Chương 329: 140.Kick Its Ass 2

An Imperial submarine that usually lurked in a higher-dimensional gutter, specializing in taking bites from the shadows, had just been shaken partway into three-space and forced to show a segment of the skeleton it never meant to. The aft half of the hull was still trying to fold back in, dark plates grinding inward, like a wolf in a trap still shoving for the ditch with half its body. I'd already pulled the Type-0 up and away just like Maki ordered.

By the book, my job now was to clear the strike axis, stay out of the big guns' way, and be a good little underage pilot who'd just completed her first live ordnance drop and really shouldn't start doing anything unexpected. The problem was — The Seawolf was still moving. Not just the I'm hurt twitch. It was still actively trying to fold itself back together.

The aft segments, those unnatural dark planes, were pulling inward, exactly like a wolf that had taken a stick to the head and still wasn't ready to give up on the hole behind it. I watched it and felt the skin at the back of my head prickle. Not fear. Okay, some fear. But mixed in with it was something more troublesome — a tactical instinct that wouldn't sit still. If we let it slip now, it would be back. And next time, it wouldn't be this stupid.

"…It's still trying to turn the board," I heard myself say. Jess answered instantly.

"Yeah. That's exactly the kind of bastard it is. Want me to log that line in the battle report?"

"No thanks. The report's filthy enough." While I was talking, my hands moved first. The Type-0 traced a short arc along the outer line. I pushed the nose down and sent the whole frame back toward the half-exposed hull. The line went dead quiet for a beat. Then Roy spoke first.

"…Hoshino, what are you doing?" He didn't raise his voice. Still sounded relatively calm. Which, coming from him, translated as: you have three seconds to explain yourself before I assume water has gotten into your cockpit.

"Going back to bite its tail," I said.

"That is not standard tactical terminology," Aida noted, cold.

"But the meaning is comprehensible," I said, eyes fixed on the Seawolf's hull, still writhing through its internal folds.

"It's still ringing from getting its bell rung and its attention's on the Yukikaze. I'm going to harass it. Make it split its focus, make it light up its AA, make it mess up its own retraction posture trying to chase me. As long as it drifts my way, more of the hull will show. Then I can hit the heat sinks and engine mouth from below." A brief silence. Then Jess let out a low whistle.

"Wow. First live sortie and you're already pulling a feint. Shimo, that's some delinquent energy."

"I just really hate things that hide and act smug about it." Akari came in fast: "Viable. The Seawolf's gravity signature is refocusing. If the Type-0 cuts in from below, chasing her will force it to delay its secondary fold."

"Risk," Ash said. Just that one word.

"High," Aida answered instantly.

"Especially for a first live sortie."

"Thank you. Your confidence is like a frozen steel railing in January."

"But not impossible," Aida finished.

"As long as she doesn't try to play hero on her own." I clenched my jaw. She'd hit that one on the nose too. There had been a tiny, stupid moment in there where I'd thought — if I can really cripple it now, maybe when I get back to the bridge even the student council types will have to blink twice when they look at me. …Great. Adolescent pride really was dead weight on a battlefield. Maki dropped onto my private line.

"Shimo."

"Here."

"Go," she said.

"But you're not going out there to prove yourself. You're going to pin it down for the Yukikaze." My throat tightened.

"…Got it."

"And one more thing."

"Yeah?"

"If you die on your first live sortie, it will be extremely inconvenient for me."

"What kind of tenderness is that supposed to be."

"About the best you're getting," she said. …Fantastic. That particular brand of body-temperature-hidden-in-a-scalpel phrasing worked entirely too well on me. Infuriating. Ash closed it.

"Approved. Type-0 Unit One — authorized for independent harassment attack. Objective priority: harass, disrupt, force more physical exposure. Engaging in a slugging match is prohibited."

"Copy."

"And Hoshino," Ash paused, "come back alive." I almost lost my timing. What was with this ship today. One by one, at the exact worst possible moments, everyone suddenly decided to start talking like people. Were they trying to synchronize my arrhythmia on purpose? I jammed that ripple down and dragged all my focus back to the front. The Seawolf hung there. It still didn't have the kind of I am here presence normal ships did. Even dragged out this far, it looked like an error trying to keep a shape.

The bow was long and mean. The belly looked like interleaved layers of armor plates. Some edges flickered — damage, fold instability, or just parts of it that still resisted being locked into this three-dimensional prison. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. But it felt pain. That much I knew now. If it felt pain, we could keep hitting it. I pushed the Type-0 down and cut diagonally under the Seawolf's flank.

"Good angle, Shimo," Roy said, in that same calmly vicious tone.

"Hold it. Don't get greedy. It hasn't slotted you in as the primary threat yet. You should cherish the luxury of being underestimated."

"Copy. Thank you for the encouragement, Mr. Navigator. It sounds exactly like a curse."

"My pleasure." I nearly laughed. Good. If I could still complain that Roy sounded like a frozen ruler, I hadn't been scared empty yet. The enemy outline on the HUD grew. Up close, the Seawolf was even worse. At a distance it was a ghost; up close it looked like someone had deliberately turned the concept of sinister into fluid dynamics. The hull surface wasn't flat armor. It had many structures like convergence fins, heat-dissipation channels, and irregular grooves.

On a normal warship they'd just be conduits, panels, radiators. On a hyperdimensional submarine, all of them became: is that part going to suddenly open and bite me?

"Entering pulse-laser effective range," Akari reported.

"Shimo, go poke it with a small toothpick," Jess said.

"Let it know there's something more annoying than it is in this universe."

"That's rude. I like it." I swept the reticle across the chunks of exposed structure on the upper half of the Seawolf — the bits that hadn't made it all the way back inside yet — and thumbed the nose weapons over. The twin pulse-laser cannons on the Type-0's nose spat a hail of blue-white. Not main guns. Not decisive weapons. Not even a proper ship-to-ship loadout.

Perfect for chewing up fighters, sensors, and exposed mounts, but expecting them to punch through a sub's main armor in one go was like expecting a compass to skewer a tank — more romantic than physical. But I wasn't here to talk physics. I was here to be annoying. The first burst swept across the Seawolf's flank. Blue-white points danced along those misaligned plates and left a trail of small burns. Some deflected clean.

Some struck near the convergence fins the depth charges had just scrambled, forcing that area to flare with unstable dark light. No real damage. But it reacted. The Seawolf's hull, which had been contracting inward, shifted slightly toward me. Like a wolf that had been trying to crawl back into its den, then took a rock to the nose and couldn't resist looking back with its teeth bared.

"It turned!" Akari said immediately.

"Beautiful." Jess's voice sharpened another notch.

"Shimo, keep at it. Your sacred mission in life right now is to be the most annoying gnat it's ever met."

"I appreciate you finding such a sophisticated role for me." I laced another burst across it. Not aiming for pain this time. Aiming to drag its whole attention my way. The beams walked across what looked like a sensor cluster and a few exposed secondary-gun mounts, knocking its attitude off again for half a beat. Then it fired back. The first AA salvo cut across my port side, fast as someone slashing a bright line through the dark. The hair on my neck went up all at once.

If dropping the phase warhead into the slice had been a contest of nerve with an inhuman thing, this was the moment the fight actually started — because the other side had stopped being an abstract horror and started actively throwing fire in my face.

"AA fire online," Lan reported.

"I have eyes!" I all but yelled back.

"Excellent. Confirming pilot visual function intact," Lan said, perfectly calm. This woman really did have a knack for saying the most punchable things when other people were stressed. The second barrage chased up behind the first. I dropped the stick on reflex, the Type-0 knifing downward half a frame-length, and the fireline scraped just over the canopy. For a second, my heart rate hit something that shouldn't count as human.

My ears were full of my own blood, and my lips were pressed shut so hard they hurt — because if I opened my mouth, I was pretty sure what came out wouldn't be orders. It would be a scream.

"Don't dodge up!" Roy barked.

"Cut under her!"

"Copy!" I shoved the nose lower. The Type-0 became a thin blade flicked hard out from under the Seawolf's belly. The AA grid chased, but the new angle turned the enemy hull into its own shield. The whole thing felt exactly like how I used to duck out of the rain as a kid — not because the rain had stopped, but because I'd wedged myself under something bigger for a minute. Only this time, the "eaves" was the enemy's gut, and it could decide to jab a cannon downward whenever it pleased. …

Teenage life experiences were getting increasingly weird. The underside of the Seawolf was worse than the top. Or rather, more like a weak point. Shaken by the depth charges, and constantly twisting as it tried to return to higher dimensions, the belly still had several structural gaps clearly not yet closed. They didn't look like normal ships' clean armor seams — half-materialized fins, heat channels, and a few nodes that looked like fold junctions forced partially into three-space.

I almost knew it on first glance: that's it.

"Good angle, Shimo," Aida said, her tone still cold, but with the faintest note of finally being willing to give credit.

"If you're going to misbehave, at least misbehave in the right spot."

"Thank you. That's the highest compliment I've received today."

"I withdraw it." I laughed once, then flipped the weapons over to the Type-99. The roots of the Type-0's main wings gave a slight shudder, like two hounds released from their leashes at the same moment. The next second, the Type-99 rotary plasma cannons opened up. Not neat beams this time. Chunky, stuttering bolts of blue-white plasma roared toward the Seawolf's belly. Every impact was a bite, chewing into the half-real structure seams and blowing them open in flares of arc and shrapnel.

"Hit!" Akari shouted.

"Heat channel punctured!" Jess followed.

"Port convergence fin destabilized!" Aida added, for once fast. I kept the trigger down. Not from rush. Precisely because I knew how borrowed this moment was. The Seawolf was hanging at the edge of three-space, structure scrambled, AA grid disrupted from my cut under the belly. If I didn't put holes in it now, the next time it got its folding back under control, I'd be stuck watching the replay wondering why I didn't shoot for one more second. The continuous plasma fire lit up the whole underbelly in hellish light.

There was nothing pretty about it. Not at all. If long-range ship gunfire retained some faint sense of order, this close-range plasma work had no such illusions. It was just blunt force. Like taking a chisel and working it along someone's ribs. Crude to describe, crude to do, but for this kind of gutter-wolf, crude was often justice.

"Enough, Shimo, break off!" Maki cut in sharply.

"Her stern is going to swing!" I glanced up and saw the Seawolf's aft start to twist. Not a normal turn. The kind that came when its folding hardware and three-dimensional control surfaces were actively fighting each other. If this were a human figure, it would be someone trying to retreat while kicking back at the same time. And its tail — or more precisely, that long, infuriating main exhaust bell — swung right into view. The image was so on the nose it might as well have been the universe saying: Come on.

You'll hate yourself forever if you don't hit it. … If I could ignore that, I wouldn't be me.

"Last burst!" I shouted.

"Hoshino—" Maki started, like she meant to stop me. Too late. I lifted the Type-0 just a hair, pinned the reticle on the Seawolf's engine mouth — flickering from fold instability — and dumped the last of my Type-99 ammo straight into it.

"Eat this!!" The blue-white plasma went in like a string of malice I'd personally lit, right up the Seawolf's ass. The back end of the hull went white. Not a pretty explosion. The ugly kind — the kind that says something that shouldn't be on fire is on fire now. The fold-line patterns around the engine ruptured, like someone had dumped a bucket of red-hot sand into its guts. The whole vessel jerked.

The controlled, sinister dipping pose it had been maintaining blew apart, dragging more of its half-real hull and structures into three-space along with it. Akari's voice went high.

"Engine mouth hit! Its phase balance has split!" Jess outright laughed.

"Shimo, you really did blow its ass open!"

"…Can we not phrase the tactical report like that?"

"No, because it's perfectly accurate." I didn't have time to roll my eyes. The Seawolf expressed its extreme displeasure directly. The turbulence around the stern blew out. The AA grid went wild — several lines that had been tracking me shot off at nonsense angles — and at the same time the whole hull began a very bad turn. Not just rolling. This was the geometry kind of breakdown that only happens when higher-dimensional fold hardware and three-dimensional control are punching each other in the face.

"Shimo, away. Now!" It was the first time Ash actually raised his voice. Everything in me tightened. I yanked the nose up and out. The Type-0 skimmed the edge of the Seawolf's insane wake, the canopy crossing just above chunks of warped dark and stray arcs. I could actually feel something wrong graze the frame — like a hand from somewhere unseen had brushed the back of my neck. It was disgusting enough I nearly surrendered my dinner on the spot.

"Frame status?" Roy snapped.

"I'm here! Type-0's here! My stomach is… mostly here!"

"Good. All three are important for the moment," Roy said, fast. I dragged the Type-0 out of the turbulence until the Yukikaze slid back into the corner of my view, steady and real. The breath I'd been holding since the rail finally leaked out, just a little. Ahead, the Seawolf's entire rear half had completely lost that composed, lurking grace from before. It didn't look like a wolf waiting for someone to step into the dark. It looked like a bad dog someone had hauled out of the mud and smacked across the tail.

I was still breathing hard when I watched the Imperial high-dimensional submarine tumble in space, ugly and off-balance. The first thought to surface wasn't I did it. It was: … Great. When I get back, Jess is going to ride that blew its ass open line for at least a year.