalized. Each phrase made perfect sense on its own. Strung together, they formed an absurdity that demanded follow-up questions. What exactly had Captain Manny eaten to vanish off the duty roster at a time like this? Mutant kaiju tail meat? Had some street stall accidentally ladled concentrated military fuel into the chowder?

But one look at Tobita's face told me this was not the moment to investigate the clinical specifics of medical-grade diarrhea.

"Right. If there are no objections, you have ten minutes." Tobita announced a deadline so absurd there wasn't even time to register the absurdity.

"Change into uniform and report back to the bridge immediately. The Yukikaze is deploying." The second that sentence landed, whatever scrap of student had still been clinging to any of us on that bridge got kicked straight out into vacuum. Not a drill. Not an observation run. Not watch how the seniors do it first. Deployment. The lights in the changing room were aggressively white.

That kind of lighting has a particular cruelty to it — it doesn't just illuminate the room, it illuminates everyone's expression right along with it, stripping away whatever filter you might have used to fake composure. I set the equipment case on the bench, took a slow breath, and lifted the lid. Inside, folded with precise neatness, lay a Federal officer's uniform. Deep navy base, silver piping, fabric stiffer and less forgiving than Academy issue. Beside it: a belt, gloves, an ID badge, and — My eye twitched.

The peaked cap. The one I'd worn exactly once, in a moment of pure secondhand-embarrassment stupidity, and had spent the aftermath wanting to bury myself over. It was in there too. Why. Did the Federal military run some terrifyingly precise archival system that tracked not just service records but every humiliating thing you'd ever done, and mail it back to you at the worst possible moment? This wasn't good logistics anymore. This was character assassination. I picked the cap up and looked at it.

It looked back at me — or at least, that's how it felt.

"... You really don't know when to quit, do you."

"Oh — everyone, look at this—" Jess's voice detonated beside me, carrying the excitement of someone who'd just discovered a new continent — or worse, discovered that someone else's dark history could now be legally put on display. She leaned right in, full I'd be failing myself if I didn't enjoy this energy, and pointed straight at the two rank tabs in my case.

"Someone got lieutenant tabs!" I looked down.... She was right. Two silver tabs, pattern and bars perfectly clear, leaving no room for the comforting hope of maybe I'm misreading this. I looked up. My first reaction wasn't pride. It was suspicion.

"Aren't we all supposed to get the same rank?" I said. In a situation like this, if someone hands you a higher rank out of nowhere, it doesn't mean you're valued. It usually means two things: one, you drew the short straw. Two, more incoming fire now has your name on it. Jess let out a couple of pointed little laughs — the sound of someone already positioning the knife for a slow twist — then held up her own tabs and waved them in my face.

"Ensign."

"..." I turned to check the others. Evelyn: Ensign. Aida: Ensign. Akari: Ensign. Lan: Ensign. The rest hadn't finished unpacking, but their expressions already gave away the pattern. Perfect. This had Tobita written all over it. I could picture it exactly — him running down the wartime rank list, face just as cold as it was right now, pen moving like he was approving a supply requisition, adding a quiet mental footnote: this one talks back too much. Lieutenant suits her. The military really is remarkable sometimes.

It's supposedly built entirely on efficiency and order, and yet at the exact moments that matter most, it always manages to make personnel decisions that feel like personal vendettas.

"By the way, Maki, you—" I spun around, clinging to the last shred of hope that at least one normal reference point still existed in this room. That hope got stepped on flat within a second. Maki Kushima was already in uniform. No — in uniform doesn't cover it. That uniform looked like it had been engineered specifically to be worn by her.

The deep navy jacket fell in a clean line off her shoulders, belt cinched sharp, her high ponytail already retied with characteristic efficiency, baring the line of her neck and jaw — cold and hard enough to draw blood. When she crossed over from the far side of the changing area, I had one genuinely unreasonable moment of thinking she was about to draw a blade and cleanly bisect everyone in the room slowing down operational efficiency. Some people put on a uniform and end up looking more like a soldier.

Maki put on a uniform and made the uniform look like an accessory to Maki. Completely unfair. And what was even more unfair — the rank tab on her shoulder caught the light. Captain. Whatever I'd had lined up to say died in my throat. Beside me, Jess produced a long, theatrical, entirely sincere gasp.

"Whoa." Evelyn visibly stalled. Aida looked down at herself, then over at Maki, wearing the expression of someone who'd just understood, on a cellular level, that the world simply isn't distributed evenly. Even Lan glanced over — something brief but unmistakable crossing her eyes: recognition. I just stood there, feeling something in my head snap cleanly in half. Not my sanity. I still had that. What snapped was the naive little fantasy that we're all just emergency fill-ins, so we should be roughly equal.

Maki seemed entirely unaware of the small shockwave running through the room — or she'd noticed and simply didn't care. She buttoned her cuffs and walked straight through the middle of us, steps as clean as if the mission had already laid itself out ahead of her.

"Move," she said.

"No time to drag your feet." Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried a natural penetrating quality. The instant it landed, whatever loose air had still been drifting through the changing room snapped tight again. I watched her pass in front of me — that wash of deep navy at the edge of my vision, trailing a faint scent of detergent, the crisp sound of stiff fabric, and a presence that had no business being this hard to look away from.

Honestly, in that moment, I had a brief, deeply undignified urge to hide my lieutenant tabs and pretend I'd never received them. Not because I was scared.... Fine. Not entirely because of that.

But the bigger problem was this: when your whole survival skill set is built on backtalk, sarcasm, and carving up absurd reality just to keep breathing — and then one day you're actually shoved into a wartime uniform, dropped into a temporary chain of command, and told to stand behind her to do your job — what does that even feel like?

It feels exactly like you thought you were sitting in the audience watching a play, and halfway through the second act, the director stands straight up out of his seat, points directly at you, and says: Yes. You. Act Three, you're the officer now. Learn your own lines. No retakes if you die. I looked down at the two lieutenant tabs in the case, stayed quiet for two seconds, and picked them up anyway.... Fine. The Yukikaze had never once been the kind of ship that left anyone room to change their mind.