Chương 293: 123.Brief Respite 2

What woke me the next day wasn't a dream, and it wasn't my conscience. It was the mess hall. The Yukikaze's soundproofing has never been much good — normally the kind of thing that makes you want to file a complaint. Today it doubled as a crude, brutal, but effective wake-up call. The first thing to drill through was the metallic clatter of a tray hitting a table edge. Then the low groan of the coffee machine, sounding like it had been conscripted into service well past the end of its natural life.

Then voices — several people talking at once, near and far, blurring into a background that was a little too loud and, somehow, reassuring. When I opened my eyes, the first thought was: So I actually fell asleep. The second was: And I'm actually still alive. Not pessimism. Yukikaze-brand pragmatism. I rolled over. The blanket slipped a little off my shoulder, and only then, a beat late, did I remember the last sensation from the night before — Maki pulling it back up.

The memory surfaced and knocked me another thirty percent more awake, and I looked automatically toward the other bunk. Maki was already gone. The bunk was made neater than my entire life plan, with just enough trace of use to prove someone had actually slept there. She'd probably gotten up early — maybe early enough to buy me a few extra minutes of pretending the world could wait. Of course. That's exactly how she operates.

Quiet, disciplined, dangerous — and prone to doing small, seemingly forgettable things, at precisely the moments you're least equipped to survive them. I sat there for a few seconds, trying to sort yesterday, that kiss, that blanket, and we're still broke today into separate boxes. It didn't work. So I decided to head for the mess hall first and let coffee and heat reassemble me into something passably human. By the time I'd washed up and walked in, the place was already busy.

Morning in the Yukikaze's mess ran differently from night. At night it functioned as a grudging pause button, somewhere you could lower your guard for a while. In the morning it was more of a distribution point for reality itself — everyone still breathing had to pass back through here to collect their share of rations, noise, and whatever the day had decided to schedule for them. The first people I spotted were Roy and Lan.

More precisely: Roy, carrying two cups with visible care, walking toward Lan, who sat near the "window" — though there was nothing remotely romantic out there besides the internal hull projection and a stingy slice of deep-space monitoring feed — reading a datapad, barely lifting her head, as if she'd already known he was coming. Roy set one cup down by her hand.

"Yours," he said. Lan glanced at it.

"This isn't what I usually drink."

"I know." He answered fast.

"The dispenser you like is throwing a fit again today. I fought this one off the other machine. It's all they had left."

"You're fighting the coffee machine now?"

"Everything on this ship is worth fighting for these days, isn't it?" That answer was so reasonable I almost wanted to applaud him for it. Lan finally looked up at him properly. The look was mild, but it lingered half a beat longer than a simple thanks would require.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Roy sat down across from her, perfectly naturally, then added, "If it tastes bad, I'll go argue with the machine on your behalf." Lan's mouth moved, just slightly.

"Beat it first. Then we'll talk." The air between the two of them was subtle. Nothing dramatic, no pink-cloud sparkle, nothing blatant enough to make bystanders start whooping. More like two people who weren't especially good at stating care out loud, so they'd folded it instead into hot drinks, small favors, banter, and the very convenient excuse of I just happened to grab you one anyway. Ordinary. Which is exactly why it worked. Watching them, I felt myself almost smile.

So there were still people on this ship, half-driven insane by the universe, with enough spare bandwidth left to get territorial over a coffee machine. Good. Proof that not everyone's mind had fully cracked yet. Then I spotted Harvey. And immediately retracted that thought. Because roughly thirty percent of Harvey's soul had clearly moved out and wasn't coming back.

He sat in a corner, a cup of something dubiously colored and aggressively pungent in front of him, a datapad and handwritten notes spread out beside it. The circles under his eyes were deep enough to look like someone had snuck up while he slept and drawn two lines of maintenance-grade carbon under them. This wasn't ordinary overtime fatigue. This looked more like a man who'd tried to physically brawl a reactor's data set using nothing but willpower, and neither side had won.

I walked over and sat down across from him.

"Still alive, huh." He lifted his head. When he saw it was me, something close to relief crossed his face.

"For now."

"Congratulations."

"Thanks." He drank from the cup, voice rough as sandpaper.

"If that helium-hydrogen reactor hands me three more sets of unreasonable interface parameters today, I'm not making any promises." I glanced at the data spread in front of him. Curves, interface models, power nodes, thermal projections — enough density to give anyone a headache just from looking.

"How's it going?" Harvey went quiet for two seconds.

"We've upgraded from 'can this even be installed' to 'it might be installable, but whether the Yukikaze actually wants to keep living afterward is a separate question.'""That sounds promising."

"Is your definition of promising different from everyone else's?"

"Can't help it. This is what all our good news looks like lately." Harvey's mouth tugged sideways, like he was trying to laugh, and sleep deprivation cut the attempt off halfway through. That's when another voice dropped in from my right.

"Morning, Shimo." My shoulders locked before I even turned my head. Jess stood there with a tray, wearing an expression of complete, untroubled ease — ease so convincing it was suspicious, as if nothing had happened, or as if she knew exactly how much that particular nothing-happened performance would rattle me. In some very specific sense, this woman is my natural predator. She set the tray down and slid into the seat beside me like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

"Sleep okay last night?" There it was. Exactly that kind of question. Sounds normal. Sounds polite. Could almost pass for genuine concern. But coming out of Jess's mouth, my brain automatically swerved toward the least broadcast-appropriate territory available. I'd meant to answer with a calm, simple fine.

Instead, the second our eyes met — that faint trace of amusement in hers — the first thing my brain served up was Maki's hand pulling the blanket over my shoulder last night, immediately followed, like a scheduling conflict, by Jess's damned friend kiss. The two memories started openly brawling somewhere behind my eyes, and I nearly turned breakfast into a live broadcast of my own internal collapse. In the end I had to force my facial muscles back into their standard configuration through sheer effort.

"... Yeah."

"Oh?" Jess propped her chin on one hand, studying me.

"Then why do you look like something's been chasing you through your dreams all night?" I nearly choked on the breath I'd just taken. Harvey, with commendable wisdom, dropped his eyes back to the datapad and committed fully to impersonating a table. Roy and Lan were still talking quietly on the other side of the room, paying us no attention whatsoever. Good. The universe was still willing to leave me a little dignity.

"Lately it feels like something's chasing me every single day," I said. Jess laughed, just a little. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Fair enough." She didn't push it any further. Which, somehow, unsettled me more than if she had. If she'd kept digging, I could've hidden behind the bickering. Her letting it drop cleanly, right there, made it feel uncomfortably like she really had only come over to check whether I'd survived the night. That kind of care — not big enough to make a scene over, not small enough to shrug off — landed exactly where it was hardest to bear.

I was just reaching for my cup when a small pocket of quiet opened up near the mess hall entrance. That usually means one of two things. Either someone's dropped something. Or someone's walked in who makes everyone sit up a little straighter without meaning to. This time, clearly, it was the second. Ash walked into the mess.

He looked even more like the acting captain today than he had last night — not because his expression had hardened, but because that particular combination sat on him at once: hasn't slept enough, but has already worked out the ship's next move regardless. It suited him. Or, unfortunately, it suited him. He didn't climb up on anything. Just walked to the center of the mess and let his eyes move across everyone there.

"Everyone — don't take too long over breakfast," he said. Not loud. Perfectly clear.

"Relevant personnel, report to the forward briefing compartment in ten minutes." The air in the mess tightened, just a notch. Ash glanced down at his datapad and added, "The preliminary reactor assessment is in. And we need to finalize our next resupply and course adjustment." Right. So much for a relaxed morning. The Yukikaze, once again, proving that she never lets anyone finish a single meal in peace. I looked at Ash, then down at my cup, and landed on one very plain thought. Good. New day, new trouble.

And this time, it's the kind that comes bundled with a reactor and an ore shortage. Ten minutes later, still carrying the taste of unfinished coffee and faces that hadn't gotten enough sleep, we filed into the forward briefing compartment. The Yukikaze's forward briefing compartment was never spacious. It barely passed for a proper tactical briefing room on a normal day.

Cram all of us into it at once, and the whole atmosphere turned into something between a semi-legal, sleep-deprived student council meeting and a collective case of malnutrition. Datapads littered the table. The wall projector was already warming up. The air smelled of cheap coffee and the dry chill of the metal bulkheads, along with something harder to name — the particular resignation of people who all know nothing good is coming, and are sitting down to hear it anyway.

By the time I walked in, Aida was already there, posture so perfect it was hard to believe last night's terrifying senior — the one who'd smiled while explaining how to wring someone dry and toss them like a rag — had ever existed. Harvey sat diagonally across from her, his dark circles even more complete than they'd been at breakfast, the whole of him looking like a coroner's report freshly dragged out of a set of reactor data.

Roy and Lan sat not too close and not too far apart, each with a half-finished drink in front of them — the distance calibrated with the precision of two people who both refuse to admit they care, while both remaining remarkably good at leaving room for each other. Jess came in half a step behind me, with enough spare energy to arch an eyebrow at me — which left me no choice but to develop a sudden, intense interest in the mounting bolt in the corner. Maki sat down beside me. She looked exactly like herself today.

Which was precisely why it felt like something was wrong. Because I already knew: when this woman is genuinely in trouble, the first symptom is never panic, never disorder. It's going flatter. Straighter. More like nothing happened at all. Like a wound bandaged too neatly — which only makes you wonder how much is bleeding underneath. Ash waited until most people had settled, then stepped to the front. No wasted words — even the standard acting-captain preamble had been compressed down to almost nothing.

"Let's begin." The projection came up. The first thing to hit the screen was the target planet's data. One glance, and I frowned on instinct. If the last frozen planet had been a silent white bone that would crack your breath just looking at it, the thing hanging in front of us now looked like a slab of metallic viscera that hadn't finished cooling. Dark red. Scorched black.

The surface was scored with the channel-lines cooled lava leaves behind, like the ground itself had been slashed open in every direction by a red-hot blade. There was nothing "gentle" about the whole planet — only exposed metal veins, huge blackened rock crystal formations, and an atmosphere trembling and warped by the heat. Even the sky looked unclean — glittering metallic particulates suspended in the atmosphere, catching the star's light and throwing back an ominous dark-red glow.

Like someone had stitched a crematorium to an open-pit mine and then, almost as an afterthought, dropped an apocalypse filter over the whole thing. I stared at the image, and exactly one line surfaced in my head. This didn't look like a place you go to mine. It looked like a place purpose-built for punishing guilty souls. Ash scrolled the data down.

"Our next destination is a Scorching Cadmium Planet." A briefing panel opened along one side of the screen, rows of data unfolding.

"Primary resources include cadmium, phosphorus, magnetized ferrite, and copper." Ash kept going.

"Environmental risk isn't low. Daytime surface temperature runs 164. 2 degrees. Nighttime, 42. 1. Atmosphere is heavy in sulfur and high-concentration metallic dust. Gravity coefficient, 1. 25G. In plain terms — better suited to working you to death than the ice field was."

"That's a thoughtful translation," I muttered. Maki didn't look at me, just answered flatly: "At least you understood it." I'd been loading up a comeback when Ash's next line shoved it straight back down my throat.

"In addition, the planet's storm activity is extremely unstable. A 'Thermal Limit Storm' can break out at any time. When one hits, visibility drops to near zero, and temperature can spike to 320 degrees in an instant." The briefing compartment went quiet for a second. Then Jess offered her honest assessment.

"... This isn't mining. This is signing up for a specific way to die, isn't it?"

"Well said," I chimed in immediately.

"Last time we were candidates for freezing to death. Today we've been upgraded to candidates for roasting alive. Our class curriculum really does aim for well-rounded development." Aida glanced up at me.

"If you can bring the cadmium ore back while the storm's roasting you, I'll appreciate your sense of humor a great deal more."

"Why does that sentence sound like you're genuinely planning to let me roast?"

"Depends how you perform." This woman really is just as terrifying as ever. Aida at full, normal capacity is more dangerous than Aida off-balance. Ash, as though he'd fully expected exactly this reaction, simply switched the display to the tasking chart.

"Collection objectives fall into three categories," he said.

"First, cadmium and magnetized ferrite — top priority, for follow-on engineering work and equipment repair. Second, copper and phosphorus, as reserve stock. Third, if site conditions allow, additional thermal capacitor cores." Harvey cut in immediately.

"Grab the thermal capacitor cores if we can — they'll likely be useful later. Especially if we really do go through with the helium-hydrogen reactor. A lot of the surrounding buffer and adapter designs are going to need alternatives." Halfway through, he seemed to remember he'd been up all night, and rubbed at his eyes — which only made the dark circles underneath look even more like a suicide note. Ash nodded.

"So this isn't a simple resupply run. It's a landing with a clear maintenance objective." The projection switched to a terrain model. Dark-red relief rolled across the display, several channels of cooled lava cutting across the surface like scorched blood vessels, certain vein clusters bright enough to hurt to look at. Not the pretty kind of bright. The kind that says: something's buried in there, but you have to survive long enough to reach it.

Watching it, I found myself thinking the frozen planet at least had a kind of clean cruelty to it. This Scorching Cadmium Planet was different. Its pressure felt cruder, dirtier — like the whole environment was just openly saying: welcome to hell, don't forget to bring ore on your way out. Ash started assigning teams.

"Landing operations split into three groups. Team One, primary resource collection — myself, Aida, Shimo, Jess, Roy." I raised an eyebrow. Right. Of course I'm on it. The Yukikaze had lately developed a very particular kind of trust in me — the kind that says: wherever things look most likely to go wrong, that's probably where Hoshino Shimo gets sent. Ash didn't give me time to complain.

"Aida handles on-site vein reading and value assessment. Shimo, logging and real-time calls. Jess, perimeter watch and mobile support. Roy, ground vehicle and extraction pacing. I run collection priority and comms."

"I thought you'd add 'tracking who gets cooked first' to the job description," I said.

"No need to track it," Ash said, perfectly calm.

"You usually report it yourself." Someone in the room laughed. Great. Now even the acting captain has learned to casually treat me as a consumable resource.

"Team Two, shipboard technical support and reactor prep — Harvey, Victor, D." D barely reacted, just crossed his arms, unsurprised by the assignment: babysit two people who might dismantle the ship. Harvey wore the complicated expression of someone thinking: thanks for not sending me to pick up rocks in a 320-degree storm, but staying on the ship doesn't exactly feel like the safe option either. Ash added, "D — watch the people, and watch the doors. If Victor's in a good mood, let him take things apart.

If he's not, your priority is keeping everyone around him alive." D answered with one word.

"Understood." Very him. Short, functional, and carrying the faint undertone of an impending, fully legal act of violence.

"Team Three, bridge and logistics standby — Maki, Lan, Akari." I glanced sideways at Maki without meaning to. Her posture didn't change. But under the table, her hand made one very small motion — not the kind that comes from losing composure, just her thumb brushing lightly against the corner of her datapad, then swiping some field I couldn't see from my angle down and out of sight. Tiny. Small enough that probably only someone who'd been watching her the whole time would have caught it.

And I happened to be exactly that someone. That small motion made something in my chest sink, just slightly. Because I was almost certain she hadn't just been turning a page. She was hiding something — or at minimum, making sure that field didn't sit on the shared briefing display any longer than it had to. The Kushima family. Those three words jumped into my head immediately. Was there a Kushima-adjacent supply line threaded into the route data somewhere?

Some old facility near the target planet that used to be a Kushima Heavy Industries subcontractor? Or something simpler — a name, an old format, an abbreviation she recognized at a glance, that she didn't want Ash or anyone else casually noticing right now? I didn't know. But I'd seen that small motion, and I'd seen her recover the very next second as if nothing had happened at all. Maki looked up, and her eyes landed squarely on mine. No warning. No explanation. Just one brief look.

The meaning was perfectly clear. Not now. I swallowed whatever I'd been about to say. Ash was still going.

"Maki, you hold overall bridge command. Lan, weather monitoring and storm-warning refresh. Akari, supply inventory and extraction windows. If it comes to it, the three of you make the final call before the ground team goes dark."

"Understood," Maki said. Her voice was completely steady. Steady enough that the small motion a second ago might as well have been something I imagined. Lan raised a hand and threw a weather chart onto a split screen, her tone calm enough to make me want to have "thank you for preserving this ship's last remaining scientific sanity" engraved on a plaque for her.

"Before a thermal storm, metallic dust concentration rises first, and the sky darkens. Surface sensors can pick up the anomaly roughly seven to twelve minutes ahead of time — no guarantee it's accurate every time. Ground team: if you see a solid band of dark red flashing on the horizon, don't think. Withdraw immediately." Roy let out a low whistle.

"So basically, 'if you see hell open its mouth, please run a little faster.'" Lan didn't so much as blink.

"That's exactly what it means." Too good an answer. Even I couldn't help the corner of my mouth moving. Ash pulled up the last page.

"Landing's scheduled around local night. Daytime's too hot. Nighttime runs forty-two degrees — at least that's within the range where the suits work more or less comfortably. Or, more accurately, hurt less."

"Forty-two degrees, presented like a gift," I muttered.

"Our standards really have been in continuous decline lately." Jess laughed quietly beside me.

"If you can't hold up out there, I can pull you through." I didn't even turn my head.

"Thanks. Lately I'm more worried that you touching me just makes my head run hotter." She went quiet for a beat. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the corner of her mouth lift.

"Oh," she said.

"So you are scared." I decided to shut up. Keep talking, and I'd need to find somewhere to bury myself before the briefing even ended. Ash, clearly uninterested in managing our residual adolescent aftershocks, knocked once on the table and dragged everyone's focus back.

"That's the outline. All teams, start prep now. Ground team, top up the thermal shielding mesh and swap filter cartridges, assemble in the lower staging bay in thirty minutes. Shipboard team, begin round two of the reactor verification concurrently. Anyone with questions, now." A short silence followed. No one spoke. Not because there were no questions. Because there were too many, and the only way through them was to start moving first. I took one last look at the Scorching Cadmium Planet on the main screen.

Dark red, charred black, scorching, mineral-rich, toxic, high-gravity, with a complimentary limit storm thrown in to boil you and your eyesight together. Next to the ice planet, it felt like the universe was making a deliberate point: it never runs short of ways to kill you. The only variable is which one you draw this time. And just as everyone stood to break up, I heard Maki close her datapad, very quietly. The sound wasn't loud.

But I still caught the almost-invisible pause in her fingers as she pulled her hand back.