Chương 305: 129.Jess's Playful Provocation 1

"Hoshino Shimo. And Jess McCallow." Ash pulled his gaze off the toxic planet's projection and turned to face the two of us, expression gone flat. That face had never been built for reassurance to begin with; set like this, it looked less like a commanding officer and more like someone about to read out an execution order.

"You two are staying on board this time. Don't argue with me." He paused, letting his eyes rest on Jess a half-beat longer than necessary.

"Especially you, Jess McCallow. One more complaint and I will genuinely consider Sergeant Takenaka's recommendation and put you in the brig." Leaning on her crutch, Jess let out a protest with zero dignity in it.

"Hey—" That one syllable carried defiance, wounded pride, stubbornness, and a hefty dose of theatrical how can you be this cruel to an invalid. Unfortunately, Ash had always been immune to that kind of performance. If anything, he'd probably survived this long precisely because watching people perform never once made him go soft. Then he turned to me.

"As for you, Hoshino." His tone didn't soften — if anything, it got crisper.

"While I'm off the ship, you're acting captain. The Yukikaze holds position in orbit around the toxic planet and stands by." I almost wondered if yesterday's shock had left my hearing not fully back online.

"…What did you say?"

"I was perfectly clear." Ash didn't so much as lift an eyelid.

"Or would you like me to repeat it over the shipwide intercom?"

"That's not what I mean," I said, looking at him.

"I mean — you keep me here to recover, and in the same breath you dump the entire ship on me. Isn't the logic there just a little too Federal-management for comfort?"

"This isn't recovery," he said coldly.

"This is putting someone who can still think in the seat that most needs thinking." …Fuck. This man's idea of a compliment was like being cut with a dull blade — you could tell it was meant well, but the process still made you want to hit him. Ash didn't give me much time to zone out. He tapped down to the next item on the slate.

"Everyone else." His gaze swept the room like he was doing inventory on a set of highly explosive but currently usable components.

"Dwight 'D' Barkley. Aida Rosen. Akari Flak. Maki Kushima. Harvey Knox. Roy Hartmann. Lan Weiss — everyone I just named, with me to the small conference room." I cursed, very sincerely, in my head. Fuck. That was basically everyone. I'd assumed he'd at least leave me one reasonably normal person to sit the bridge with.

Instead he'd packed up everyone who could walk, do math, throw a punch, fix a machine, or talk trash, and taken the whole lot with him — leaving me with just myself, and Jess: a woman on a crutch who was theoretically supposed to behave and was, in practice, harder to manage than live ordnance. This wasn't "acting captain" anymore. This was some kind of high-level revenge. Jess clearly reached the same conclusion. Her hand shot straight up.

"I object."

"Overruled." Ash fired the word back so fast it was obvious he'd had it loaded.

"I haven't even started—""You don't need to." He looked at her.

"Ninety percent of what you're about to say is going to be complaining, and the other ten percent is an attempt to make me feel bad about it. Unfortunately, I don't have time for either today." Jess turned to me.

"See that? He's targeting me."

"No," I said, with complete honesty.

"That's called reasonable risk management."

"You're taking his side?"

"I'm taking the side of not watching you drag that leg through a toxic fog to give us a live demonstration of dissolving." Jess narrowed her eyes like she wanted to fire something back, but Ash had already stopped giving her the floor. He turned and headed for the small conference room. The others fell in behind him. D passed by me, glanced over, said nothing — just a short, quiet nod. It wasn't comfort. It wasn't a handoff, either. It was something more Yukikaze than both: You've got this.

Don't embarrass the ship. Harvey, hugging his data slate, still found room to get a word in on his way past.

"Acting Captain — please don't fly off with the ship once we're down there. I've got half-finished work all over the engine room."

"Don't worry," I said.

"If I fly off with the ship, the first thing going out the airlock is that pile of illegal cabling of yours."

"Good. Mental status confirmed normal."

"Is your bar for normal really set that low?"

"On the Yukikaze, being able to talk back counts as a passing grade." Lan and Roy came last. Lan gave me a small, quiet smile. Roy threw up a quick good-luck gesture, fast enough to look like he was afraid Ash would catch him distributing unauthorized warmth. And then there was Maki. She glanced back at me once, still walking with the group. Just once. Not a single word.

But the look was quiet, and it went deep — deep enough that for a second I nearly forgot I wasn't sitting on a medbay cot anymore, but in the chair that would be carrying the weight of this entire ship for the next few hours. Then she followed the others into the conference room. The door shut behind her. The bridge went half-empty all at once. It wasn't quiet.

It was just suddenly too big — like someone had reached in and pulled out every person who usually filled this place with noise: the bickering, the orders, the eye-rolls, the slates hitting consoles, the footsteps cutting across the deck at a run. What was left was the low hum of the main console, the steady vibration of the reactor bleeding through the hull, and, dead ahead, that yellow-green toxic planet that had never once looked like a tourist destination and wasn't about to start now.

When I sat down in Ash's chair, I had exactly one thought. … Shit. It really was heavy. Not weight-heavy. Responsibility-heavy. The chair itself looked like nothing special most days — just a seat some especially punchable man happened to occupy for long stretches of time. But the second it was your turn to sit in it, you understood immediately why that man, garbage mouth and sour face and all, still managed to keep this entire ship locked on course.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Because this seat was never built for comfort. I'd barely gotten my hands on the main console when Jess came hobbling over on her crutch and dropped herself into the auxiliary seat beside me.

"So," she said, tilting her head to look at me, something faintly punchable glinting in her eyes.

"That face — are you thinking about running, or about dragging Ash out of that conference room and hitting him?"

"I'm thinking about strapping the two of you outside the hull and letting the fog decide."

"Wow. Acting Captain's first threat already has real style."

"Keep talking and I will personally walk a confinement proposal to Sergeant Takenaka's desk." Jess let out a low, entirely fearless whistle.

"Vicious." I ignored her and pulled the main display back to planetary monitoring and the extraction-route simulation. The toxic planet turned slowly ahead of us. The thick atmosphere looked like a rotting yellow-green wound; the low cloud bands were so dense you felt like you could reach out and feel the stickiness.

The surface was carpeted in massive glowing fungal spore bodies and sodium ore crystal formations, that yellow fluorescence spreading out in sheets — gorgeous in the most nauseating way, like someone had ground up every moldy petri dish in a hospital ward and sprinkled the residue evenly across an entire planet. Honestly, if the universe ever published The Definitive Collection of Places No Sane Person Should Live, this rock would make the cover.

Not long after, the conference room door opened and the briefing broke up. Personnel split off, and the bridge flared briefly into organized chaos. Extraction teams, landing craft crews, support staff — all of them moving toward the lower decks with gear and slates. Ash came out last, stopped beside me, and pushed a string of command permissions straight into the main console.

"Three-hour orbital hold window," he said.

"While I'm gone, all surface-to-ship traffic routes through you first. Anything looks wrong, you call it."

"Call it how far?"

"As far as it takes for me to get back up here and argue with you about it."

"That's not a very precise standard."

"Then use your own judgment." He glanced at me.

"I didn't leave you here to be a relay station." I held his gaze for two seconds, then said only: "Understood." Ash didn't add anything else. He turned and headed out. Passing Jess, he couldn't resist one last cut.

"You cause trouble on my bridge, you're the first thing I deal with when I get back." Jess spread her hands.

"Captain, this is starting to sound like prejudice."

"Not prejudice," Ash said, without turning around.

"Experience." A few minutes later, the Yukikaze's landing craft cleared the bay. The main display split three ways: near-orbital panorama of the toxic planet on one side, external feed from the collection craft on another, surface tactical window on the third. Acid rain bands, fog density, wind vectors, shield drain, collector pressure — the numbers jumped like they'd all lost their minds at once. I stopped having room to think about anything else.

"Landing Craft One, adjust attitude — don't cut straight into the main fog plume." I put my fingers to the console and pulled up the wind-field map.

"Bank twelve degrees left, ride the edge layer in. Craft Two, hold a hundred meters higher for now — don't drop low until the airflow settles." Replies came back through the headset immediately. Harvey cursed about how even the air down there had teeth. Akari corrected her heading without a word wasted. D reported visibility dropping. Lan started feeding back the first readings on the collectors' outer shielding.

Maki's channel stayed dead quiet — she only spoke when there was something that needed saying, and only as many words as that required.

"Approaching surface. Standing by for rapid extraction." The moment her voice came through, my fingers pressed down against the console. Just slightly. Slightly enough that no one but me would have noticed. Except Jess was sitting right there. And Jess's eyes — mostly wasted on stirring up trouble — were first-rate at seeing straight through people. The first drop went smoother than projected.

The terrain-mod guns blew open the first sheet of glowing sodium crystal; light and toxic fog blasted outward together as the collectors dove in like they were raiding a vault. On the other side, the high-altitude craft skimmed the top edge of the fog layer in a posture no sane person would call proper flying, forcing the toxic plume gases straight into its filtration tanks. Fast. Hard. Precise. Ash's line hadn't been a slogan. Every second down there had to match it.

"Surface Team One, spore field on your right is about to blow — fall back thirty meters." I kept my eyes on the feed.

"Copy," Maki said.

"Craft Two, collector pressure's running high. Don't get greedy — ten more seconds, then pull up."

"Yeah, yeah, Acting Captain," Harvey still had room to clown.

"You blow yourself up with the auxiliary fuel, I'm writing your incident report as your epitaph."

"Wow. That sounded more like the captain than Ash does."

"Shut up and work." I kept feeding orders down the line, one after another, and the rhythm at the console started to settle. It felt strange — like a weapon that sat awkward in your grip at first, finally dropping into the groove your hand already knew, a few rounds in. The bridge was quiet, just comms, data, and my own voice going back and forth. The Yukikaze crouched in this toxic orbit like an iron beast, and I was sitting where its eyes were, watching every window, making sure nobody fell half a beat behind.

The moment the first sodium extraction cycle stabilized, and Craft Two hauled up a clean batch of high-purity radon, I finally let out about half a breath. Just half. Because a real acting captain doesn't get to take the second half. And that was exactly the moment the patient beside me — the one who was supposed to sit quietly and watch — chose, with impeccable timing, to start acting up. Jess pushed herself up on her crutch.

"What are you doing?" I said, eyes on the main display, not turning.

"Observing."

"Sit back down."

"No." Her crutch tapped the deck as she made her way, step by step, toward my chair. Not fast — the bad leg made every step look like effort — but that, somehow, only made the whole approach carry more weight. Like someone who had no business being this close was taking her time anyway, making absolutely sure you knew she was coming. I could smell her now. Leftover medbay antiseptic, cleaning solution, and underneath it, the faint warmth of her own skin.

After last night's mess, that smell should have been nothing but reassurance — she was alive, I was alive, nobody had come back missing any pieces. But she was standing too close. Close enough that the reassurance had started curdling into something with no business existing on a bridge.

"Jess," I said, low.

"Don't start anything right now."

"I'm not starting anything." Her voice dropped too, close enough to my ear it felt deliberate.

"I'm watching the acting captain give orders."

"You've watched. Back off."

"I haven't watched enough." I finally turned my head and glared at her. Which put me straight into her eyes. Not her usual grin — the one built purely to run her mouth and watch you blow up. Lighter than that. Worse than that. Like she already knew exactly what she was about to do, and that it was going to kill me — not literally, but in a considerably more humiliating sense of the word. I opened my mouth just as Maki's report cut through the headset.

"Bridge, southeast fog column's activating ahead of schedule. Requesting updated retrieval path." My focus snapped back. I turned to cut a new route. And in that half-second — Jess leaned down. She didn't drag it out. Didn't linger in my line of sight, didn't make it into some overwrought movie scene. She just moved, fast, and pressed her mouth to the corner of mine. Once. Quick enough to almost be a glitch. But dead accurate.

Accurate enough that my whole body locked up on the spot, my fingers frozen over the console for a full beat. The next second her breath was right at my ear. Close. Close enough that the words felt less spoken than branded straight onto my eardrum.

"Consider that the upgraded version of a friend-kiss." A low laugh. Then, deliberately lowering her voice:"Shimo." Boom. If the human face had a self-ignition function, I would have caught fire on the spot. The heat slammed into my ears first, went numb, then climbed straight up my neck; even the back of my skull felt like someone had dragged a lit match across it. The worst part wasn't the heat. The worst part was that this wasn't the medbay. Wasn't a hallway.

Wasn't any kind of private space where I could quietly strangle her and later claim I remembered nothing. This was the bridge. The comm was live. And there was an entire team on the surface waiting on my next word.

"…South — southeast—" I nearly bit through my own tongue, forcing my eyes back onto the main display.

"Southeast retrieval route to B-7. Don't cut through the main column — go under, along the secondary wind band. Craft Two, delay ascent ten seconds. Surface Team One, hold your distance, don't let the shields take the rain front head-on." Half a beat of silence on the comm. I had no idea whether that half-beat meant someone had caught something off in my voice, or whether it was just the normal pause it takes to confirm a route change.

Either way, it was more than enough to make me want to eject myself, chair and all, straight through the viewport and cool off in deep space for three minutes. Then Maki's voice came back.

"Copy. Executing B-7." Steady. Steady enough that you couldn't read a single thing off it. Which was somehow worse. I kept my eyes locked on the display, face on fire, fingers still moving at their normal pace across the console — pulling maps, marking routes, managing windows. Jess had already stepped back half a pace, leaning on her crutch, looking utterly innocent, as if she hadn't just been the reason I nearly said I want to die instead of fog column.

I dragged in a breath and forced the words out through my teeth.

"Jess McCallow."

"Present, Acting Captain." She answered like a model officer, and even flicked an eyebrow up while doing it. I genuinely wanted to take her crutch apart, piece by piece.

"Do you feel like you haven't been hurt enough?"

"Nope." Her grin was pure trouble.

"I just thought you looked a little too focused and wanted to confirm you were still among the living."

"I can tell you, with full professional confidence, that if you do that again, being among the living is going to get very uncomfortable for you."

"Wow. Vicious."

"Shut up."

"Yes, Acting Captain."