Chương 307: 130.Compromise 1

I'd thought Jess's parting shot — that sound you made earlier, genuinely cute — was already more than enough reason to throw her, crutch and all, into the toxic fog to cool off. The universe, apparently, felt my tolerance training for the day wasn't finished yet. The entire upper-right corner of the main display went red. Not a single warning tile. The kind of full-panel alarm that reaches through the screen and slaps you across the face with excuse me, it's time to actually work now.

Craft Two had just started lining up for its second gas window when the anomalous yellow fungal cluster beneath the fog layer jerked awake like something had kicked it from underground — every spore bulb swelling at once, then blasting three near-continuous columns of corrosive fog straight up like a wall.

"Bridge!" Akari's voice hit first.

"Shield on Craft Two's forward viewport down to forty-seven percent and still dropping!"

"East side of the surface team is destabilizing!" D followed immediately.

"Secondary fissure — fog current's changed direction!" Harvey just swore outright.

"Fuck, this isn't a normal eruption! The whole cluster's resonating!" Whatever ember of humiliation Jess had bitten into my nerves a minute ago got doused cold by the work in front of me, evaporated into steam. The holographic wind-field map refreshed in front of me like it had lost its mind. The second rapid-extraction window we'd plotted was now being sliced apart by those three new fog columns.

If Craft Two pushed through anyway, the collector might scrape out one more radon batch — right before its port-side shielding melted. The surface team had it worse. Maki's group was mid-recovery on the sodium crate, fog ahead, a fissure behind, and neither direction was anything close to a real path. For a second the bridge held nothing but jumping data, comm static, and my own heartbeat. Then Maki's voice came through.

"Bridge. Surface team can force-recover the second crate." Steady. Too steady. Steady like she'd never heard a single humiliating sound out of me earlier, steady like right now she was nothing but a surface execution unit, waiting on the bridge for a call. Which meant I had no room left to slip. I took a breath and overlaid the second-window yield estimate directly on top of the personnel-risk map. Didn't take long to decide. Hesitation in a spot like this isn't caution. It's getting people killed.

"Abort the second gas window." My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"Craft Two, immediate ascent — shielding and the collector, priority. Surface team, cancel full recovery on the second crate. Take what you can from the first, blow the rest. Maki, your group cuts thirteen degrees north — not the original route. Take the left-side hard-crust band and jump clear." Half a beat of silence on the comm. Harvey came up first.

"Wait! There's still stuff in that crate—""I know." I cut him off.

"You want the fuel, or you want your people?" Harvey stalled, then ground it out.

"…Copy. Craft Two ascending." D dropped in right behind him.

"Surface team prepping demo charges on the abandoned crate. Covering withdrawal." Maki spoke half a second later.

"Thirteen degrees north?" She repeated it once. Not a challenge. A confirmation. Because that line wasn't on any standard retreat map. It was a hairline gap squeezed between a low-gravity crust band and two pockets in the fog. Run it clean, and you clear the main eruption zone. Miss it, and the whole team steps straight into the strip of ground between acid rain and open fissures that exists specifically to collect bad ends. Eyes locked on the wind-field, I burned the route straight onto their HUDs.

"Thirteen north, yes." I said.

"Don't step the third crust point, it'll give. Use the second for lift, then cut west the second you land. You've got a seven-second window." Another half-beat of quiet on the line. Then Maki came back, low.

"… Copy." The pause had been small. Any other time, I might have had room to wonder if she'd heard something, remembered something, deliberately left that half-second there for me to sit in my own guilt. Not now. Because the next second, the surface feed lurched. Maki's team cut hard through the fog's leading edge at full speed. Low gravity carried every step farther than it should have, which meant every landing was a bet with a life on it.

The hard-crust band ahead glared chalk-white, like bone dried out in acid; one wrong plate and the drop below was an active fissure. D put two rounds into the abandoned crate's anchor locks; it blew open on the ground, sodium crystal scattering in a yellow spray, just enough to scramble the fungal fog's line of sight behind them. Craft Two pulled up at the same moment, port shielding falling to thirty-two percent — two seconds slower and it would've gone into early retirement.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Ten more meters!" I snapped, eyes on the data.

"Nobody goes back for a scoop. Anyone turns around, I will personally bolt their head to the collector when we're home."

"Copy, copy!" Harvey's voice was pure survival instinct.

"Nobody's catching feelings for this shit planet today!" The next second, the anomalous spore cluster on the lower left of the main display detonated whole. Thick yellow fog rolled up like a wall and swallowed the exact ground Maki's team had been standing on. Half a beat slower, and they wouldn't have been retreating — they'd have been giving the Yukikaze a live demonstration of how to pickle a human being in corrosive fungal soup. I watched the fog churn, cold sweat crawling slowly down my spine.

"Surface team, report." Breathing first, and boots on hard crust. Then D: "All personnel clear of the main eruption zone." Half a second more. Then Maki:"First crate secured. All personnel accounted for." She stopped there. Very short. Very flat. Then one more line.

"…Bridge. Good call." My fingers tightened on the console. Perfect. That was worse than if she'd just asked me point-blank what exactly I'd been doing up here. Because she hadn't asked anything. She'd just placed that confirmation exactly where it belonged — clean, professional, and heavy enough that the breath in my chest dropped a notch, settling into something steadier and considerably harder to deal with. Jess let out a low whistle beside me.

"Nice work, Acting Captain." I didn't look at her.

"Shut up."

"That one was a compliment."

"You also called me cute earlier. I can't afford your compliments."

"Oh. So you did remember." I decided not to deal with her yet, on the grounds that one lost second of focus and I'd end up dismantling the whole bridge myself. The withdrawal ran faster than projected. Second extraction cycle officially dead, every craft and surface team prioritizing survival over yield. The Yukikaze made two orbital corrections, threading the recovery bay into the cleanest gap along the upper fog line.

Not until the first craft locked onto the guidance beam, and the second came screaming home with a collector that had nearly shed a layer of skin, did I let out one full breath. The second one, I couldn't take yet. Not until roll call. Only when the last "all present" came through the headset did I lean back into the chair, both shoulders feeling like they'd just been pried out of solid lead. The bridge went quiet. Recovery protocols still running in the background.

On the main display, the toxic planet churned on, yellow-green and utterly unapologetic, as if to say: you ran fast today. I'll be here next time. I stared at that rock for two seconds. Then, slowly, turned my head. Jess was still leaning against the auxiliary console, crutch angled at her side, wearing the exact face of someone who knew a reckoning was coming and had zero intention of pretending to be sorry. Good. That made this easier.

"Jess McCallow." Full name. Her eyebrows went up instantly.

"Right here, Acting Captain." Still using the title. Unbelievable. I stood, walked over to her. Her leg wasn't healed. Technically, one reach and I could pull that crutch clean away, and she'd be giving the bridge a live demo of one-legged survival. But I wasn't Ash, and I wasn't the kind of person who gets satisfaction watching a teammate go helpless — so instead I just grabbed her by the collar and pulled her in. Jess blinked. For one full second, she was genuinely caught off guard.

"Wow." She looked down at my hand on her collar, then back up.

"That expression's meaner than the one you had commanding a retreat."

"Do you have any idea how close you came to making me give the wrong order down there?"

"But you didn't."

"That's not the point."

"Oh?" She dragged the syllable out.

"So what is the point — that I kissed you with the comm open, or—" I hauled her collar in again.

"Jess."

"Fine, half a second of silence." She smiled anyway, still infuriating.

"But I have to say, that sound you made was rea—""Say that word and I take the crutch apart."

"Which word?" Fake innocence.

"Cute?" A vein jumped at my temple.

"No."

"Or are you more bothered that I said it sounded like a—""Jess." She finally laughed, low, close enough that I caught the medbay antiseptic still clinging to her breath, and underneath it, the warmth of someone coming down off an operation.

"Fine," she said.

"Let me rephrase." She looked at me. The usual glint of provocation in her eyes sank, just slightly, into something heavier.

"You knew exactly what you were doing up there," she said.

"And you did it well." For a second I had nothing. Because that didn't sound like a joke. It didn't sound like she was working me over for sport, either. It sounded like she'd watched the whole thing from start to finish and picked the precise moment I was about to explode to hand back a fact I hadn't gotten around to owning myself. Which was infuriating. And more than a little dangerous. I held the glare.

"Stop changing the subject."

"I'm not." Jess said.

"I'm answering the part you're actually angry about." She glanced at my hand still fisted in her collar, then raised her eyes back to mine, slow.

"You're not just mad I acted up," she said.

"You're mad because you really were carrying every one of their lives down there — and I picked that exact second to knock you sideways." … Damn it. Of course she'd see that too. My grip didn't loosen. It didn't tighten either. Because she was right. It wasn't just the kiss. Wasn't just the breath at my ear. I was angry because I'd nearly lost the thread — and every one of them, Ash, D, Maki, Aida, Harvey, Lan, Roy, Akari, had been down in that fog with their lives hanging off whatever came out of my mouth.

That mattered more than a blush. More than shame. Far more than one humiliating sound that came out sounding like a startled kitten.

"And you did it anyway," I said quietly. Jess looked at me. This time she didn't smile right away.

"Because you looked too good not to," she said. I went still. She added one more line, voice dropping lower.

"And every time you hear her report come through, your eyes change. It pisses me off." The second that sentence hit the air, whatever had still felt like an argument on the bridge stopped being just that. It became something a lot harder to ignore. I looked at her, and for a second I genuinely wasn't sure which offense to prosecute first. Jess walked half of it back herself, the wicked grin resurfacing.

"Don't worry, though," she said.

"I have standards. You were brilliant in the second half — didn't I sit still and help you watch the boards like a good girl?"

"Your idea of professional ethics sounds exactly like a criminal's self-assessment."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"Counts as one where I'm standing." I held the glare two more seconds, finally let go of her collar, and pushed her back toward the auxiliary seat.

"Sit down," I said.

"If I hear you bring up that sound again—""The kitten one?"

"…" She genuinely had a death wish. I took a long breath, seriously beginning to consider confiscating the crutch, when the recovery bay's seal cycle finished and the bridge doors slid open at the same moment. The whole team was back. Ash came in first, wearing the exact look of someone freshly out of toxic fog and ready to write ten disciplinary reports and hand-deliver them shipwide. D followed, outer armor still streaked gray-yellow where the acid mist had chewed on it.

Maki came through, swept the main console once, then me, then let her eyes catch — for one precise, unmistakable beat — on the distance between me and Jess. Too close. Not remotely platonic. Harvey was already stripping off his gloves, cursing the planet as an insult to engineering. Lan and Roy came in hugging the recovery data. Akari, head down, was still reconciling yield numbers. Then Ash stopped.

His gaze went over me, over Jess, over my hand — only just released from her collar — and over Jess's face, which was making zero effort to hide that she'd just done something and enjoyed it. The expression on his face translated cleanly into one complete sentence: What are you two doing now. The specific Yukikaze flavor of despair: I was off this ship for under three hours. How. Then Aida.

She came in half a step behind, checked the return-complete markers on the holo, looked at me, looked at Jess, and let her gaze make one slow, elegant, entirely clinical circuit between the two of us — the exact look of a medical officer cataloguing a new and interesting symptom. The corner of her mouth twitched. She didn't say a word. Her face said oh — now this is interesting clearly enough anyway. Fuck. Every single one of them had an agenda running.