Chương 274: 113. Frozen Planet 2

The moment the team was confirmed, the ship's mood shifted from we're all equally broke to great, now we pick a few people to go beg the universe for a drink. Said romantically: a survival operation. Said plainly: if we didn't go dig up ice soon, in a few days we'd have to check for spit before we could even swear properly. I stood in front of the equipment racks on the prep deck, looking at the row of low-G EVA suits dragged out of deep storage. My first thought wasn't professional pride.

It was: this is going to make us look exactly like the mass-produced grunts who die in episode three of a washed-up tokusatsu show.

"Acting Captain, this is the last usable batch we've got." Aida had a tablet under one arm, tapping a chestplate with the other, tone as calm as announcing the soup's out of salt.

"Two left-knee stabilizers lag half a beat. Number two thruster pack's attitude correction glitches occasionally. One helmet defogger needs a manual reset. But don't worry — none of it's bad enough to send anyone to their ancestors directly."

"Your definition of don't worry has a very distinct Federal Logistics flavor."

"Thank you."

"Not a compliment."

"I'm choosing to take it as one." I sighed and checked the kit list. Cutting modules, thermal drills, portable reclaim bags, ice-sample clamps, backup life-support cartridges, rigging, magnetic pitons, emergency retrieval lines. None of it romantic. All of it, right now, considerably more reliable than a love letter — which can't melt ice, can't filter water, and definitely can't haul some idiot back down by the cord after he drifts off in 0. 04G. The first team came to five: me, Aida, Roy, Lan, Jess.

Roy, because someone had to fly the lander, and if even Roy was too scared to touch the stick, the rest of us were landing on prayer alone. Lan on ground comms and map calibration. Aida leading water-cycling and gear. Jess... Jess because Jess would have died rather than be left behind.

"I object to being described like a free gift with purchase," Jess said, hugging the thermal inner layer to her chest, eyebrows sky-high.

"This is called volunteering. Great frontier spirit. It'll look good in the ship's record."

"You heard leave the ship and got excited."

"Obviously. I'm losing my mind under this water ban. I want to breathe air that isn't on a ration table."

"That planet's air is mostly thin CO₂ and ice dust."

"... You really don't make friends talking like that, Shimo."

"I have some," I said, my gaze drifting, not entirely on purpose, toward the far side of the deck.

"At least one." Jess followed my line of sight and produced a smile that absolutely deserved a punch — if she weren't currently a semi-casualty. Maki stood some distance off, at the mouth of a maintenance corridor. No uniform jacket, just a dark thermal shawl over her shoulders, her face still too pale from the injury, which only made her eyes look colder and clearer.

She wasn't doing anything but standing there, and yet the noise on the deck seemed to bend around that corner on its own — the air by her felt like actual air, not the industrial byproduct the recyclers were struggling to pump out. I genuinely wanted to pretend I hadn't seen her. Because the second I did, I'd want to walk over. And the second I walked over, I'd probably forget I was Acting Captain and not some idiot heroine from a seventeen-year-old's romcom, sulking on a riverbank after school.

Unfortunately, I was a fairly convincing version of both.

"All right — suit-up lesson," I clapped my hands, hauling myself out of that particular pit.

"Aida. Go." She nodded, clean as a page turn.

"Low-G EVA suits run three layers. First: thermal base, handles body heat and sweat reclamation. Second: micro-pressurized work suit. Third: exo-frame and thruster pack." She demonstrated, pulling the thermal layer up from the ankle.

"This isn't about looking good. It's about the seal — neck, wrists, ankles especially. Anyone who leaves a wrinkle is going to step outside and immediately start questioning their life choices."

"You could've said that earlier," Roy muttered, locked in a losing fight with his thermal layer, looking exactly like he'd been wrapped by a hostile white sea cucumber.

"This is harder to get into than my enlistment physical." Lan, beside him, sealing a glove ring, didn't look up.

"At least this one doesn't ask you to cough." The deck went dead silent for half a second. Then Jess broke first, laughing hard enough to nearly drop her helmet. Roy's face ran through several stages — wanting to argue, realizing Lan's expression was too flat to safely engage with, then accepting that continuing would only end in a worse defeat — and settled on yanking his zipper straight up to his collar in silent surrender.

"Lan, have you been picking up bad habits from Shimo?" Jess said, wiping her eye.

"I'm stating facts," Lan said.

"That's the scariest kind of knife — delivered completely straight-faced." When Aida got to the exo-frame clips, she grabbed me as a live demonstration.

"Acting Captain. Arms up."

"Wait — why me?"

"Because you fidget the most. If I don't lock you down first, everyone else copies you." Deeply disrespectful. Unfortunately accurate. I gave up and spread my arms, letting her snap the chest harness in place, connect the pack line, and lock the attitude-correction modules along both forearms.

"Low-G movement has one rule," Aida said.

"Don't treat the ground like ground. Treat it like a stage that magnifies every mistake by three. Small steps. Low center of gravity. Light thrust. Push off with normal-gravity force in 0. 04G, and—" She tapped the back of my calf, lightly. I stepped forward on pure reflex, and my whole body floated out an absurd distance, nearly slamming into the rack across from me.

Roy grabbed for me on instinct; since his own pack wasn't sealed yet, my drift pulled him off-balance too, and the two of us collided midair like two overpriced bags of frozen goods nobody had asked for. Jess laughed so hard she squatted — forgot where she was — and the squat launched her sideways like a misfired toy. Lan caught her tether without even looking and reeled her in, smooth as someone winding in a kite that had developed opinions of its own.

Aida nodded, teacher-calm, as if her demonstration had gone exactly to plan.

"—like that." I steadied myself against Roy, a vein throbbing at my temple.

"Thank you. Very vivid teaching."

"You're welcome." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Roy still had a hand on my arm, expression somewhere between agony and sincerity.

"Shimo, can I file a request to have that deleted from the ship's internal monitoring log?"

"No," Jess answered first.

"That's the single most precious morale asset this entire water run has."

"When we get back, I'm swapping your ration cup for a measuring spoon," I said.

"Abuse of power, Acting Captain!"

"Yes. Just noticing that now?" The noise bounced off the prep deck's metal walls, and somehow it gave this battered ship a strange trace of an ordinary day. Everyone knew perfectly well we'd been flung to the edge of the universe — ship half-crippled, senior officers down, supplies bottoming out, five days of sub-light ahead of us and a repair yard that might not even be legal waiting at the end of it. But as long as someone could still roll their eyes at a bad joke, this ship wasn't dead yet.

Once the checks wound down, the others went off for final pack-pressure tests and tool counts. I'd just finished sealing my own glove rings when Maki called me over. With a look. Just a look. The you — come here kind. Completely unreasonable. Completely effective. I followed her out to the quiet corridor off the prep deck. Only the emergency strips glowed along the base of the wall, cutting a cold line along the edge of her shawl.

Away from the crowd, the laughter and the clatter of gear dropped away like a door had shut between us and it. Just the low hum of the circulation fans, and my own heartbeat, which was not behaving.

"Does it still hurt?" I said first. And immediately wanted to bite my own tongue off. What an opening line. Clumsy as someone learning to talk for the first time. Maki looked at me, expression unchanged, voice a little lower.

"It hurts," she said.

"Not enough to keep me in bed."

"Med doesn't want you walking around."

"Med also didn't want you flying this ship to the edge of the Boötes Void."

"That wasn't voluntary."

"I know." She said it flat, like commenting on the weather — and somehow it loosened, by a fraction, whatever had been wound tight in my chest since I woke up. I leaned against the wall and looked down at the clasp on my glove.

"This run will be quick," I said.

"First batch of water, confirm ice purity and reclaim efficiency. If the layer's better than the scan says, we expand later. You and Ash rest. By the time we're near the yard, you'll probably both be back on the bridge." Maki was quiet a moment.

"Are you trying to reassure me?"

"... Is it that obvious?"

"Very." I laughed, a little embarrassed.

"Sorry. Reassuring people and issuing bad orders seem to be the only things I'm good at right now."

"You're good at holding on," Maki said.

"Is that a compliment?"

"For now, yes." She stepped closer. Just one step, but the distance dropped sharply — close enough to see the not-quite-healed scrape at her throat, close enough to catch something under the medbay disinfectant, cool and clean, like faint snow, or a composure I was never going to learn in this life.

"Shimo," she said. My throat was a little dry.

"Mm."

"Don't push yourself."... That was genuinely against the rules. If she'd ordered me to go die, I could at least have called her cold-blooded. Instead she told me not to push myself. I looked up at her.

"Same to you," I said.

"Stop treating yourself like reusable military hardware. Executive Officers are expensive. We can't afford to write one off right now." The corner of her mouth moved — barely enough to count. I saw it anyway. Then she reached out and smoothed down a small fold of armor fabric at my shoulder that hadn't sealed flat. Her fingertip crossed the material, light enough to be nothing — and did more damage to my composure than any alarm on this ship ever had.

"Report in when you're back," she said.

"... Copy, Executive Officer."

"And—""What?"

"Remember to drink water." I almost laughed out loud. Under shipwide rationing, with washing your hair bordering on a court-martial offense, that line was practically extravagant. Under these conditions, it was the most Maki thing she could possibly have said. So I just looked away and muttered, "I know." Back on the prep deck, Jess was standing by the lander hatch wearing the exact expression of someone who'd just missed something enormous.

"What's that face for?" I asked.

"My gossip radar just logged a high-concentration, silent-mode ambiguous event."

"If your radar's that good, use it to scan for voids in the ice layer once we're down there."

"Cruel reassignment." Roy was already in the lander's front seat, running final checks on the attitude thrusters. Lan had the short-range link to the bridge open. Aida had the collection modules in her arms, doing one last pressure check. Fully suited up, we looked like a crew of professional bandits about to strip an unlucky planet down and boil it for parts. I gave the bulkhead outside the prep deck one last look. Then sealed my helmet. The world went quiet at once — just my own breathing.

When the lander dropped from the Yukikaze's belly, the hull gave a low shudder. Not the teeth-grinding violence of combat — something more practical, more everyday. Metal friction, like an old worker who wasn't supposed to be back on shift, getting a pat on the shoulder and picking up his toolbox anyway. Roy's hands were steady. Nobody usually goes out of their way to compliment that — steady is the baseline for a helmsman.

But flying a half-repaired lander through a pitifully thin atmosphere, down onto a low-temperature, low-gravity ball crusted in ice, with nobody else alive on it — steady suddenly turns into a very attractive quality. I sat in the aft restraint seat, watching the frozen planet swell through the viewport. It wasn't beautiful the way fairy tales are beautiful.

It looked more like a bad-tempered god had smashed an entire ocean and an entire winter onto the ground together, then couldn't be bothered to clean up — leaving behind a silent ruin built from white, blue, and silver. Vast ice fields threw back cold light at a slanted angle. In the surface rifts, crystal spires stood like forests of glass. Here and there, dark red mineral veins broke the snow like frozen wounds.

Fine ice dust drifted through the thin atmosphere, wrapping the horizon in a pale haze that seemed to sand the starlight down to a duller edge.

"Landing zone confirmed," Lan reported.

"Low gradient. Surface shell thickness stable. No active fault signals. Wind negligible. Radiation within safe range."

"Translate to human," Jess said.

"We won't die immediately," Lan said.

"That, I understand." The lander's struts touched down with barely a shiver — nothing like the heavy impact I'd braced for. 0. 04G made everything strangely light, as if even this planet's welcome was delivered without much conviction behind it. The moment the hatch opened, the view outside nearly made me forget to check my breathing rate first. Ice. Everywhere. Not just white — layer over layer of clear and translucent ice, interlocking.

The ground looked like a slab of enormous polished crystal, rolling gently outward into slow hills. Farther out, uneven spires refracted the starlight, like someone had shattered the universe and jammed the pieces into the earth at random. No storms. No animal calls. Not even falling snow. Just a silence so total it felt like if you shouted here, even the echo would refuse to work overtime.

"It's so pretty," Jess said first.

"A very calm graveyard," Aida said.

"You're both right," I said. The first step off the lander taught me exactly how important Aida's lesson had been. It wasn't walking. It was negotiating with the ground. The lightest push off the sole sent your whole body gliding out further than made any sense. Every step felt like moving through a dream that had decided to take no responsibility for physics — absurdly light, excessively floaty. Upside: hauling gear cost almost no effort.

Downside: get cocky for even a second and you'd be giving a live demonstration of human balloon ascent. Roy, clearly determined to hold onto his professional-helmsman, reliable-male image in front of everyone, hit the ramp using his normal ground-force habit and slid forward in a huge, uncontrolled glide, both hands grabbing at nothing in midair — looking exactly like a tame farm animal that had just been released by accident. I held it for half a beat. Failed.

"Roy, you look like a released penguin."

"Don't do metaphors right now!" he said over comms, fighting his thrusters to correct his drift.

"And penguins don't fly like this!"

"That's exactly the point."

"You're the worst!" Jess laughed so hard she squatted — forgot she was in 0. 04G — and the squat bounced her sideways instead, like a toy someone had jabbed the wrong button on. Lan caught her retrieval cord without even looking and hauled her back in, smooth as someone reeling in a kite that had developed opinions of its own.

"Don't turn yourself into a reclamation item," Lan said.

"You're really toxic today," Jess said.

"Operational status: good." I took a slow breath of recycled air inside the helmet and raised a hand, signaling the team to spread out to their assigned positions. Aida moved to the first site to check ice thickness and purity. Lan planted the short-range scanning pitons and began calibrating the surrounding terrain grid. Roy stayed by the lander as mobile support. Jess and I took the cutting modules and pushed forward toward a section where the surface looked flatter and the ice more transparent.

Honestly, nothing about this first collection run was dramatic enough to be worth filming for a recruitment video. The real trouble was simply this: the surface shell, which looked so clean and dreamlike, turned out to be as unreasonably hard as Federal High Command's conscience. The moment the cutter head made contact, the whole unit vibrated hard enough to numb my arms, and the recoil nearly launched me straight backward.

But once Aida dialed down the thermal-melt output and Lan recalibrated for the density layer, the problem got brought under control fast.

So if I had to sum up the first ice-sample collection in one sentence, it would be this: we successfully cut our first large block of usable reclaim ice, and aside from Roy nearly kicking himself airborne again, Jess nearly turning a ground piton into a selfie stick, and me nearly performing an impromptu backward slide into home base courtesy of the cutter's recoil — overall, it went off without any real incident.

When the first ice sample locked securely into the reclaim bag, I stood on that mirror-flat plain, watching our own reflections stretch long and blurred beneath the ice, and for one moment the whole scene felt absurd in a way that was completely real. A battered warship. A handful of half-trained officer candidates. A dead frozen planet. And a tomorrow being chased down by a water-ration table. But we had actually come here and dug water out of the ground.

Out here in the universe, staying alive is, most of the time, exactly this undignified. And just as worth celebrating.