Chương 285: 119.Long-Range Reconnaissance 1

I didn't sleep at all that night. If I told the medical officer that, she'd probably just give me a flat look and write in my chart: Patient reports subjective insomnia. Cause suspected self-inflicted. Unfortunately, she probably wouldn't be wrong. The second-class cabin was small. The ventilation hummed steady. Deep in the bulkheads, the Yukikaze's half-repaired vibration came and went—the sound of an old beast letting someone stitch its wounds while still grumbling I'm still alive from somewhere in its throat.

I lay on the bunk. I closed my eyes. I even tried counting my breaths, counting the rhythm of the hull welding, counting exactly how many lives I had left to burn. None of it worked. Because the moment I closed my eyes, my brain automatically queued up its own screening. First reel: the Kushima Heavy Industries helium-hydrogen core, cold-silver casing resting on the heavy-load rack, like a heart far too valuable to be sitting in a pirate ship's gut.

Second reel: Maki pulling me back into the shadow of the deep refit dock, her hand against my shoulder, her voice dropping low to say that's not a civilian-spec output. Third reel—... Third reel was just playing dirty. Jess's arms around me. That kiss—short as a theft, light as if she hadn't quite dared admit to herself she was doing it before she'd already done it. It felt smuggled into my head like contraband, and no matter how hard I tried to act unbothered, it kept surfacing exactly when it shouldn't.

Eventually I gave up faking sleep. I rolled over, sat up against the wall, buried my face in my hands, and seriously considered whether a functioning adult was allowed to write off an entire night's sleep because someone had touched her lips for half a second. The answer was yes. Especially when that same adult might be climbing into a recon craft the next day to tail a pirate ship while watching her executive officer nudge the whole situation somewhere worse. That gave the write-off a lot more texture.

I think I finally blacked out a little before dawn. I'd slept for some unmeasured stretch of time before a knock dragged me out of a shallow, incoherent, thoroughly irresponsible dream.

"Shimo." Maki's voice, from outside. No second knock. No third demand. Just the one. That was enough. My body was moving before my brain finished booting—some deep reflex snapping me upright the moment I heard her. By the time I registered that my hair looked like it had lost a fight with static and my face was probably worse than last night's meat patty, the door was already half open. Maki stood there. She was already in field gear.

Not the crisp bridge uniform, but a dark flight suit built for engine rooms and cramped cockpits—waist cinched tight, cuffs sealed at the wrist, jacket slung over one shoulder, a thin terminal in her hand. The corridor light cut clean along her profile, throwing into sharp relief the kind of composure I was never going to learn in this lifetime. And me—something dragged out of an old blanket. Good. Educational contrast. She looked at me. Just once.

"You didn't sleep," Maki said. Not a question. I badly wanted to play dumb. My current state probably couldn't fool even the Yukikaze's most forgiving repair drone.

"Slept a little," I insisted.

"How long?"

"... Subjectively, about ten minutes." Maki was quiet for a second.

"Admirably honest."

"Is that a compliment?"

"No." She held out the terminal.

"Hook moved up his departure. Filed for undocking twenty-seven minutes ago. Cleared outer-port inspection fifteen minutes ago. Ash is holding the Yukikaze in place. We launch in the Keiun first." I looked down at the terminal. A freshly updated station-corridor schematic, Hook's raider's initial departure vector, and the Keiun-21's launch-readiness status. At the bottom, a note from Ash—short, and irritatingly calm: Shadow only. Do not engage. If Imperial patrol units intervene, observe first. Good.

It was actually starting. I looked up, and whatever sleepiness was left burned off clean.

"Hangar in five." Maki looked at me, and added one more line.

"Wash your face." Me: "..."

"Also," she went on, same flat tone, "if you throw up in my back seat from sleep deprivation, I'll strike you off the Keiun's rest-rotation roster. Permanently."

"Executive Officer, that threat is genuinely inhumane."

"It works. That's enough." She turned and walked off. No wasted motion. I stared at her back for two seconds, dragged a hand through my hair, muttered "understood," and bolted for the washroom to reassemble myself into something like a human being. Five minutes later, zipping my flight jacket up to my chest, I had to admit: worse than the lack of sleep was the fact that I was, despite it all, starting to look forward to this. Which was bad. Anticipation usually meant risk.

But that seemed to be the fuel this crew ran on regardless. The Yukikaze's hangar had a strange kind of quiet to it right now. Not because nothing was moving. Quite the opposite. Repair arms still clamped to both flanks. Deck crew running final checks on the output lines. Akari's people crouched under the fuselage doing sensor calibration. From the engine section somewhere aft, Victor's voice carried—a metal tyrannosaur lecturing the next generation on the meaning of civilization.

But all of that noise was pressed down under something bigger. The Keiun-21. Or more precisely: the Yukikaze's modified high-recon Keiun. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Parked in the center of the hangar, it didn't look "pretty." It wasn't supposed to. It looked like a long blade ground down cold, thin, and quiet. The wingless, spindle-shaped lifting-body fuselage stretched lean, its coating dark enough to swallow light.

No unnecessary angles on the shell—only the lines forced into existence by sensors, heat management, and silent running, like the musculature of something restrained to the point of cruelty. The two low-emission pulsed-ion thrusters sat cold and silent at the tail. Along the spine rose a mast—unshowy, but unmistakably not standard carrier-aircraft equipment: the high-frequency gravitational-wave antenna mast. The whole thing didn't read as a fighter.

It read as a cold-blooded organ built for lying in deep space, watching, keeping score, and bringing the intel home for someone else to do the killing. I stood at the hangar entrance for two seconds. My first thought was: This thing really suits Maki.... No. What was I even thinking right now. Ash stood near the nose, terminal in hand, Lan and Akari beside him.

Jess was there too, tablet in her arms, wearing the expression of someone who had absolutely not stolen a kiss from anyone last night and was fully entitled to participate in mission prep today. The moment I saw her, my stride caught, just slightly. Of course she saw me too. Our eyes met, and—rare for her—she froze for half a beat before hugging the tablet tighter to her chest, looking exactly like a habitual offender trying very hard to act like she hadn't done anything.... Good.

At least she wasn't entirely unaffected either. That knocked my private implosion down by about half a percent on the humiliation scale. Then Ash looked up and dragged me out of that unproductive internal monologue.

"You look terrible," he said.

"Thanks. That really didn't need public confirmation."

"I just need to know whether to strap you into the back seat."

"Did you all agree beforehand to use my sleep debt as entertainment today?" Akari leaned half out from under the fuselage, cold as ever.

"Not entertainment. Risk assessment."

"You too?"

"Because right now you genuinely look like someone who starts questioning the meaning of life halfway through a high-G turn." I was about to argue when Maki walked over from the other side, a helmet and two wrist-control modules in hand. She tossed one straight at me.

"Why are you still standing there?" she said.

"Hook isn't going to fly slower because you didn't sleep."

"That's completely correct and completely without mercy."

"You can process mercy when we're back." Damn it. Every line today, straight to the target. I snapped on the wrist module and followed her toward the boarding ladder, asking as we walked:"What's the Yukikaze doing?" Ash pushed the final updated lane chart to both our terminals before answering.

"Yukikaze holds berth. Holds repair pace. Holds negotiation pace," he said.

"I've already sent the Gaffer's side a new materials-price dispute. Enough to keep them arguing with me all morning instead of asking why Hook left early." I couldn't help looking at him.

"You really do have the energy of someone who buys you dinner while quietly emptying your ledgers."

"Thank you."

"That's still not a compliment."

"I know." Lan, at the comms terminal, added without looking up.

"Perimeter monitoring shows Hook's ship clear of the main port's masking band, now in gray lane tier three. No direct intersection with Imperial patrol hot zones yet, but two common patrol routes run near his forward vector."

"Meaning," I said, pulling on my gloves, "the Empire might just happen to take an interest in him." This time Maki answered.

"If the luck holds. Yes." Her expression didn't change at all when she said it. But I could hear exactly how much of that "luck" had human hands behind it. I felt a brief, entirely sincere pang of sympathy for Hook. Just a small one. Pirate captains tend to be other people's misfortune by trade. Getting flagged by Maki Kushima specifically just upgraded it to a more refined class of misfortune. Jess finally forced herself to speak.

"Shimo." My spine tightened before I even turned.

"... What?" She held out the tablet, movements normal, expression working hard at normal, ears betraying her anyway.

"Current usable Frostcrystal allocation and our committed floor," she said.

"If it comes to negotiating with Hook—whether that's for his life, the core, or whether his mouth stays on his face—memorize this first." I took it. Our fingers brushed at the edge of the tablet. Just once. And my brain, uselessly, immediately flashed back to last night's stolen kiss.... I'm doomed. I was in no state to handle any contact involving human body temperature right now. Luckily, Jess didn't push it. She just said, low enough that only I could hear:"You can yell at me when we're back." I gave her a look.

Jess had the nerve to give me a smile—short, guilty, and infuriatingly a little bit endearing. Unforgivable. The kind of unforgivable that waits until you're busiest and pokes exactly where your guard is thinnest. I let out a quiet huff, filed the debt away, and turned to follow Maki up the Keiun's boarding ladder. Up close, the inside of the Keiun-21's cockpit looked even more like a premium coffin built to slowly grind away human sanity than it had from across the hangar floor. Tandem seating.

Space cut down to something almost confrontational. Pilot forward, recon/aux-control aft. The two seats sat close, front to back, with nothing wasted between them. Every panel, every restraint, every fold-out compartment screamed the same thing: this isn't for comfort. This is for staying alive long enough to finish the job. I settled into the back seat. My shoulders had barely a polite margin against the side panels. Passive radar and comms to my left, environmental controls and rear interface to my right.

Further back sat the rest-module and low-power hibernation pod I'd only ever seen in spec sheets before. With the canopy still open, I could see the fold-out door of the compact recycling galley-and-head unit, and two VR visors hanging on the wall. The whole layout suggested the designers had assumed from the start that this craft wasn't built for "a short errand"—it was built for two unlucky people to take turns staying conscious and going quietly insane in deep space.

"Like it?" Maki asked from the front seat, locking her harness without looking back.

"If you mean the cockpit," I said, locking my own restraints, "it feels like a high-spec military tin can."

"That's a compliment."

"What if I said it feels like stuffing two people into a metal coffin for discipline training?"

"Also a compliment." I clicked my tongue. This woman really was built for this airframe. Even making small talk, she had the same cold, no-waste efficiency as the equipment around her. She brought up the main control. The cabin lights dropped a level, and the display panes lit up together. The Keiun's system tones weren't the type that tried to sound heroic—just short, restrained low-frequency pulses, like someone leaning in close to say quietly: All right. Come back alive. Akari's voice cut in on external comms.

"Attitude thrusters zeroed. Passive array self-check green. Cold-body loop temperature drop nominal. If you two absolutely must flirt out there today, please don't use my aircraft as the venue." I nearly choked on my own breath.

"Who would even—" Maki answered before I could finish, perfectly calm.

"She won't have the stamina for it."

"Executive Officer?" I stared at the back of her seat.

"Did you just preheat my dignity along with the engines?" Akari's dry laugh crackled over the line.

"Good. Still enough spirit left to function." The link cut. I sat there with heat climbing my face and no counter-argument worth deploying, so I just snapped my helmet on and drove straight into my own systems check.

"Rear module online. Passive neutrino array on standby. Gravitational-wave antenna mast feedback nominal. Silent comms channel prepped." I read them off one by one, forcing my brain back onto the mission track. Maki ran through the front-seat checklist at a steady pace.

"Primary control online. Meteor Low-Emission Pulse Ion Thruster on standby. Kaiten RCS, 32-point self-check complete. Cold-body stealth loop entering pre-chill." Her cadence wasn't fast. Just precise. Every word landed exactly where it belonged. Strangely, just listening to her run through it smoothed down some of the frayed edges I'd been carrying all night—the sleep deprivation, Jess's ambush, a whole night's worth of undigested feelings piling up in a heap. Probably a very unhealthy kind of dependency.

But this wasn't the time to examine it. The external clamps released. The hangar's guide lights turned green. Ash's final transmission cut in.

"Keiun, once you clear the bay, don't use the main lane. Cut out along the Yukikaze's starboard shadow. Hook doesn't know he's growing a tail yet. Don't disappoint him." Maki answered.

"Copy." I added from the back.

"And if we actually run into an Imperial patrol out there?" Ash's answer had no romance in it whatsoever.

"Then we see who they bite first." I laughed once. Good. Very Yukikaze. The next second, the Keiun-21 shivered lightly, sliding free like a fish holding its breath as it left deep water. Clearing the Yukikaze's hangar, I caught our old ship through the side observation window, sitting quiet in her berth, still wearing the wreckage of mid-repair like a hospital patient. But I knew that was just skin. Right now she was curling into the dark, waiting for the right moment to open her mouth.

We were the blade inside that shadow. The Keiun never lit its main drives. It slid along the outer berth structure using only cold-gas nozzles and low-emission mode. Lawrence Shipyard's iron-bound asteroid heart turned slowly past the window—massive, rough, saturated with the smell of the black market, like a monster pretending to sleep. From this angle, it looked even more like something that swallowed secrets one layer at a time. We slipped out along its shadow. Silent. Cold. Almost no thermal trace.

On the tactical display, the Keiun might as well have been a sliver of ice drifting slowly through the dark.

"Hook acquired," I said, eyes on the rear sensor window, my voice dropping automatically.

"Within 1. 8 AU. Main reactor output unstable. Two micro-corrections on the secondary drives. Heading drifting toward the outer gray lane." Maki didn't answer right away. She made one light attitude correction. The Keiun's frame turned half a degree in the dark, almost soundlessly, as if pinched between her fingers. It didn't feel like a maneuver so much as her knowing exactly where an invisible seam was and simply letting the Keiun thread through it.

"Pull back point-three," she said.

"Copy." I adjusted the sensor window, marked it, and became, very clearly, aware of something. All that mess from last night—the fog of no sleep, the tangle of feelings—had been overwritten by something else. Not gone. Just forced to yield. Yielding to the dark, to the mission, to the thin thread trailing behind Hook's ship, and to the woman in the front seat flying this entire aircraft like a cold blade.

I took a breath and locked my eyes on the target ahead, pulling away from the station, still unaware it had already been caught.