Chương 272: 112. Water Crisis 2

I stared at the reclamation report for three seconds, then made a decision with absolutely no romance to it, but perfectly suited to an acting commander.

"Aida. Come with me to look at water processing." She looked up. Her face, already short on color, now looked like it had just crawled out of an incident report.

"You're sure you want to go yourself?"

"If I don't go now, and rationing goes out later, and everyone asks me why they can't shower, I can't exactly answer because the numbers looked pessimistic." Aida let out a very faint snort. Which meant she still had enough spare energy left to roll her eyes at the world. Good. People who can still be bothered to find things annoying are usually not about to die. I glanced back over the bridge. Roy had the bow steady again, adjusting attitude along the route I'd just laid out.

Lan had her head down over the external bands, apparently using cold efficiency to refreeze whatever shock was still loose in her skull. Akari kept pushing the sensor net forward, still wearing the face of someone one bad shift from ascending, but her fingers were moving. Jess had settled into the auxiliary seat beside the captain's chair, clearly still a little soul-absent, but when she caught me looking, she made a visible effort to straighten her spine anyway.... Fine.

This ship had just been used as the universe's stress toy, but at least the pieces still had a will to work.

"Jess. Hold the bridge. Call me the second anything happens." She nodded fast.

"Copy, acting acti—""Don't," I said.

"Understood." I took Aida and left the bridge. The Yukikaze's water-processing section sat low midships — the kind of place nobody ever thinks about, right up until something goes wrong, at which point everyone suddenly remembers exactly how fragile civilization really is. Sections of corridor lighting were still flickering. A damage-control rating knelt by the bulkhead, wrestling a cable trough back into alignment.

One deck further down, the air picked up a distinct metallic dampness layered with disinfectant — not the fresh kind of water smell, but the industrial conscience of an entire system working very hard to turn urine, condensation, wash-off, and various other things nobody likes naming back into something you could call drinking water. Stripped of any pretense, this was the ship's last line of dignified survival. Aida walked and talked, pulling up the damage overlay on her handheld terminal.

"Bottom line first," she said, without looking up.

"It's worse than what I said on the bridge."

"I've heard ugly enough times today already," I said.

"Details."

"Two purification modules knocked off their mounts." She pointed to the red zones on the schematic.

"Membrane assemblies cracked. One UV sterilization array shorted out. A return pump in the condensation loop's jammed. The worst part isn't bulk water loss — it's that the process of turning dirty water clean is currently doing a terrible job."

"... Truly the most fragile part of civilized existence." We stepped into the main water-processing bay. It was worse than I'd pictured. The cylindrical purification tanks stood in neat rows, but two of them no longer looked anything like the trustworthy industrial products they'd been on the factory floor. Mounting frames canted sideways. Inspection panels shaken loose. Thin wisps of pale vapor leaking from the seams.

A shallow pool of undrained reclaim fluid still sat on the deck, lit under emergency lighting into something that looked like a cheap broth with no business appearing in any decent science-fiction set.

"Can this be fixed?" I asked.

"It can," Aida said. I looked at her.

"Hearing you say that already makes me nervous, because the next line's usually if we get to a proper yard." She finally looked up, wearing the expression of someone who wanted to smile and couldn't quite manage it.

"Close enough," she said.

"I can nurse one module back online. That should pull reclamation efficiency back up to around seventy percent. Full restoration isn't happening aboard this ship." I stepped closer to the console. A column of figures kept ticking downward. Potable reserve. Reclamation efficiency. Irreversible loss. Medical priority allocation. None of it was there to make my day any easier.

"At normal consumption?" Aida didn't hesitate.

"Not even three days." I was quiet a moment.

"If we tighten it?"

"No showers, no washing hair, no using excess water to cook anything with any dignity. Non-medical cleaning switches entirely to dry disinfectant wipes. Hot water goes to medbay first." She swiped down, pulling up another calculation table.

"First rationing pass, and we can stretch the whole ship to roughly five days. Assuming nobody does anything stupid with the water." The first face my brain served up was Jess's. No — that wasn't fair. Jess would probably just use it for a selfie, not actually waste it. The real risk was people like Roy, who drink compulsively under pressure, or damage-control crews who'd instinctively splash their faces mid-repair to jolt themselves awake.

That's always the worst part of wartime rationing — it's never purely arithmetic. It requires accepting, up front, that human beings are remarkably good at making inefficient choices while falling apart. I set my hand on the main console.

"All right. Start the first rationing pass." Aida looked at me.

"You're sure? The moment this goes out, the whole ship's going to know things are worse than what you told them in the broadcast."

"They don't need to know how far from home we are," I said.

"But they do need to know that every extra time they wash their hands right now, they might be using someone else's water to do it." She nodded. Fast this time. No wasted words. That's exactly what I liked about working with practical people. The mouth might run a little dry, the face might run a little grim, but the second a problem gets specific enough to fit on a spreadsheet, they're more reliable than anyone still shouting about ideals. I switched back to the bridge channel and pinged Jess on internal priority.

"Jess." She picked up almost instantly, voice carrying the slight stiffness of someone trying very hard to sound professional.

"Acting acting captain on the line."

"Good. Then the acting acting captain can prepare to issue a Level One water-rationing bulletin." A beat of silence.

"... We're really that broke already?"

"Yes."

"Understood." Her voice sagged a little with it.

"Content?" I read Aida's list off to her, item by item. Drinking water allocation reduced. All bathing suspended. Non-medical washing switched to dry disinfectant only. Galley shifted to low-water ration mode. Any unauthorized hot-water taps or non-essential fluid discharge, across all compartments, classified as a violation. Jess was quiet for two seconds after I finished.

"I'm suddenly thinking almost dying in that jump had more romance to it."

"Cut the commentary. Read it out."

"Copy." I cut the line. A few seconds later, the shipwide broadcast sounded. Jess had clearly worked hard to flatten out her usual too-lively, too-chaotic, too-likely-to-sneak-a-bad-joke-into-a-serious-moment tone. It held up well — the announcement sounded like an actual notice, not an influencer live-streaming a disaster unboxing. By the time it ended, Aida was already crouched beside one of the damaged purification modules, the inspection panel fully off.

"Here. Look at this." I walked over.

"This is the reclamation membrane assembly — cracked. This is the condensation return line — knocked off-center. And this—" she tapped a warped UV sterilization chamber with her tool "—if we jump again, this thing's going to lose its mind before we do."

"We're not jumping again," I said.

"Good. Otherwise I might strangle Roy first."... Oddly persuasive. I looked at the row of damaged modules and turned the number five days over in my head again. Five days isn't long, and it isn't short. The infuriating part is that it's exactly enough to let you hope, and exactly not enough to let you get careless. One bad call, one detour, one more module failing, one collection team coming back empty-handed — any of it could shave five days down to three and a half.

"The water already on this ship won't cut it," I said. Aida looked up.

"I was thinking the same thing." She slid the terminal aside and pulled up the external resource-scanning page.

"If there's an ice body anywhere nearby, we're not finished yet. We don't need a pretty ocean world. We just need water ice — something we can mine, melt, and purify."

"Start looking." The Yukikaze's biggest advantage right now was that, however wrecked we were, the sensors were still alive. As long as the instruments weren't dead, people would immediately start pinning their hopes on some distant rock. That's probably one of the reasons civilization has lasted this long. Aida pulled the search parameters out, one at a time. Volatiles. Low gravity. Low storm risk. No large biological signatures. Water ice. Bonus points for anything we could also strip for industrial material.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. The external star chart unfolded in front of us, layer by layer, like someone pulling open all the battered drawers of the frontier universe and letting us rummage through them for however many more days of life we had left. A few minutes later, Aida made a sound.

"Got one." I leaned in immediately. A small blue-white body lit up on the main display — cold, quiet, friendless, and entirely uninterested in visitors. It hung against the gray backdrop like a glass marble that had been left in a freezer too long, radiating a single, isolated message: I have nothing here but cold and minerals, and I'm not sorry about it. Aida threw the data out.

"Frozen planet. Primary resources: CO₂ ice, water ice, activated copper. Two anomalous substances also flagged — Frost Crystal and Condensed Carbon." I raised an eyebrow.

"Frost Crystal?"

"Never mind whether the name sounds like a trophy that got named specifically after you," Aida said.

"The point is there's a lot of water ice." Good. She'd recovered further than I'd given her credit for — already back to landing unnecessary shots at me. She expanded the environmental parameters.

"Daytime surface temp: minus seventy-eight point four. Night: minus one forty-two point one. Thin CO₂ atmosphere with trace ice-crystal dust. Low hazard rating. No dense atmosphere, which means no blizzards."

"Gravity?"

"Point zero four G." I looked at the number, my mouth twitching.

"... So one overenthusiastic kick against the ground and you just ascend to heaven?"

"More or less. But thruster efficiency runs three hundred percent higher," Aida said.

"Collection ops will barely take any effort at all."

"Truly inspiring. We finally get the chance to fall much further, in extremely low gravity, on a planet perfectly designed to freeze us solid." Aida ignored the commentary and kept reading.

"Flora's minimal — a few scattered ice-crystal shrubs. No fauna signatures detected. In other words—""A dead, silent world of ice," I finished for her.

"Correct." I stared at the planet for a few seconds. Honestly, it looked exactly like the kind of place you wouldn't want to stay long, but would happily raid and leave. No storms. Low gravity. Nothing alive to worry about biting you. Plenty of water ice, plus bonus activated copper and some strange Frost Crystal thrown in. This wasn't just decent conditions. This was practically one of the last rocks on the frontier still willing to show us the bare minimum of courtesy.

"Distance?" Aida gave me the number. Not far. Considerably closer than Lawrence Shipyard, in fact. Which meant we could swing by the frozen planet first — top up on water, scavenge whatever else was worth grabbing — and then drag the Yukikaze, short on water and short on repairs but never short on trouble, onward toward a place whose very name sounded like it would find a way to slip two extra line items onto the final bill. I leaned back against the damaged purification module and let out a slow breath. Good.

The situation, stated plainly, was now this: We weren't simply lost. We weren't simply short on water. We weren't simply looking for a repair yard. We had to go to a dead ice world first, dig our right to keep living out of the permafrost, and only then continue toward a facility that was probably illegal, probably a rip-off, and currently our only road anyway.... In a certain sense, this story was getting more frontier-flavored by the minute.

I straightened and said to Aida:"Pull together the collection specs for that ice planet — viable landing zones, cold-environment operating requirements, all of it. Once we're back on the bridge, we'll plan the first water-collection team." Aida nodded.

"Do we tell Maki?" I was quiet for half a second. Then said:"Yes. We're not deciding what not to tell them, this time." I looked once more at the frozen planet hanging on the star chart. White. Cold. Silent. No life. Water. That was enough. For the Yukikaze, right now, that was enough. On the walk back from water processing to the bridge, a very particular atmosphere had already begun spreading through the Yukikaze. Not panic. Not exactly low morale, either.

More like — nobody knew yet exactly how bad it was, but everyone could feel, on instinct, that for the next few days, even wanting to live with a little dignity was going to require filing a request first. That atmosphere was very Yukikaze. Most of the people aboard this ship weren't fools, after all. Genuine fools rarely survive long enough to make it onto a ship like this.

The ones who'd lived this long usually only needed to watch which direction the damage-control crews were running, count how many stretchers Medical had carried past, and notice whether the hot water had suddenly started rationing itself like an old man's conscience — and they already knew the good days were over.

When I pushed the bridge hatch open, Jess was sitting in the auxiliary seat beside the captain's chair with the exact expression of someone who'd only been asked to cover for three minutes and had somehow ended up starring in thirty years of palace intrigue. The second she saw me, you could practically watch half her life force flood back into her body.

"You're finally back," Jess said quietly.

"I almost got yelled straight through the deck by Supply."

"Good," I said.

"That means my notice hasn't officially gone out yet." She blinked.

"... The thing you just had me read wasn't official?"

"That was a preventative death notice." I dropped back into the captain's chair and pulled the water-processing report up onto the main display.

"The real one starts now." Jess gave me a look — equal parts sympathy, schadenfreude, and a distinct trace of thank god it wasn't me. Perfectly understandable. A real friend is someone who hands you water and helps you up when you're going down, while quietly thanking the universe it didn't pick her today. I opened the shipwide channel. This wasn't the we've stabilized broadcast from right after the jump. This was the kind that would make people start resenting my existence on a personal level. I cleared my throat.

"All hands, attention. This is Acting Command, Lieutenant Hoshino Shimo." The bridge went quiet. It's a strange kind of quiet. I was the only one speaking, but every time I keyed the shipwide mic, I got the distinct sense of dozens of pairs of eyes lifting at once across the hull. I knew perfectly well nobody could see me. I still caught myself straightening my spine anyway, as if any weakness in my voice might leak out through a single syllable.

"This ship's water-reclamation system sustained damage during the Singularity Jump. Several purification modules are currently offline. Effective immediately, the entire ship enters Phase One water rationing." I paused a beat, giving the sentence time to crawl through the bulkheads and ventilation runs and reach every ear aboard.

"Details as follows: drinking water will be issued by ration, with priority to Medical and Engineering. All bathing and non-essential cleaning water use is suspended shipwide. Personal hygiene switches to dry disinfectant only. Galley shifts immediately to low-water ration mode. Any unauthorized hot-water tapping, unapproved tampering with circulation valves, or any behavior that makes Ensign Aida Rosen want to kill someone on sight will be treated as a violation." Aida looked up at me.

"I'm not that quick to want to kill people."

"Oh — my apologies." I kept my finger on the broadcast key, expression unchanged.

"Correction: any behavior that makes Ensign Aida Rosen more inclined to kill someone on sight." Jess made a sound and slapped a hand over her mouth. I ignored her and kept going.

"This is not a long-term measure. But until water processing is restored, everyone endures it. Supply will push the detailed ration tables to all compartments shortly. If anyone has strong feelings about not being allowed to shower, feel free to line up and put it in writing — once we've found our way out of this, I'll personally collect every report." I let go of the key. And the Yukikaze immediately demonstrated the full splendor of human beings as a social species. First came two seconds of dead silence.

Then the internal channels erupted like someone had jabbed a hornet's nest with a stick. Supply comms blew first.

"What do you mean, bathing's suspended?!"

"Someone in Compartment 3 is halfway through washing her hair!"

"Whoever's still running water — shut it off! That's not hair, that's the whole crew's survival rate going down the drain!" Jess bit back a laugh, one eye on the channel map, and asked if I wanted her to cut the volume.

"Not yet," I said. Because right now, letting people shout for a bit is actually the healthier option. The real problem was never the complaining. The real problem is when everyone suddenly goes quiet at once — that usually means someone's started doing something worse than complaining. Sure enough, the second wave landed fast. From the galley, a young supply rating, voice carrying all the personal devastation of someone who'd just been dumped.

"What about the soup? Today was seaweed chowder day!" An older mess corporal barked straight back:"What do you mean, what about it? Starting today, that's not soup, that's slightly salty hot water. Leave the pot. Dump the water back into reclamation. Fish the seaweed out and we boil it again tomorrow!" Beautiful. That was the Yukikaze's everyday texture, right there. Not we're all in this together, united as one. More like we might die, so fish the seaweed out and reuse it.

Lan's fingers paused on the comms panel at that, the corner of her mouth twitching very slightly.

"Fishing the seaweed out to reboil tomorrow — does that count as wartime culinary philosophy?"

"It's called resource maximization," Aida said, without looking up.

"And, incidentally, maximizing everyone's exhaustion with life." The third wave came out of the lower berthing decks. Direct complaints. Very human ones.

"I just pulled sixteen hours of damage control and I can't even splash water on my face?"

"No."

"Then at least let me wash my socks!"

"You touch the potable supply for socks, and you'll wear that same pair on your next shift for a week." That last answer came from Sergeant Major Takenaka. The channel went dead instantly. I silently offered that unlucky rating half a second of condolences. Managing to zero in specifically on socks at a moment like this was, in its own way, a genuinely unique interpretation of the apocalypse. Not everyone was complaining, though. The cooperative responses started coming in fast, too. Engineering answered first.

"Engineering copies. All water goes to Medical and cooling first. Anyone I catch touching a hot-water line without authorization, I will personally stuff into the auxiliary boiler." That I, with zero suspense attached, belonged to Victor. The second his voice came through, the whole ship probably felt the same instinctive certainty settle in: fine — at least on the subjects of engines and credible threats of violence, Engineering is still very much alive. Medical responded not long after.

"Medical has adjusted cleaning protocols. Wound treatment shifting to water-conservation procedure. Reminder to all hands: not showering won't kill you. An infected wound will. Please leave the limited water for the people who are actually bleeding." Beautifully put. Cold, precise, and carrying exactly the specific brand of professional arrogance unique to a medical section. Excellent — the last thing this ship needed right now was every department racing to perform we have it worst.

As long as one section led with yes, this is garbage, and we're still functioning, the rest would find it a lot harder to be first in line to cry about their own situation. I flipped over to the corridor's open channel and caught a few lower-deck ratings hauling sealing panels, muttering as they worked.

"Hey — heard CIC looks like it took a direct hit."

"Didn't hear it. It genuinely did, emotionally speaking."

"Is D still alive?"

"Alive. Wedged in his chair. Screaming louder than the alarm."

"Good. If he can still scream, he's still got a mouth on him." Another voice cut in — probably one of the two Security personnel in powered armor who'd gone in to help with the extraction.

"Harvey's alive too."

"No way. From that position, I figured he'd already gone to file his report with his ancestors."

"Nope. Doc says his face just took the brunt of the impact on behalf of the rest of him." The bridge went quiet for a beat. Then Jess folded up behind her console, shoulders visibly shaking.

"If you want to laugh, laugh," I said.

"I'm trying to hold it in," Jess said, producing a thoroughly undignified snort.

"But his face took the brunt of it for his whole body is just—" I wanted to laugh too. But I was sitting in this chair, and keeping up the appearance of someone who takes personal responsibility for this entire ship's survival meant I couldn't just dissolve into laughing along with the onboard comedy hour. So I dragged my attention back to work.

"Aida. Is CIC sealed?" She pulled up the compartment feed for me. The CIC hatch was already blocked off with temporary sealing tape and a lockout marker. Two damage-control ratings were hauling a replacement data terminal out through the gap. Inside, you could still make out the wreckage of the fixed seating and the twisted control frames — an accident scene that had just been officially declared closed for business.

"Sealed," Aida said.

"Data lines rerouted to the bridge's auxiliary console and the sensor backup station. Without CIC, plenty of things are going to run a beat slow, but at least nobody's going to be working in there while throwing up."

"Thank you for your humanitarian instincts."

"I was worried about people throwing up into the equipment." Fair enough. That was the Yukikaze, through and through. Every gesture that looks like it might have some heart behind it eventually gets stripped down to something more practical, and considerably less romantic. Strangely enough, it was exactly that lack of romance that made this whole ship feel honest. Right then, the Supply channel lit up again.

A very young voice, careful in the specific way of someone trying not to get killed by an entire ship's worth of resentment at once.

"Um... after rationing kicks in... does coffee count as water?" This time, even Roy buried his face in his hands. Lan cut straight in, cold as ever: "If you're asking whether coffee's exempt from rationing, the answer is no." A pause on the other end. Clearly not ready to give up yet.

"What if I cut the espresso concentrate with half—""No." I took the channel myself.

"If you try trading two shares of water for one share of being conscious, I'll make sure you spend the next three days thoroughly unconscious, thinking it over." Silence on the other end. Jess finally lost the fight and laughed out loud. That laugh set off something small but real. It didn't spread to everyone — but the skin of the Yukikaze, stretched tight enough to split, eased back by a fraction. The complaints were still there. The exhaustion was still there.

Plenty of the crew probably still hadn't fully crawled their way back from the jump accident. But at least people had started sniping at each other in the ordinary way again. That was enough. On a warship, getting back to normal is almost never warm morning light, hot coffee, and clean sheets. It's someone complaining about the rations while dutifully following them anyway. Someone calling the whole system garbage while their hands are already fixing the part that'll make it slightly less garbage.

Someone who was crying her eyes out twenty minutes ago, now finding the energy to snicker at whoever just asked if coffee counts as water. I looked over the faces on the bridge — all of them still counted among the living — and something odd settled over me. The Yukikaze's greatest strength was probably never her firepower. Not her speed. Not even that antique engine capable of flinging us clean off the edge of the map.

It was this: no matter how close to falling apart she got, she could always hammer a handful of half-wrecked people back into the shape of an ordinary day. Only this particular ordinary day was about to run straight into its next problem. I pulled the frozen planet's data back up onto the main display. The blue-white, dead world hung quietly ahead of the bridge — a rock that looked cold, certainly, but at least wasn't going to try negotiating terms.

"Everyone, save the complaints for the memoirs — once we've survived long enough to write them." I tapped the armrest once, dragging the bridge's attention back.

"Rationing was step one. Step two: we need to go find water." Roy looked up. Lan's eyes came back around. Akari overlaid the sensor grid onto the frozen planet's position. Aida already had the collection-requirements table open. The ship had only just found the faintest trace of routine again, and I'd personally hauled everyone straight back out of it. Good. That meant I was steadily becoming exactly the kind of commanding officer people find genuinely insufferable.

Which is, as it happens, one of the most useful things a commanding officer can be. Because the job — its most irritating function, and its most valuable one — comes down to this: The moment everyone's just remembered how to breathe again on a terrible day, you're the one who has to say it. Sorry. The terrible day isn't over yet.