Chương 291: 122. Right Now, I Just Need to Sleep

In the end, we didn't take Hook and his crew into custody. The reason, stripped down, was simple: there was no point.

To put it even less flatteringly — and saying this out loud feels a bit like slapping my own face with the sole of my own boot — everything we'd just done out there (blow an Imperial patrol corvette into fireworks with one shot, force-dock a pirate ship, board it, tear the place apart, and walk off with everything of value) was, compared to actual piracy, probably only distinguishable by our report formatting. Take the uniforms off. Throw a towel over Ash's very civilized, very articulate face.

The actual nature of what we'd just done really wasn't something that bore close examination. And beyond that slightly undignified reality, there was something else — something so absurd that for a moment I genuinely wondered whether exhaustion had finally tipped me over into hallucinating under pressure. Aida really had given Hook her contact information. Not the polite, official kind — not "please direct future business through the Yukikaze's public liaison channel."

Her actual, personal comms code, handed over to that yellow-toothed, heavily bearded, hasn't-seen-soap-in-a-decade, breathes-criminal-intent old pirate. Standing there watching it happen, the first thing that crossed my mind wasn't tactics or follow-on risk. It was one deeply pathetic, deeply ill-timed thought: If the good-looking Upper House boys who used to chase Aida around back at school ever found out about this, they'd probably line up on the dormitory roof and take turns jumping off.

Because Aida had never once been short of suitors. Grades, family, looks, manner, brains — she cleared every bar, and cleared most of them by a wide margin. The men circling her weren't lightweights either — bright-future, immaculate-manners types, the kind who probably tied their shoelaces with more precision than most people applied to their five-year plans.

And after all these years, the one person who actually walked away with her personal contact code — even under the gray-market pretext of "we might have business to discuss later" — turned out to be Hook. An old pirate. An old pirate who looked like he'd get the soap dirty before the soap got him clean. The universe has a genuinely nauseating sense of fairness. I must have let too much of that show on my face, because the instant Aida sent off the last packet, she turned and looked at me.

The glance was light, elegant, and dead accurate.

"Miss Hoshino. Are you thinking something rather rude right now?" I snapped straight.

"N-No. Not at all. Oh, ha ha—" The second that laugh left my mouth, I wanted to hit myself. A guilty conscience apparently evolves the human laugh into some species unfit to survive outside a vacuum. Aida didn't push it. She just folded her terminal away and said, mild as ever:"There's no point holding someone like Hook. No point locking him up."

"... There isn't?"

"No." She said it as calmly as if she were explaining a basic principle of asset management.

"The best way to handle a man like that is to squeeze every last drop of value out of him, and then throw him away like a rag." I went quiet for two full seconds. Wow. Women bred for politics really are a different category of terrifying. Not the loud, table-flipping kind. The kind that straightens your collar with one hand while calculating, with the other, exactly how much use you still have left in you. I muttered, mostly to myself:"I thought you'd say... keep him like a pet dog." She heard me.

Not only heard me — she laughed. Beautiful smile. Also genuinely dangerous.

"A dog?" She tilted her head slightly.

"I'm not like those Imperial princesses. I've never had much use for keeping pets. Although—" She paused, as though seriously appraising a product's long-term utility.

"If he works hard enough for me from now on, letting him lick my boots occasionally isn't entirely out of the question." I couldn't take any more of that. Not morally. Spiritually. I could feel the whole mental image I'd built of Aida over the years collapsing in real time — not a hairline crack, but an entire load-bearing wall coming down. I'd barely managed half a step backward when Aida, apparently with eyes in the back of her head, reached out and caught the back of my collar.

"Miss Hoshino."

"Y-Yes?" Still smiling.

"Everything I just said — I'll have to ask you to keep that between us." The between us came out light. Feather-light. And the cold sweat hit instantly, because I had no doubt whatsoever that if I ever failed to manage my own mouth on this subject, the next rag to get wrung dry and discarded would be me. So I fled. Not a figure of speech. An actual, full-commitment retreat.

I cut through the Yukikaze's internal corridors at speed, past a corner still smelling of fresh welds, around a work party hauling confiscated cargo off Hook's ship, and finally, like some small animal that had just wriggled out from under a predator's paw, dove straight into the mess. The mess ran a little warmer than most of the ship.

A lot of the Yukikaze felt like a survival apparatus assembled in a hurry, but the mess still held onto a token scrap of dignity — proof that people weren't only alive to avoid dying. Not much dignity tonight, admittedly. The air was thick with reheated rations, strong coffee, metal trays, and the smell of people at the tail end of a long watch — fatigue, chopped fine and stir-fried. At the inner tables, I spotted three people immediately. Dwight "D" Barkley sat on the outside.

Still looked like someone who could put you through a bulkhead without warning, uniform somehow crisper than the manual required. Since Takenaka had pulled him into "training," something about him had shifted — not softer, that was never happening — more like a blade that had already been dangerous, freshly re-edged. Surface looked about the same. The edge was quieter, and a good deal sharper.

Harvey sat across from him, datapad spread open, wearing the classic late-stage-engineer expression: I have been working past reasonable human limits, please do not remind me, or I will finally admit I'm dying. And Jess sat right beside them. The instant I saw her, at least three separate alarms went off in my head at once. One from the incident in the Keiun. One from that corridor "friend kiss." The third from my own shame, loudly reminding me: act normal, right now.

Unfortunately, I've never been particularly good at that. Jess spotted me first, waved, smiled — more or less her usual smile, minus the deliberately chaotic brightness. Which made it look, for once, almost normal. That made me more nervous, not less. When Jess goes normal, things are usually harder to handle than when she goes feral.

"Yo, Shimo," she said.

"What's with that face? You look like you just escaped something awful." I hesitated half a beat, sitting down.

"In a sense, I did." D glanced up.

"Who's after you?"

"Aida's entire character design." Harvey, who'd been staring dead-eyed at his datapad, actually lifted his head.

"... That sounds serious."

"Right?" I latched onto him like a life raft.

"And she just handed her contact info to Hook." D's eyebrows went up. Jess whistled low. Harvey seemed to blue-screen for two full seconds before he managed:"Aida?"

"Yes."

"Contact info. To Hook."

"Yes." Harvey went quiet — the specific quiet of an engineer who understands the fact perfectly well and just needs a moment to rebuild his working model of reality. D broke it first, with a short grunt.

"Makes sense." I turned to him.

"How does that make sense?"

"You keep a line to anyone useful," he said.

"Trash like Hook — locking him up wastes space, letting him go clean is too cheap. Keep him owing something, leave him hanging, and he'll crawl back on his own eventually." I stared at him for two seconds.

"... You've been sounding a lot like Security lately." D drank from his cup, expression flat.

"Takenaka's training." Those three words landed on the table and the whole group went quiet.

"Trained by Takenaka" didn't sound like an experience. It sounded like a diagnosis. I had to ask.

"So what exactly have you been learning?" D set the cup down, perfectly level.

"Stop-and-frisk. Suppression. Cutting escape routes. Close-quarters restraint. And how to make someone understand cooperation is in their own interest, without actually killing them in the process."

"..."

"He also made me memorize thirty-seven standard security-response procedures." Looking at his utterly unbothered face, I felt a brief wave of sympathy for Victor, and a much larger wave of sympathy for anyone D would ever legally process in the future. Jess's shoulders were shaking, fighting a laugh.

"You actually memorized them?" D looked at her.

"Problem?"

"None. Absolutely none." Jess raised both hands, grinning wickedly.

"I'm just saying, whoever's unlucky enough to get caught by you from now on is going to look embarrassingly uncultured even trying to run." Harvey chose that moment to shove his datapad to the center of the table, dragging the conversation back into a world he had some control over.

"Speaking of unlucky, the unluckiest person here is currently me." I looked down. The screen was covered in equipment specs, interface diagrams, output curves — enough technical density to make a reasonable person skip dinner in self-defense.

"The helium-hydrogen reactor?" I asked. Harvey nodded, pressing at his temple.

"Aida dumped the preliminary intake and compatibility assessment on me."

"Dumped it on you?" I blinked.

"Isn't that thing supposed to be critically important?" The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Exactly because it's important, she wants to know right now: if we bolt this onto the Yukikaze immediately, do we get a second heart, or a second explosion." Hard to argue with that logic. Even understanding maybe a third of those curves, I knew the Kushima Heavy Industries helium-hydrogen core wasn't some casual spare part. If it could actually go into the Yukikaze, it wouldn't just mean survival — it would shove this already-not-quite-normal modified destroyer a good deal further into unreasonable territory.

"You confident?" I asked. Harvey gave me the exact expression unique to engineers who badly want to say no honestly and know they have no choice but to press on anyway."'Confident' is far too generous a word. Right now my whole goal is making sure it doesn't send the entire compartment sky-high the second I touch the next wire."

"That's a modest ambition."

"It is," Harvey said, exhausted.

"Also a very practical one." D glanced at the datapad.

"Need hands?" Harvey looked at him, expression complicated.

"Can you weld?"

"No."

"Can you read a reactor interface diagram?"

"No."

"Can you tell, on instinct, which cooling branch to shut first when a high-rad alarm goes off?"

"No." Harvey nodded.

"Then you can pray for me." I almost laughed out loud. Jess propped her chin on one hand and turned to me.

"What about you, Shimo? How'd your side go?" The second she asked, my brain started misbehaving again. The question was completely ordinary — her tone wasn't stretched, was even fairly serious. But it was exactly that seriousness that made me think of the times she hadn't been. Her arms around me. That brief, thieving touch against my mouth. It had apparently installed itself as some illicit background process, popping up to wave a flag at the worst possible moments. I dragged my attention back by force.

"How do you think? Pirate ship, stolen goods, nearly getting psychologically murdered by Aida," I said.

"Today's information density is high enough I feel entitled to file for hazard pay." Jess watched me, mouth curving.

"Want me to comfort you a little?" I nearly choked on my own spit.

"No."

"That fast? Heartless."

"Not heartless. Survival instinct." She laughed — not her usual loud, disruptive laugh. Something lower, a little wicked, carrying the specific quality of someone who knew exactly how on edge I was and had chosen, for now, not to poke it. Worst of all, I realized I could now tell her different laughs apart. That wasn't a skill worth being proud of. It just meant I was in deeper than I was willing to admit. D glanced between us and said nothing.

Harvey very obviously pretended not to notice, burying himself in the datapad with an intensity that suggested if the engineering parameters were dense enough, human feelings simply ceased to exist. That men like him have survived this long is a minor miracle of civilization. Jess tapped the table twice, then leaned in slightly.

"Seriously, though. You look terrible," she said, low.

"Not sleeping?" Every alarm in my head went off at once. Too dangerous a question. Answering honestly meant starting with your damned friend kiss, working through the even less appropriate incident in the Keiun, and ending with me evaporating on the spot from an overdose of shame. So I took the less dignified but survivable road.

"Who's been sleeping well lately?" Jess studied me for a few seconds, seemed to hear exactly what I wasn't saying, and let it go with a small shrug.

"Fair." That tiny concession made me more uncomfortable than if she'd pushed. If she'd kept digging, I could've hidden behind banter. Her backing off cleanly just told me she'd seen more than I wanted her to. Harvey finally shoved the datapad away and exhaled at length.

"I can't. I need coffee." D said, flat: "That's your fifth today."

"That's your fifth that you've seen."

"Not something to be proud of."

"Wasn't planning to put it in my memoirs." Watching them, the whole scene felt strange for a second. The Yukikaze had just torn a hole in half a sector outside — Imperial patrols, pirates, a Kushima back-channel, a military-spec reactor, weapons-grade materials, all of it still hot. And here in the mess, people were still arguing about coffee, security drills, and whether tonight's cutlet had ever actually been near a pig. Maybe that's just how people work.

When something big enough presses down, you need something small — almost boring — to prove you're still in a world where you get to sit down and talk. Then the bridge PA cut in. A short chime, then the faint hiss of the all-hands channel opening. The scattered noise in the mess thinned at once. A second later, Ash's voice came through.

"All students, report to the bridge immediately. Repeat: all students, report to the bridge immediately." Same voice as always — level, clear, polite enough to sound like a reminder about homework. But I knew better. Being summoned to the bridge over the all-ship net never came bundled with easy news. D was already on his feet. Harvey closed his eyes, apparently holding a moment of silence for the coffee he hadn't gotten to drink. Jess glanced at me and smiled.

"Looks like break's over, Shimo." I stood too, and took a breath.

"No. I don't think we ever had one." That's the Yukikaze. On this ship, even catching your breath feels like something the battle grudgingly lends you. Eleven from Class 144... no, wait. Minus Evelyn Sado, still recovering. Ten of us, standing on the Yukikaze's bridge. I took a spot toward the back and looked at those faces — each one sanded down over these last weeks by exhaustion, dehydration, close calls, repair bills, pirates, the Imperial Navy, and whatever fate felt like throwing at us next.

A word surfaced in my head, distant enough to make me want to frown. Class 144. How long since anyone had actually used that name? Long enough that it didn't sound like us anymore. Back at the Academy it still smelled like uniforms and timetables and grades and drill manuals, of who fell asleep at lunch and who got called out and who was pulling something behind the instructor's back. Now it had gone from a name to something closer to a relic.

A class placard still nailed to an old classroom door, unchanged, while the people who belonged to it had been flung to the edge of known space to learn how to survive on main guns, hunger, and silence. I shook my head and shoved the sentiment out. Sentiment has zero nutritional value on the Yukikaze. Especially not tonight. The bridge lights ran cold. The main screen still carried the freshly consolidated course data, cargo tallies, and power-distribution charts. Outside was deep space.

Inside was a group of people who somehow looked more exhausted than deep space itself. The mood wasn't tense, exactly. Wasn't relaxed either. More like finishing the hardest question on an exam only for the proctor to walk in with a second paper. Ash stood at the front, datapad in hand.

He'd grown into "acting captain" more than I'd expected — not in the sense of looking commanding, nobody could look commanding in this chair given the Yukikaze's current state, but in his ability to fold exhaustion, calculation, pressure, and surface courtesy together and tuck the whole bundle neatly inside his uniform. He looked, more and more, like someone who'd genuinely taken on the job of keeping the whole ship from falling through the floor.

"Everyone — good work." A short nod around the room, then straight to it.

"We've got the new reactor. Once Engineering finishes testing, we move to the swap." The air on the bridge loosened, just a notch. Not cheering. Nothing heroic. More like the sound of people who'd been slowly strangled by rent and oxygen bills discovering they might get to see next month after all. Harvey took that loosened air and wrenched it straight back to reality.

"We'll still need a proper yard for the install." He looked up, voice carrying the specific cruelty of an engineer with zero romantic expectations of the universe left.

"A legitimate one." He put real weight on legitimate — the kind of weight that suggested if anyone dared propose going back to somewhere like Lawrence, he'd personally retrofit their skull into a heat sink with a wrench. Ash smiled, faintly.

"Of course. If there were any other choice, I wouldn't have picked that place either." That place came out very measured — measured enough to make it sound like we'd merely visited a slightly overpriced garage with mediocre service, rather than staked our lives haggling on a black-market rock wrapped in iron struts, reeking of gray-zone trade from every angle. Ash flipped a page.

"We'll let Victor take first pass." Hearing that from the back row, I held one silent second of mourning for Engineering and everyone about to get within arm's reach of that Kushima core. Because let Victor handle it first is not a phrase that comforts anyone. Its subtext runs: this is hard and dangerous, but that man probably can make something that has no business moving start moving. Whether anyone loses three years off their life in the process is a separate question. Ash paused, looked up.

"And — the next resupply point." Just hearing that gave me a bad feeling. Sure enough.

"As you all know, we're sublight-only right now," he said.

"At this drive rating, getting back to Dunan would take roughly a lifetime." I nearly nodded along. Not for effect — genuinely. In the Yukikaze's current state, returning was optimistic. Drifting back alive was the realistic framing, and even that assumed the universe had briefly decided to be kind. Ash kept going.

"And more urgent than the FTL drive right now is food. And drinking water." I couldn't help it.

"Didn't we just resupply?" The moment it left my mouth I knew it was stupid. My brain was still processing "last time" as an event, not a ledger line. People do this after every close call — briefly assume that surviving something also solved groceries. The universe never bundles that in. Aida answered without turning her head much.

"That was ten days ago." Her voice carried that particular steadiness that told you her internal checklist was more complete than anyone else's in the room.

"And at Lawrence, we barely took on anything." Flat, factual.

"Those animals had jacked ration prices up over tenfold." My mouth twitched. Over tenfold. Wonderful. We'd gone in for a repair job and walked out with a hands-on seminar in black-market capitalism. Tuition brutal, textbook filthy, instructor liable to pull a gun at any moment. Harvey glanced at his own list, clearly meant to read the shortages item by item, and gave up before starting.

"I'll skip the read-out," he sighed.

"We're short on almost everything." I looked at those sheets, then at the ten half-dead students on this bridge still somehow pretending they had a future, and couldn't hold it in.

"Great," I said.

"We've leveled up from cosmic orphans to cosmic beggars." Several faces nearby did the thing where they clearly agreed but didn't want to say so out loud. A second later, Maki's hand touched mine. Not a tap. Not a pull. Just a touch — light enough to be a reminder, or something a little closer than a reminder, though not quite close enough to name in front of an audience.

"Shimo." Low. One word. I understood immediately. Don't push it. Or, more precisely: don't shave down what little morale is left in this room. I shut up, sensibly. Honestly, ever since the Keiun, even the briefest touch from her was enough to knock my brain off its axis. Add the bridge, the audience, all ten surviving members of the class watching, and the spot on the back of my hand felt like it had developed independent consciousness. Far too much presence for its own good. Embarrassing.

Also entirely out of my control. Ash ignored my sarcasm and kept going.

"In any case, I've had the AI locate a planet where we can restock on ore." The main screen updated with a new target — not close, but within the range our half-crippled state could reasonably consider. The full data hadn't unpacked yet, but it clearly read as a resource world, one that at least offered the Yukikaze a chance to breathe on minerals and basic supplies. Ash's eyes swept the room.

"From now, we rotate rest." For most of the people on that bridge, that line landed better than we got a new reactor. No reactor, however good, slots under your eyelids and doubles as a pillow.

"First rotation — everyone except Aida and myself stands down," Ash said.

"The rest will be easier to schedule after." Reasonable. Reasonable enough nobody had the energy to complain. Aida had to keep riding herd on supply and reactor data; Ash had to hold navigation, command, and outside judgment calls. As for the rest of us — pinning us to our stations right now wouldn't have been duty. It would've been arranging human-shaped objects, run past their limits, in chairs for decoration. Another ten minutes and I might have fallen asleep standing up. And not gracefully.

After the brief dismissal, people started filtering off the bridge. There's always a strange buffer between the end of a high-pressure briefing and actually getting through the door — the body already knows it's allowed to disperse, but the brain's still stuck a half-beat behind, chewing on ore, resupply, sublight, legitimate yard, we're broke, slowly working out exactly how bad it all was. Maki and I walked out together. The corridor lights ran dimmer than the bridge.

The ship's operating hum vibrated low through the bulkheads — no matter how battered the outside looked, that old heart we hadn't officially swapped out yet was still beating, however reluctantly. We walked a stretch side by side. Neither of us spoke first. Silence with most people wouldn't be worth noting. Silence with Maki had started to feel like it had edges lately. I couldn't tell anymore whether it was just she's naturally quiet, or whether something was quietly growing in that space between us.

In the end, I was the one who brought it up.

"That cipher, earlier..." I let it trail off, my voice dropping on its own. She knew exactly what I meant — Hook's cipher, the one that had cracked her expression on that pirate ship, the one she'd forced back down by sheer will. She kept her eyes ahead, pace steady.

"Yes."

"Are you dealing with it now?" Two seconds of quiet.

"Not now." I'd guessed as much. Guessing it and hearing her say it were still two different things. I glanced at her.

"Because there's not enough evidence yet?"

"Because there's no signal," she said, even.

"Whatever we do, we need somewhere with stable external comms before anything can go out."

"Go out to whom?" She didn't answer right away. The corridor held only our footsteps and the faint thermal creak of a pipe somewhere ahead. I thought she wasn't going to answer at all. A few seconds later, she said, mild:"Not the point. Not yet." Very her. Not a refusal. Not a dodge. Just filing the real answer in a drawer and waiting for the right moment to open it. She was always like this — capable of pressing anything down, thoroughly enough that the people walking beside her eventually learned to do the same.

I nodded and didn't push. Getting this far into her thinking was already a form of trust. Going further wouldn't be bravery. It would be asking to get hurt.

"So we shelve it," I said.

"We shelve it," she echoed. Four words, laying a thin sheet of ice over the whole thing. Not solved. Just sealed for now. Hearing it still left something unsettled in my chest. Because once something reaches into "the family," it rarely stays shelved. It's more like fire buried under snow — invisible on the surface, and still hot enough to burn if you step on it. We turned the last corner into the second-class block.

The Yukikaze's second-class berths were never what anyone would call comfortable — honestly closer to a compromise trying to land somewhere between at least you can lie down and don't ask for more. Maybe it was everything that had happened these last few days, or maybe I was simply out of charge, but when that familiar hatch appeared, I felt a brief, ridiculous flicker of something close to coming home. Absurd. And a little sad.

If the Yukikaze counted as home, our household finances had progressed from the edge of bankruptcy to surviving on a stolen pirate heart. Maki keyed the hatch. The moment it opened, my exhaustion hit like someone had cut the last support cable holding me up from behind.

Everything I'd been suppressing through willpower, stubbornness, sarcasm, and reflex — the sleep debt, the near-loss-of-control tailing run in the Keiun, the aftershock Jess had left in my system, Hook's cipher, the Kushima shadow, Aida's mentally scarring commentary, the resupply math from the bridge — all of it came due the second I saw the bunk. Standing in the doorway, I genuinely wondered for a second whether I'd go down before I reached the bed.

"... That's bad." I said it honestly, holding the frame. Maki looked back.

"What is?"

"If someone tells me there's another meeting right now," I said, completely serious, "I might just choose crime." She watched me for a beat. Then, very quietly:"Then sleep first." Four words. No coaxing. No teasing. But she said it in that flat, almost matter-of-fact tone, and somehow that was exactly what pressed the tangled mess in my chest down, just a little. I made some vague sound of agreement and stepped inside. The door closed behind us, cutting the ship's operating noise down a layer.

What was left was the low hiss of ventilation, and the leftover warmth two people had carried in, not yet fully cooled from everything that had happened. I wanted, badly, to fall face-first into the bunk and sleep until the next time the universe ended. Unfortunately, judging by the Yukikaze's recent pace, before the universe got around to ending, we still had ore, resupply, the reactor, the Kushima cipher, and a long list of other things I refused to think about right now, standing in the way.

Life is unreasonable. But right then, all I wanted was to close my eyes. Even if it was only for a few minutes.