Chương 268: 110. Absolute Limit 2

I'm sorry. But I genuinely blacked out. However inhumane Federal training gets, however enthusiastically its stims like to treat people as lab animals to be pushed to the limit, it still has to accept one thoroughly unromantic fact: swing a human skull through an entire warship's jump turbulence for long enough, and the brain shuts off. So when I came back to consciousness, my first thought wasn't thank god I'm alive. It was: so hell smells like metal too. The bridge was a wreck. Not rhetorically.

Actually wrecked — like someone had unbolted the whole thing, stuffed it into a jar, shaken it for thirty seconds, and poured it back out. Warning lights were still flashing, but weakly. Several screens had gone dark; the ones still lit flickered like something on life support. The air was a mix of scorched circuits, coolant, blood, and that specific, hard-to-name smell a wounded warship gives off — like the steel itself was gritting its teeth through the pain.

I hadn't even fully peeled myself out of the harness before a deeply undignified wail cut through the noise.

"Help—!" The first one to yell for help was D. Good. That meant at least one person still had the lung capacity for nonsense. Silently saluting the Federal military's bare-minimum survival statistics, I unclipped the harness and hauled myself up. My legs went sideways; I nearly reintroduced my face to the deck. My skull was still ringing, my stomach still felt like it hadn't left the drum, but the noise coming out of CIC didn't leave time to slowly reassemble myself as a person.

I grabbed a console edge and pushed through into CIC. That's where I learned what it means to be grateful, by comparison. Because after seeing CIC, the bridge suddenly felt fine. D was wedged between his chair and a collapsed console frame, folded into a shape so creatively awful it looked like a bad-tempered artist had bent him halfway and tossed him back. No obvious major injury — no missing limbs, nothing growing at an angle it shouldn't — but he was jammed in with real precision.

Precise enough that my only certain conclusion was: D wasn't dying anytime soon, and I also wasn't getting him out anytime soon.

"D-don't look at me first!" His voice cracked.

"Evelyn's worse—" I turned toward the shape on the deck. Right. That one was genuinely bad. Evelyn had been thrown clear of her station and lay on her side beside an overturned auxiliary screen, uniform smeared with enough blood and grime that the original color was mostly guesswork. Her arm sat at the wrong angle. So did her leg. Even her breathing carried obvious pain. Not the dying in minutes kind of bad — but clearly not a one- or two-fracture problem either.

"Evelyn. Can you hear me?" Her brow tightened. Her lips moved without sound. Still responsive. Good. I got her as flat as I could, confirmed nothing was pinning her down, then looked up for Harvey. And nearly laughed at what I saw. Not because I'm cold. Because Harvey's pose looked exactly like the disposable background extra in a cheap space movie — the kind cast specifically to die in the first act, badly. His face was buried almost entirely in the console. His body was slumped sideways.

Still enough to pass for a corpse. For one actual second I was already composing rhyming lines for a eulogy. Unfortunately for my poetry, the Federal military clearly wasn't ready to cut personnel costs today. I reached over and checked. Pulse.

"... Guy's hard to kill." I muttered it low. Harvey probably didn't hear it — if he had, he'd have filed a complaint about my lack of basic bedside manner. Nobody had time for that right now. Once I'd confirmed all three CIC personnel were still on the roster of the living, I backed out. Having seen CIC first, when I looked back at the bridge, a genuinely absurd thought surfaced — This side actually isn't that bad. People on the bridge had started coming back around.

Jess sat on the deck beside her station, arms wrapped around herself, looking like an infant who'd just suffered catastrophic trauma. The second she saw me, her eyes went red, and she started crying for real. Not the composed, two-tears kind. Full, uncontrolled crying — the kind you do after being dragged back from the reaper and simultaneously deciding you never want to be within ten meters of a jump engine again. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Good.

Jess was alive, and her lungs were in excellent working order. Aida was braced against a side console, face the color of a hospital wall. Lan looked about the same beside her — neither with obvious major injury, but both wearing the identical expression of soul not yet fully reinstalled in body. Lan usually ran cold. Right now she ran colder — the kind of cold you get when someone's pulled out of ice water and nobody thinks to dry her off.

Akari sat near the radar station, head tilted, expression exactly as unreadable as ever. Honestly, her resting face always looks like someone who's pushed insomnia far enough to be sleeping her way into a farewell note, so whether she was scared, blank, concussed, or simply tired, I genuinely couldn't tell. Managing that is a talent all its own. Roy had been thrown clear back and was now tangled up with Ash on the deck. The whole tableau looked like two high-end fragile items shipped to the wrong warehouse corner.

Fortunately nothing looked bent the wrong way, and their total limb count still roughly justified the Federal education budget. I swept the bridge fast. Then my chest dropped straight out. Where was Maki? Whatever half-numb state I'd been running on shattered at that. I didn't register my breathing speeding up — my body moved before my brain finished the thought, eyes tearing every corner of the bridge apart. I found her by the hatch. For one second, I went cold all over.

Maki lay slumped by the door — thrown, then flung again on impact. Her whole face was covered in blood, running from her temple and down the side of her face, turning features that were usually cold enough to serve as the cover of a disciplinary manual into something that looked like it had walked back from a crime scene under its own power.

"... Maki." I dropped into a crouch, my voice so low I could barely hear it myself. Still breathing. Thank god, still breathing. Unconscious, but the pulse was there. That feeling was awful — like someone had crushed your heart into a fist and then suddenly let go, leaving it to decide on its own whether it wanted to start working again. I gritted my teeth, forced my eyes off the blood on her face, and checked quickly for anything worse. Then I looked up, toward the captain's chair.

And immediately withdrew my earlier assessment that the bridge wasn't that bad. The worst casualty right now was Tobita. He was still in the captain's chair — but sitting wasn't the word anymore. A shattered piece of bridge structure — probably a console strut or an internal reinforcement frame — had snapped under the impact and driven clean through him, pinning him to the deck in front of the chair. It was the kind of sight that makes even swearing stall for half a beat.

On anyone else, you'd skip the medics and go straight for a chaplain. Somehow Tobita's face still held onto a stubbornness that had no business existing — not consciousness, exactly, more like the stubbornness of a man who intends to absorb even a fatal wound in the imperative mood. I walked over and picked up the captain's dedicated line. The fact that my voice snapped back into standard-issue mode before my brain did was its own kind of curse.

"Medbay. Bridge here." I said.

"Captain Tobita is down. Multiple wounded. Send a team now." I set the handset down. Thought for a second. Realized that wasn't enough. This wasn't purely a medical problem. With the bridge in this state, two or three medics weren't going to hold the scene together. CIC still had people trapped, Tobita needed careful extraction, and worst of all — the information couldn't be allowed to run loose. The whole Yukikaze had just been spat out of a singularity jump like a kicked tin can.

Every nerve on board was still raw. If Captain critically injured started circulating freely, shipboard order might collapse before the infirmary did. So I picked the line back up. This time, not medical. Sergeant Major Takenaka. The line connected, and that voice — the kind that could correct your posture through a comm channel alone — came through immediately.

"Location?"

"Sergeant Major. I need two men in powered armor up here." A beat of silence.

"Who is this?" My throat caught. Saying my own name right then felt stranger than the order to open fire had.

"... Hoshino." A pause.

"Lieutenant."

"Bridge?"

"Yes." I drew a breath.

"And — the Captain's critically injured. I'm telling you first, Sergeant Major. Keep it contained for now. Hold the ship together." He didn't ask anything further. That was the value of Sergeant Major Takenaka. Genuinely useful people never spend a comm channel performing surprise.

"Understood." The line cut. Not long after, the medical team arrived alongside two Security personnel in powered armor. The sight was, oddly, comforting. Not because it looked impressive — because after the whole ship had just been rag-dolled by physics, watching people walk in upright, carrying tools and procedure, was proof civilization hadn't fully come off the rails. Under the medical officer's direction, the two armored personnel extracted the CIC casualties one by one with ease.

D came loose screaming like he'd been reborn. Evelyn was strapped to a stretcher. Harvey was finally pried off the console with some dignity, ending his brief career as a cheap sci-fi background death. Then Tobita was carefully lifted onto a stretcher as well. I watched it, and the absurdity of it still hadn't resolved. A few minutes ago, this man had been standing on the bridge, smiling, planning exactly how to drive a knife into the Imperial fleet's back.

Now he was being detached from the captain's chair and carried out, face too white for the lights to bother reflecting off. One of the medics caught me staring too long and, in true Yukikaze fashion, offered a line of comfort:"Don't worry. As long as they're not dead yet, we can save them." Wow. Truly inspiring news. Print that on a Federal recruitment poster and it might actually work. At least it's honest. Once the medical team started moving out, the next unavoidable problem slammed back into place.

Captain: incapacitated. Executive Officer Maki: unconscious. Bridge: half destroyed. And the ship wasn't going to grow a new commanding officer just because everyone was having a bad day. I turned to the bridge's central control core.

"Computer. With the Captain incapacitated, which officer assumes command?" The ship's AI answered at once, in that eternally, shamelessly polite voice.

"Highest-ranking officer currently aboard: Major Victor Nikolayevich Borodin." My eyelid twitched. Oh, fuck. The drunk. I could feel my survival odds tracing a genuinely ugly statistical slide in real time. The AI wasn't finished.

"However, Major Victor Nikolayevich Borodin's assigned duty is Chief Engineer. He cannot leave the engine room to assume bridge command." I looked up.

"So?" A brief pause. Then, in the same mild tone you'd use to call a table number at a restaurant, the AI announced something that made my soul try to physically detach from my body.

"Until Captain, Third Class, Ash Vander or Captain Maki Kushima are fit for duty, you are the senior commanding officer aboard, Lieutenant Hoshino Shimo."

I looked at the flickering wreck of the bridge — the debris, the blood not yet cleared away, the Captain being carried out, Maki unconscious, Jess still crying, Aida corpse-white, Lan cold enough to frost over, Akari looking like she might drop off to sleep in her chair at any moment, and Roy just now dragging himself off the floor with a face that said am I still dreaming. And my brain produced exactly one word. Complete. Pure. Fit for the postwar oral history record.... What？