Chương 276: 114. Keeping Secrets 2

The ward lights were softer than everywhere else, the quiet closer to something like a normal world. Unlike the prep deck and the bridge, running on sheer willpower and exposed wiring, this room still held onto the basic idea that injured people should lie down. Most of the Yukikaze's common sense had gone bankrupt lately. The ward kept a small reserve of it going. Maki sat at the bedside, jacket over her shoulders, a half-finished nutrient pack beside her.

Ash was propped in the other bed, torso and shoulder strapped down thoroughly, color much better than a few days ago—at least he'd upgraded from might need resuscitation any moment to has the energy to find fault with people. The medical officer caught me at the door and ran the update first.

"Captain Kushima can return to duty early, provided she doesn't do anything reckless. Third Lieutenant Vander's about the same. D and Harvey are clear for discharge tomorrow, light duty only. Evelyn's fracture is trickier—she's down for a while yet."

"Does Evelyn know?" I asked.

"She does. She spent three minutes swearing about it," the medic said.

"Emotionally stable. Prognosis good." That was a genuinely convincing description. I relaxed a little. Maki's eyes moved from my wrist to my face. The tail of her eyebrow shifted, barely.

"You're hurt." Not a question.

"Minor," I said immediately.

"Occupational. Not enough to justify slacking off." Ash looked up, using that infuriating rationality of his.

"That sentence usually means it wasn't minor. Something went wrong with the water?"

"A little." I dragged a chair over, sat, and walked them through the whole EVA from the top: first batch recovered clean, anomalous Frost Crystal reading at the second site, successful sampling, the second recovery interrupted by a surface collapse, Roy nearly going into the fracture, everyone and the first batch saved, the second batch abandoned. By the time I got to nearly went into the fracture, Maki's face had dropped a full degree colder.

By I decided to take the crystal sample first, Ash's eyebrow lifted a fraction. When I finished, the ward held a brief silence. Maki spoke first.

"You touched an anomalous crystal with unknown applications."

"Under controlled conditions," I said.

"You also ran a second recovery on unstable ground."

"That was after we'd moved zones, post-sampling, so in theory—""You also jumped out to pull him back."

"... If I hadn't, Roy would currently be part of the local geology." Maki stared at me. I stared back. A few seconds passed. Then Ash cut in, entirely ruining the moment and dragging the atmosphere back to something a sickbay could hold.

"How much water did you bring back?" he asked. I gave him the number, plus estimated purification yield, plus Aida's preliminary read on the Frost Crystal's possible value—not just energy storage, but a potential assist to the purification modules, assuming nobody blew up the lab first. Ash listened, then nodded once.

"Then some risk was worth taking." Maki turned her head toward him.

"Don't encourage her bad habits."

"I'm acknowledging the outcome," Ash said.

"And the outcome isn't bad."

"If he'd gone into the fracture, the outcome would've been very bad."

"Which is why he didn't." Sitting between them, I had a sudden, strong urge to shove both patients back into their pods and reboot the conversation from scratch.

"Both of you," I said.

"Could you debate whether I'm decisive or brain-damaged after I've left the room?" Jess had drifted up to the doorway at some point, still holding her ration drink—approved for an extra twenty milliliters—and slotted right into the gap.

"I vote for a third option." I looked over, wary.

"Which is?"

"Beautiful girl, excess death wish."

"Are you just bored today?"

"I wasn't the one who nearly went into a fracture. I've got less trauma to process." Someone in the ward actually laughed. Quiet, but real. The nearly invisible curve at the corner of Maki's mouth showed itself again, gone fast enough to be a trick of the light. I still saw it. It did more for me than any medical report could have. It meant she was coming back—inch by inch, from that stretcher and that blood, toward the version of her I actually recognized.

I finished reporting the water numbers and the updated supply corrections, then stood. Maki gave me one line.

"Next time you take a risk, think through your exit first."

"I did."

"Not fast enough."

"... Copy that, XO." Ash added, just before I turned to go:"Go read the mood on the ship. Water's back—morale's going to shift. Not necessarily only upward."

"That sounds like you're deliberately assigning me overtime."

"Acting command was always overtime." Also, unfortunately, very convincing. By the time I left Medical, the Yukikaze had already cleared the ice planet's gravity well and settled back onto the five-day sub-light run toward the Lawrence Repair Yard.

The ship-wide broadcast pushed the updated resource status: potable water reserves up, the harshest rationing tier temporarily suspended; the galley cleared to resume minimal hot food; medical and engineering priority allocations held; full-ship bathing still banned, but daily hygiene allowances had climbed from negotiating with death to technically civilized. Morale reflected it fast. The mess hall reported that tonight's ration soup would finally taste like something other than warm, salted memory.

A damage control crewman filled a clear cup with the first batch of purified water and held it up shouting this is freedom. Engineering—who'd always carried themselves like minor deities—immediately demanded a higher coolant allotment, with the exact smugness that made you want to hit them with a ration chart. But the shift ran deeper than that. Once people aren't quite as thirsty, they have room left over to think about other things. Like who did what. Who calls the shots.

Who maybe shouldn't be sitting where they're sitting. When I got back to the bridge, Roy and Lan were already back on rotation. Aida was uploading the Frost Crystal's preliminary analysis to the main database. Jess leaned against the XO's station and threw up a hand the second she saw me.

"Acting Captain. There are currently two schools of thought running around this ship."

"Give me the one that won't give me a migraine first."

"First: Lieutenant Hoshino's amazing, she actually got the water back."

"And the other?" Jess smiled with a very bad feeling attached.

"Second: Lieutenant Hoshino actually took people out there and dug up some glowing rock of unknown application." I closed my eyes and breathed in slow. Right. Reasonable. Very Yukikaze. Aida pushed her report onto the main screen, voice flat as if she were reading off tomorrow's menu.

"Technically, three schools of thought. There's a third: some people think the Acting Captain made a decisive call today. Others think the Acting Captain's starting to act like Captain Tobita." That assessment brought me zero joy.

"That's not a compliment," I said.

"Depends who you ask," Lan said. Roy cleared his throat from the helm, working hard to project neutrality, and gave himself away the moment he opened his mouth.

"Personally, I think if Hoshino hadn't been there today, I'd currently be reconsidering my life choices at the bottom of that fracture. So... yes. I support the current acting command structure."

"That sounds like you're hedging before a no-confidence vote," I said.

"Because I'd like to still be drinking tomorrow." A short, real laugh went around the bridge. But underneath it, I heard other things too. Some crew had already dropped Acting and just started calling me Captain. Some held onto the word deliberately, enunciating it hard. Some reports came in more deferential now, because today's results were sitting right there. Others went quieter in a way that felt like waiting—waiting to see whether the next time, I'd bring the ship home, or drag everyone into another fracture.

I stood in front of the main display, looking at the thin line of our course toward the repair yard, then at Aida's crystal spectra and the remaining water-cycle efficiency numbers. The ship was still moving forward. The water was holding, for now. Everyone was still alive, for now. But the fractures on this ship clearly didn't only open under ice fields. Some things had already started splitting, slowly, from the inside. And I was sitting dead center of it.

The faint sense of fracture on the bridge didn't grow out of anyone's mouth first. It grew out of a report. Here's how it happened: once we were back on the bridge, the course stable, the watch rotation reset, and Roy's soul fully crawled back into his body from the edge of that crack, I went to check Aida's preliminary results on the Frost Crystal—wanting to know whether the thing was a slightly dangerous rare mineral sample or expensive garbage about to turn the whole ship into a science education exhibit.

The moment I walked into Analysis, I knew the answer was landing on option three. Which meant: big trouble. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Analysis had been temporarily converted into half a materials lab. The Yukikaze was never short on the specific wisdom of squeezing use out of spaces after they'd been blown apart and bolted back together. The small room normally used for routine water and fuel purity checks now looked like a smuggled research site.

Three portable analyzers lined up side by side. Two containment boxes running on external power. The table buried under dense spectral charts, thermal waveforms, and materials models that dried my eyes just looking at them. Only two ceiling tubes were lit, one of them flickering. The whole scene looked like it wouldn't even blink if someone walked in and announced this was actually an illegal mod bay. Aida stood in the middle of the half-lit instrument glow.

Sleeves rolled to the elbow, a few loose strands at her forehead, that particular sharp gleam in her eyes that only shows up when a research mind fully engages. That gleam usually ends one of two ways: it saves the ship, or it generates fifteen incident reports afterward. I was hoping for the first.

"You finally made it," Aida said, not looking up, still adjusting the output curve on a containment box.

"I was starting to think that if you were five minutes later, I'd have to call the Acting Captain over the intercom to come appreciate a cosmic joke."

"Cosmic jokes are never funny," I said, crossing to brace both hands on the edge of her workbench.

"Especially when I'm the punchline. So?" Aida slid the second screen toward me.

"So this isn't a simple energy crystal."

"That tone usually comes right before please brace yourself."

"Then brace."

"... You're genuinely terrible at reassurance."

"I'm not Medical." I gave her a look, then dropped my eyes to the data. Honestly, at first glance, the charts just looked like a pile of sea urchins in a foul mood—peaks everywhere, frequency bands stacked on top of each other, none of the clean decay curve you'd expect from a normal material scan.

In its place, something almost responsive: feed it a trace of heat, and the surface would build up localized charge; push it a little harder, and certain internal layers would flare like something waking up, producing a delayed resonance. And the worst part—the more I looked at that resonance pattern, the more familiar it got. Not I saw this in a lecture once familiar. I recently got my brain nearly scrambled by this exact thing familiar. I looked up slowly.

"... This waveform." For once, Aida looked genuinely satisfied.

"Yes. That waveform."

"The Kamikaze engine?"

"More precisely, the pre-jump singularity field pulse residue from the Kamikaze engine." She pulled up two overlapping layers, stacking the residual parameters from our own jump incident directly on top.

"I thought it might be coincidence at first—the universe loves those, especially the lethal kind. So I ran three cross-checks, then pulled whatever's left of the Yukikaze's old power circuit backups that the system can still read. The match rate is disgustingly high."

"How high?"

"If I say eighty percent, you'll relax too much," Aida said. Two seconds of silence.

"... Ninety?"

"Ninety-three." I genuinely, sincerely wanted to swear. Analysis wasn't the prep deck, though—there was still a thin veneer of civilized behavior expected here—so I just pressed my hand into my forehead and felt a headache begin its very disciplined march along my temples.

"Hold on," I said.

"Let me get this straight. You're saying this pretty glowing glass branch we dug out of the ice doesn't just react to heat—it also has a near-identical resonance to the Yukikaze's Kamikaze engine's residual field?"

"Yes."

"And not just similar—high enough to make you wonder if someone quietly wrote this material into the original blueprint?"

"Yes."

"You saying that this calmly is really pissing me off."

"Because if I weren't calm, you'd probably order it thrown back into space."

"How did you know that option genuinely just crossed my mind?"

"Because I know you." That was slightly out of line. Not the blushing kind of out of line—the you've read me too accurately kind, which is its own specific irritation. I cleared my throat and pulled my attention back to the screen.

"Anything else?"

"Yes," Aida said.

"The bad news isn't finished."

"I had a feeling." She magnified the real-time monitoring curve for the fragment inside the containment box. Under full isolation, low temperature, minimal power, the faint blue-white glow inside was still moving—slowly. Not randomly. Following some internal logic, circling the crystal's edges loop by loop, maintaining a very small, very precise cycle.

"When I brought it close to a retired power coil housing," Aida said, "the response got stronger." I snapped my head up.

"You brought it near a power coil housing?"

"Decommissioned spare," she added quickly.

"Not the live main circuit. I'm not quite crazy enough to send this ship on a second dimensional vacation."

"The most unsettling word in that sentence is quite." Aida chose to ignore my objection and kept going.

"When it got close, the crystal's energy spectrum didn't amplify. It... calibrated."

"Calibrated?"

"Like it knew what beat it was supposed to match." She pointed at two lines slowly converging.

"Not passively excited. Actively hunting for frequency." Something went cold down my back. Not from the room temperature. From how much that sentence sounded like something that shouldn't belong in real life. Materials out here can be dangerous, rare, expensive enough to steal. The worst ones, always, are the ones that seem to know something.

Because once a piece of matter starts showing patterns beyond what its own material properties should allow, you have to start asking what's behind it—design, civilization, legacy tech, or the most irritating answer of all: a secret. And the Yukikaze was never short on secrets.

From that antique-war-crime of a Kamikaze engine, to the way Captain Tobita always looked like he knew more than he'd ever say plainly, to the ship's absurd talent for surviving things she had no business surviving—if someone told me right now that she was hiding an old-era installation most of her crew weren't cleared to know about, I'd probably just roll my eyes and ask, "Fine. Whose turn is it to get wrecked touching it this time?" I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I said, slowly:"You have a hypothesis." Not a question. Because Aida was already wearing the most dangerous expression a researcher can wear— I don't have proof yet, but I've started liking this possibility. She took a slow, careful breath, one last layer of packaging around a very large idea.

"I do."

"Say it."

"I don't think the Frost Crystal's a simple natural high-energy mineral." Her pace stayed even, but steady.

"It's more like a... selective-coupling medium. Something built to lock selectively onto specific field systems. The Kamikaze engine wasn't using it—it was designed to be compatible with it. And if you push that one step further—" She stopped. I narrowed my eyes.

"Don't you dare cliffhanger me right now."

"One step further, and the Kamikaze might not be the only system on this ship that's been waiting for this material," Aida said.

"There could be other systems. Other circuits. Or... something sealed off. Something that never activates under normal protocols." The room went quiet. Not silent—the instruments still hummed, the fans still spun low, the flickering tube still ticked—but all of it slid far away. The only thing left in my ears was that sentence, on repeat. Sealed off. Something on the Yukikaze that never activates. If Jess had said that, I'd have told her to lay off the cheap urban horror feeds.

If Roy had said it, I'd have wondered whether his soul was still stuck at the edge of that fracture. But it was Aida. Aida doesn't invent things for drama. Aida only scares people with data.

"Evidence?" I asked.

"No direct proof," she said honestly.

"Three points. First—the crystal's match to the old singularity field residue is anomalously high. Second—its response to the decommissioned coil housing isn't excitation, it's frequency-seeking. Third—" She pulled up another scan. An old structural schematic of the Yukikaze's sub-primary power deck. The chart was incomplete to begin with—whole sections eaten away by time and classification, leaving only blurred outlines.

But in one section flagged as unidentified auxiliary circuit, an old, corroded block, Aida had overlaid the crystal's response spectrum. A faint pattern resonance showed up. Not strong enough to draw a conclusion from. Plenty strong enough to ruin a night's sleep.

"There's no complete annotation on this circuit in the database," Aida said.

"I traced it down to the lowest clearance I have and found nothing but a handful of tags that look like they've been chewed by a dog. It's old—predates the current refit records."

"Does Captain Tobita know?"

"Probably," Aida said, carefully.

"Or—if anyone on this ship knows, he's the most likely candidate." I laughed once, internally, with no warmth in it. Wonderful. Another entry in the Tobita-probably-knows-but-is-currently-frozen-in-medical file. For an acting commanding officer, that particular distribution of intelligence was about as helpful as an exam that says please independently derive the theorem your professor never taught you.

I pulled a metal chair over and sat, staring at the diagrams, working through a problem more complicated than the data itself. Whether to report it. In theory, that shouldn't even be a question. As acting CO, anything touching core systems, unknown installations, potentially high-value materials, and a suspicious hidden legacy circuit should trigger a full report—up the chain, immediately.

Notify Maki and Ash, seal the sample, restrict access, document it clearly enough that everyone still breathing with clearance knows exactly what category of trouble we'd stepped in. In theory. The Yukikaze was currently living outside of theory. Maki and Ash were recovering, but not fully back on duty. Tobita was frozen solid. Ship morale had just barely warmed up because we'd brought back water and a decent surface haul. And on the bridge, voices about my command style were already starting to split.

If I laid this out flat right now, we wouldn't need an outside enemy. We'd grow three separate problems on our own. First: the technical faction would get excited immediately and start figuring out how to feed the crystal toward the power deck, just to see if the Yukikaze could squeeze a miracle out of it—and let's see if we can squeeze out a miracle is usually just another way of saying catastrophic explosion.

Second: the conservative faction would demand full containment, maybe even disposal, because unknown material plus hidden legacy installation reads exactly like the kind of combination that makes an incident report impossible to write cleanly. Third, and worst: the moment word spread through the ship, everyone would know we hadn't just dug up water on that ice planet—we'd dug up something that might be tangled up with the Yukikaze's own secrets. And that stops being a technical problem fast.

It turns political: who gets told, who doesn't, who's being kept in the dark again. And a new political problem was the one thing I couldn't afford right now.

"You're weighing whether to say anything," Aida said.

"Your observational skills are particularly annoying today."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I'm keeping it anyway." I leaned back and let out a long breath.

"If it were you—what would you do?" For once, Aida didn't answer right away. She set the stylus down and turned to look at me properly. The dim light of Analysis cut her usual cold, decisive features into something sharper.

"Pure technical judgment—I'd report it," she said.

"The level this touches is well past anomalous sample recovered. But given the ship's current state... I'd narrow the circle of who knows, first."

"How narrow?"

"You. Me. Lan, if avionics analysis needs her later." A pause.

"Whether Captain Kushima and Lieutenant Vander need to know isn't a technical question. That one's yours." That was a beautifully clean way to deflect responsibility. Classic Aida—even her way of kicking a decision back at me looked like scientific method. Unfortunately, she wasn't wrong. It really was mine. Because reporting up the chain right now wasn't filling out a form.

For me it meant choosing whether to hand over something that could change the Yukikaze's balance of power today, or hold it in my own hands a little longer—until I'd seen at least two moves further ahead before deciding who got to know. That was dangerous. It wasn't clean. But acting command was never going to be a clean job. I looked at the Frost Crystal, glowing quietly in its box.

It sat there like a nerve pulled out of a dead planet's bones—beautiful, cold, dangerous, and carrying an order to it that made your skin itch. It didn't feel like a trophy. It felt like something people would change their positions over, the second they caught a whiff of it. This wasn't a card to let the ship smell early. Not yet. I looked up.

"We don't file the full version," I said. Aida didn't look surprised—she'd probably already guessed.

"How do we log it?"

"Split it in two." I stood, and my voice settled into the decision.

"First copy goes into the main database. Standard write-up: anomalous crystalline sample recovered from the ice planet's surface, weak energy accumulation and thermal sensitivity, recommend containment for future study, provisionally classed medium-risk. Keep the collection process and basic safety parameters. No resonance data. No auxiliary circuit. No Kamikaze."

"And the second?"

"The second stays off the main net," I said.

"Offline backup, physical lock. Only you and I have access. Bring Lan in later if the avionics work needs her. Anyone else asks, we say the data's still insufficient." Aida nodded.

"The sample?" I glanced at the box.

"Split storage. Primary specimen stays here with you, minimal handling. Cut a surface flake and hand it to external materials analysis as a decoy."

"You're getting fluent with the word decoy, Acting Captain."

"No choice. Honesty runs too expensive on this ship." She let out a short breath—not quite a laugh, but close. In this room, it was enough to count as a declaration of shared guilt.

"One more thing," Aida said.

"What?"

"If this hypothesis is right, we should probably stop describing the Frost Crystal as... ordinary, on open channels." I frowned.

"Meaning?" She thought it over, then chose the less alarming phrasing.

"Meaning that outside the hull, this kind of thing probably doesn't stop at research specimen in anyone's value assessment." She said it flatly.

"The fewer people talking about it casually, the safer we are." I looked at her for two seconds. She looked back, wearing the exact expression of someone who'd already been as conservative as possible and expected me to fill in the rest myself. I did. And knowing exactly filled in what she meant made my stomach settle heavier. This wasn't a card to flip yet. Not until we understood what the Yukikaze actually was to it.

"Understood," I said, quietly. I pulled the full report into my private permission tier, added two layers of offline lock, then reviewed the simplified version bound for the main archive. Deleted the key resonance charts. Deleted the auxiliary circuit match. Deleted Aida's hypothesis—the one that, spoken aloud, would keep several categories of people up at night. What remained looked important enough to take seriously, but not enough to flip the table. Dishonest. Necessary.

The instant I hit seal, the crystal in the box flickered once. Faint. Brief. Like a quiet blink. I stared at it and got the sudden, unshakeable sense that this thing would bring its trouble to our door sooner or later, whether we asked for it or not. Burying it now didn't solve anything. It just pushed the problem down the line. But sometimes buying five days, three days, even a single watch rotation, on a ship this close to falling apart—that's a tactical win. I shut off the main display and straightened.

"That's as far as this goes for now," I said.

"Copy," Aida said.

"If the sample does anything new, I hear about it first. No solo high-power experiments." Aida's expression didn't move.

"That statement wounds my dignity as a technical officer."

"You have that?"

"I do. I just don't take it out often."

"Good. Keep it put away." I turned and walked to the door, hand already on the sensor plate, and stopped.

"Aida."

"Mm?" I didn't turn around. Just watched our blurred reflection in the panel.

"Don't let Jess know the full version yet." Aida actually laughed at that—a real one.

"Because Jess would demolish operational security through gossip?"

"No," I said.

"Because in three minutes flat, the whole ship would know we dug something beautiful and dangerous-looking out of the ice. And then it gets a lot harder to manage than the data ever was."

"Fair."

"One more thing."

"More?" Half a second of silence. Then I finished it.

"... Don't give Maki the full version yet either." Behind me, the room went quiet. Aida didn't answer right away. I knew what she was thinking—not doubt, confirmation. Confirming whether this decision came from command judgment, or from something a lot more personal, and a lot weaker. Honestly, even I couldn't say for certain it wasn't a little of both. Because the second I laid the whole thing out in front of Maki, she'd start taking it apart immediately—pressing, driving straight for the core. That's who she is.

Calm, precise, relentless. And right now, I still hadn't gotten my own thoughts in order. I wanted to hold onto a little more of the initiative. Even just a little. Finally, Aida said, quietly:"Understood." The sensor door slid open. I stepped back into the corridor. The lights out here were the same cold as always. The Yukikaze's engines gave the same low hum from deep in the hull—an old, badly wounded animal still stubbornly crawling forward. Five days of flight still ahead. The repair yard still far off.

The crew's loyalties still shifting, slowly. And now one more thing pressed into the dark by my own hand—a Frost Crystal specimen, small as a splinter, buried in the flesh for now, quiet for now, but guaranteed to hurt later. Walking back toward the bridge, I couldn't help thinking: Being Acting Captain was starting to feel more and more like a job made of keeping things from the entire ship. And the worst part was— I was starting to get good at it.