Chương 282: 117. Out-of-Place Object 2

I had assumed that when the executive officer personally requested my presence to "verify external labor hours and material flow," the job would, at least on the surface, resemble actual work. As it turned out, as long as Maki Kushima was the one executing it, and Lawrence Shipyard was the location, even the most legitimate-sounding mission objective would automatically grow the distinct criminal scent of casing the joint. And I, unfortunately, was already starting to get used to it.

The inner ring of Lawrence Shipyard was brighter than it had been the last two days. And dirtier. And now, I had to walk right into the belly of the beast with Maki.

"Hold this." She handed me a clearance board. I looked at it: today's external labor verification sheets, material flow signature blocks, transfer codes for two berth zones, and several notes boring enough to murder any romantic fantasies. Perfect. The more boring it was, the less it looked like a cover story.

"Are we really just here to verify labor hours today?" I asked, keeping my voice low. Maki kept walking, answering flatly.

"On the surface, yes."

"And underneath?"

"Underneath, you keep your eyes open and your mouth shut a little more."

"... You always say that like my mouth is the only thing keeping me alive." She glanced at me from the side.

"Isn't it?" I nearly choked. Damn it, she wasn't entirely wrong. I could only hug the board and keep up with her. Maki wasn't wearing her conspicuous duty jacket today. She'd swapped it for a dark gray short coat that was better for moving around the station—waist tailored sharp, cuffs buttoned tight at the wrists. It looked like she'd had the words don't mess with me stitched directly into the fabric. Her pace wasn't fast, but she moved with absolute directional certainty.

It was as if the chaotic tangle of pipes, suspension bridges, reinforcement beams, and gray-market rules of Lawrence Shipyard automatically aligned into readable lines the moment she looked at them. Walking beside her was sometimes very reassuring. Other times, it made me want to protest that I looked entirely too much like a lackey assigned to carry her paperwork.... Of course, protesting wouldn't do me any good anyway. The crowd in the inner ring was even more mixed than the outer.

The outer ring at least had the basic shape of this section is repair, that's material supply, over there is berth security. The inner ring was a different ecosystem entirely. Mama Steel's repair crews held the heavy-industry corridors and large equipment lines, walking with a swagger, always carrying wrenches and cutters that had no business being in a civilized setting.

Ledger Crow's people were like a crossbreed between a cockroach and an abacus—slipping through gaps, pushing carts, transferring orders, swapping tags. They always knew exactly whose name was on a shipment, and exactly which corner to take to quietly lose two connectors along the way. As for the Gaffer's people, they looked scattered, but they were actually holding the doors, the paths, every truly important access point.

Like a pack of guard dogs too lazy to bare their teeth, but fully prepared to bite your ankle off the moment you crossed the line. Deeper in, there were the people I liked least. Quiet. Clean. Dressed unremarkably, but everyone else automatically stepped out of their way. Ledger's line. That type was the worst. Because they didn't need to write I'm in charge on their faces; everyone else just read it anyway.

As Maki and I passed the third junction, a crew of Mama Steel's people on the left was arguing with one of Ledger Crow's handler bosses. Not over money—over which assembly line a set of high-heat sealing rings was supposed to go to first. Their tone was vicious enough that it sounded like they were about to start cracking skulls with bolt wrenches the next second. But the two station security guards standing nearby didn't even blink. Apparently, this classified as "standard operational noise" at Lawrence Shipyard.

I couldn't help keeping my voice down.

"Is it this lively every day?"

"Lively means things are flowing. Things flowing means the place is still alive," Maki said.

"That sounds like you're writing a travel brochure for a black market."

"If you want to leave a black market alive, learn not to complain about how ugly it is first."

"... That makes so much sense I hate it." Her mouth twitched slightly. I wasn't sure if it counted as a smile. The next second, a cart loaded with metal drums nearly hit me from the front. I reflexively stepped aside, my foot hit a section of grating slick with condensation, and I slipped sideways. My brain only had time for one thought: Great. Hoshino Shimo, today is the day you finally die in a very stupid way in a black-market corridor. Then someone grabbed my wrist. Maki didn't even fully stop walking.

She just caught me backhanded in one smooth motion, pulling my entire body toward her. The reflex was as fast as instinct, but the grip was unreasonably steady. When I bumped against her shoulder, I could even smell that faint, cold scent near her collar—like the air in the corridor outside the Yukikaze's medical bay on the night shift, or some kind of crisp clarity that didn't belong in a grimy place like this.

"Watch your step," she said.

"... I was watching."

"You weren't watching the deck. You were watching the argument."

"Because they were arguing with so much vitality."

"If you fall again, I can let you experience exactly how Mama Steel's crew calculates emergency labor hours up close." I immediately stood straight.

"Executive Officer, I've just realized my sense of balance is actually excellent." She let go and kept walking like nothing had happened. I quietly rubbed my wrist behind her back, and pathetically admitted to myself: Damn it, that was against the rules. Not because it was so ambiguous it belonged in a third-rate romance novel. It was because, in a place like this, she grabbed me so naturally, like it was a given that I was supposed to be within her arm's reach. That kind of detail was lethal.

Because it left absolutely no room for me to make a sarcastic remark about it. We kept going deeper, actually checking the nodes we had the paperwork for. This was the part that eventually earned my genuine respect: Maki wasn't the type to use a cover story to do something else and just drop the actual work. She really checked.

Outer-plate replacement hours for a specific berth, transfer numbers for a batch of water-cycle filtration membranes, why two carts of cooling cartridges had stalled in the inner ring for forty minutes, even why a set of medical supplies meant for the Yukikaze had been re-tagged with a new transit code mid-route—she asked about every single one. Logged every single one. She asked until the contacts got annoyed, then scared, and finally just obediently filled in the missing data.

Standing beside her watching it happen, I could only sigh internally. The reason an XO is terrifying isn't because she yells at you. It's because once she decides to take things seriously, she can take the excuses you only just thought about using to slack off, put them in a spreadsheet, and throw them right back in your face. And the actual objective of this trip was slipped naturally into the middle of all that legitimate business.

"How many times has Hook's ship moved berths in the last two days?" Maki asked casually while verifying a heavy-industry crane usage form. The station record-keeper had been giving half-hearted answers, but at the word "Hook," his eyes noticeably flickered.

"Why are you asking about that?"

"Because he's occupying a heavy-industry crane that could have been shifted to the Yukikaze's repair line," Maki said.

"If he doesn't clear out by tonight, I have to reschedule three repair lines, and that's going to make Mama Steel's people very unhappy. I don't like taking the blame for a pirate's schedule." It was such a beautiful lie I wanted to write it into a textbook for her. The contact immediately shut his mouth and looked down at his records.

"Moved once on the night shift yesterday. Applied to add a power-bay maintenance line this morning," he said.

"If nothing goes wrong, they'll leave port by tomorrow night." By tomorrow night. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Maki and I shared a look. Just one. But the meaning inside it was clear: the timeline matched. After that, we used two other transit nodes to confirm exactly which section of the old refit dock Hook's raider was currently hanging in, and whose people had been keeping that line tightly sealed lately.

Finally, Maki led me down an old maintenance belt even more remote than the last one. This time she clearly wasn't relying on luck. She was following the thread. The deeper we went, the less sound there was. Not silence, but human noise filtered out by metal doors, rock layers, and heavy industrial walls, leaving only the deep, heavy, low-frequency vibration of some massive machinery breathing. I couldn't help keeping my voice down.

"Did you guess early on that this place wasn't just a normal refit dock?"

"Part of it," she said.

"And now?"

"Now it's more like confirming exactly how not-normal it is."

"... That phrasing is not reassuring."

"I didn't bring you here to reassure you." Great. Very Executive Officer. We stopped behind a corner obscured by scrap racks and a half-closed partition. From this angle, looking through the gap between the two structures, we had a half-view of the deep refit zone ahead. And this time, I saw it much more clearly than before. The raider was locked in the center of the half-open inner dock.

The overall hull shape was more obvious than in my previous hurried glance: the bow was long and sharp, intentionally ground down like a blade. The belly was thick, structured to favor high-speed penetration and the ability to take hits while pulling out. The external modules on the port and starboard were asymmetric—one side looked like an enhanced fire-control pod, the other looked more like a hastily added cargo hold or boarding-assault bay. To put it bluntly, it didn't look like a proper ship.

It looked like someone had welded the words grab and run directly into the hull design. And the Next-Gen Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant was sitting quietly on an external heavy-load rack. It was more fully exposed than the last time I'd seen it. The casing was cold silver. Not a cheap, polished shine, but a highly industrial, highly precise metallic texture that absolutely did not belong in a place like this.

The annular main interface wrapped around the central core chamber in concentric rings, with six secondary nodes along the perimeter that looked like heat exchange and magnetic-field stabilizers. The structure was tight. So clean it gave you an illusion—as if this thing didn't belong to a pirate ship, and didn't belong to Lawrence Shipyard. It belonged to a blueprint, a factory floor, a place that was supposed to be high-end, legitimate, and entirely unwilling to associate with the black market.

And those four characters were printed on the side of the main casing. Kushima Heavy Industries. I instinctively looked at Maki. She didn't speak. But I could tell her eyes weren't just "looking at a potentially useful piece of equipment" anymore. She was reading. Reading the casing welds, reading the exposed nodes, reading the interface arrangement. Reading what was original, what was patched, what looked like it had been cracked open and resealed.

In moments like this, I became acutely aware that she and I were not the same kind of person. I could smell danger, memorize a scene, catch the wrongness in the chaos. But Maki could take that wrongness apart and see the logic inside it. Terrifying. Also incredibly cool. I was about to speak when a rough shout carried up from below. The pirate captain who called himself Hook had appeared.

He was dressed even more today like someone who would absolutely sign up for a loyalty card at a discount-ambition shop: long boots, short coat, bone ornaments salvaged from some unlucky ship clipped to the side of his hat. Standing beneath his raider with his hands on his hips, he acted like the entire dock zone existed to service his ego.

"I told you, not this line!" Hook yelled at a technician.

"Don't seal the main loop yet, I want to run the voltage stabilizer again! Do Mama Steel's people only know how to weld, or can you actually follow orders?" The technician standing opposite him didn't even bother lifting her eyes.

"I only listen to the person paying."

"I am the person paying!"

"No," another voice cut in coldly from the side.

"The only reason you're still standing here yelling is because Ledger's people haven't given the nod yet." Hook's expression instantly soured.... Interesting. So even a pirate like Hook, who clearly desperately wanted to play the big shot, still had to watch other people's faces here. I lowered my voice.

"His backing here doesn't seem as solid as I thought." Maki answered flatly: "The ship might be tough. The man isn't necessarily."

"That sounds like it could apply to a lot of situations." She ignored me. Probably didn't want to engage with such an obviously derailed comment. The people below were still busy. The crane slowly rotated, bringing the helium-hydrogen core closer. That was when I finally noticed two people standing near it who hadn't been there before.

One was a tall, thin woman in dark goggles holding a datapad, her movements clean—not a mechanic, not a crew member, more like a station broker who specialized in verifying goods, appraising value, and pulling strings. The other was an older man with gray hair and a simple coat. Long fingers. Unassuming posture, yet everyone around him naturally gave him a half-step of clearance. My heart sank slightly. Ledger's people. Not necessarily Ledger himself, but the resemblance was too close.

A second later, I knew I'd guessed right. The goggled woman reached out and lightly tapped the side of the reactor casing. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried clearly.

"Still no hard number on the source?" The gray-haired man answered her evenly.

"The Gaffer says we watch first. No rush to bite."

"No rush?" Hook whipped his head around the moment he heard it.

"If that Federal wreck actually has a stable supply of icefield stock, and we don't bite now, are we just going to wait for someone else to grab it?" My back went cold. Icefield stock. That phrase again. And this time they weren't asking quietly. They were putting it right on the table. Maki's eyes dropped a degree colder, but she still didn't move. She just asked me, voice very low:"This is the line you heard last time?"

"Yes." I kept my voice just as low.

"Hook had someone else beside him, but the direction was the same. Ledger's side clearly already knows the Frostcrystals aren't just pretty rocks we picked up off the ground." Below, the gray-haired man didn't rise to Hook's impatience.

"Before we bite, we need to know if there's actually bone there," he said.

"I'm sick of hearing that." Hook clicked his tongue.

"I just know that ship is willing to use the stuff to pay, and it doesn't look like their last batch. If we just trace the route—" The goggled woman cut him off.

"Tracing the route is fine. Don't move right now. The Federal warship is still docked in the station. The Gaffer won't like you starting trouble right now."

"There's a lot of things the Gaffer doesn't like," Hook sneered.

"But when someone else walks away with that supply pipeline, you'll all start liking the idea of blaming me for not moving fast enough." I ground my back teeth. This wasn't just ordinary "interest in Frostcrystals" anymore. This was someone actively evaluating whether to hit the Yukikaze directly, or at least trace us back to chew on that frozen planet.

And the last thing I wanted to see was the Yukikaze finally getting repaired enough to catch its breath, only to turn around and find a pack of border hyenas tracking the scent of Frostcrystals straight to our door. Maki finally pulled her gaze away from the reactor for a second and looked at my face.

"Remember those two," she said.

"Already logged."

"And the Hook ship's interface configuration, external pod positions, and main engine startup sequence." I blinked.

"Me?"

"Why else would I bring you here? To admire the pirate ship's aesthetics?"

"... Right. Executive Officer, you're being very unromantic."

"Right now we need memory, not romance."

"If you said that in any other context, it would be very hurtful." This time she finally looked at me. Very brief. But that look carried a clear, almost soundless message: Wait until this is over. How was it that even postponing flirtation like a military order felt this addictive? I forced myself to focus, pulling my attention back to the floor below.

Hook's raider, the position of the external fire-control pods, the installation progress of the reactor, the format of the record the goggled woman was holding, the half-step of clearance the others automatically gave the gray-haired man... I stuffed them into my brain one by one, forcing myself to be a recording machine first, and an easily distracted girl second.

Though honestly, with Maki standing next to me, close enough that I could bump her elbow if I shifted slightly, asking me to be completely undistracted was an unrealistic demand to begin with. Just then, there was movement near the core below. Two technicians removed an external maintenance panel, exposing a deeper layer of interface housing inside. Maki's breathing stopped for a second—so faintly it was almost imperceptible. Just once. But I felt it.

"What is it?" I asked, using only my breath. She didn't answer right away. Two seconds passed before she spoke, voice low.

"That's not a civilian-spec output." My scalp prickled.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning," Maki kept her eyes on the interface array, voice low but cold as the back of a knife, "it's not just that it shouldn't be on a pirate ship. It wasn't built for a pirate ship in the first place." The wire in my chest snapped one notch tighter. Great. At first I'd just thought this core might be valuable, highly desirable, and potentially life-saving for the Yukikaze. Now the Executive Officer had personally confirmed that it wasn't just high-end hardware—it came with an even worse background.

Which meant this wasn't just a simple black-market leak. There were likely dirtier hands involved. And we had happened to stumble right into it. I was about to ask more when a faint metallic clink echoed from the corridor ahead. Not from the refit dock below. From our level. Maki reacted half a beat faster than I did, reaching out and pulling me straight back, the two of us retreating into the deeper shadows beside us.

She pressed one hand against the front of my shoulder, her body angled to block out most of my silhouette. In that instant, I could even feel her breath brush past my ear. Short. Steady.... The fact that I had the bandwidth in this situation to think my own heartbeat was a little too loud meant I was truly hopeless. Footsteps passed outside. Two people. One had a gruff voice, the other slightly hoarse.

"The upper counting house is looking for files on that little Federal girl," the hoarse voice said.

"Which one?" the gruff voice asked.

"The one carrying the goods. Hoshino something," the hoarse voice said.

"Heard she was the one holding the case during the first handoff, and she's been running the manifests around the station since. Someone wants to know if she's just a runner, or if she actually knows where that icefield stock comes from." The blood in my entire body felt like it dropped half an inch. Looking for me? Not Ash, not Maki, not the Yukikaze as a whole. Me. The gruff voice clicked his tongue.

"Are the people in your counting house brain-damaged? You can tell at a glance that woman is just a mid-level runner for the ship."

"Would a mid-level runner refuse to let go of that kind of cargo?"

"Doesn't mean she knows anything."

"We won't know if she knows until we check." The footsteps slowly faded away. I stayed quiet in the shadows, though I had already lined up several curses in my head. Maki didn't let go until the two of them were completely gone. She looked at me. Her eyes were level, but there was clearly something else pressing up from underneath that calm.

"From now on, your solo runs in the station are cut in half," she said.

"They're watching me."

"Yes."

"Do I look like a vault key that's about to cause a lot of trouble right now?"

"No," Maki said. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. Then she delivered the next sentence.

"You look more like the doorknob that leads people straight to the real vault."... Thanks. That was worse than a vault key. I pressed a hand to my forehead and kept my voice low.

"So what do we do now? Go back and find Ash?"

"We head back," she said.

"Find Ash first, split the two threads. The leak risk regarding the Frostcrystal source is his to contain immediately. This core and Hook's ship—that's my call."

"You've already made a call, haven't you." Maki was silent for a second. Then, she looked down at the Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant lying quietly on the heavy-load rack, her tone low and cold.

"I have." I stared at the side of her face, not rushing her. I knew she didn't throw conclusions around casually at times like this. But once she said it, the weight of her words was usually enough to alter the entire ship's next move. Sure enough, a second later, she spoke.

"If the internal specs of that core haven't been ruined beyond repair by Hook's people," she said, "it is indeed possible that it's worth risking more for than the Yukikaze's current old fusion reactor." My throat went dry.

"You mean..."

"I mean," Maki turned her head to look at me, "from this moment on, Hook's ship isn't just black-market scenery. It's a target." Right. The moment those words came out, the entire flavor of the situation changed. It was no longer we found a pirate ship installing good hardware it shouldn't have. It was the Yukikaze officially drawing that ship, that Kushima Heavy Industries Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant, and the dark line circling our Frostcrystal source straight into its tactical sights.

I took a deep breath, pushing down the surge of adrenaline climbing up from my stomach. Danger. Trouble. Black market. Pirates. The Empire. And the expression on Maki's face right now—excessively cold, yet clearly already calculating how to make the hit. Good. This was right. This was more like us.

"Then let's go find Ash," I said. Maki nodded.

"Let's go." As we turned to leave that shadowed corridor, I looked back one last time. Below, Hook was still yelling at the technician, the goggled woman was still taking notes, and the gray-haired man stood quietly, like a pool of water that would never ripple on its own. The Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant stamped with Kushima Heavy Industries gleamed cold silver under the task lights. Like a heart that was never supposed to be dropped into this black mud.