Chương 322: 136.Ghost Ship 2

Seven minutes into the FTL stable phase, the Yukikaze was quiet the way a creature finally learning to breathe properly is quiet. That kind of quiet was rare. Not nothing is happening quiet. The whole ship had just survived FTL ignition — the kind that picks up your stomach, eardrums, and soul together and gives them a spin — and was now doing its best impression of something professional, composed, and absolutely ready to keep working.

In other words: everyone was pretending the universe hadn't just shoved them underwater. I sat at the tactical station, watching the sector map rebuild itself. Jess was watching too, but this woman could stare at something completely serious and still look like she was critiquing a restaurant menu. In some sense, she was probably alive today precisely because she could find the layout of a death notice aesthetically lacking.

Outside the bridge's forward viewport, the binary blue giants still rotated slowly in the deep. Both stars blazed with that near-painful aurora blue, outer coronas churning — two hearts thrown into the dark by some god, refusing to go out.

The silver-blue nebula filaments blown open by stellar wind stretched long and thin in the vacuum, weaving cold, unreasonably beautiful light bands; further out, the enormous protoplanetary disk lay like a black record pressed from debris, ice, and failed ambition, turning slowly in the gravity wells of the twin stars. The Yukikaze advanced steadily along the disk's outer edge. Acting Captain Ash stood at the front, eyes moving between the main display and the viewport.

Maki sat at the executive officer's station, spine straight as if someone had measured it with a ruler. Aida's technical monitoring curves ran smooth and reassuring; Lan held minimum necessary comm loops; Akari continued tracking the outer debris flow; Roy kept both hands steady on the helm, the kind of steady that suggested if anyone let this ship wobble even a tenth of a degree, Roy would pin them to the bulkhead with his eyes alone. In short, everything was normal.

The universe's least favorite thing is the second after you decide everything is normal.

"Radar contact. Non-natural metallic reflection." Akari's voice came in at the same register as always. I genuinely liked that about her. She could be reporting the end of the world and it would sound like a note that the afternoon soup was too salty. Not coldness — professionalism. The truly dangerous ones don't scream at the alarm. They finish the numbers.

"Distance four thousand two hundred units. Located in the shadow of the protoplanetary disk's ice-debris band. Reflection cross-section anomalous. Shape is…" Her hands stopped. Just for a moment. For Akari, that was approximately equivalent to the universe clearing its throat.

"…Shape is consistent with a large artificial hull structure." I looked up. Jess looked up. Even Aida pulled her eyes away from the power curve she'd been regarding with more affection than most people get.

"Magnify," Ash said. The main display split in two. Left side held the course and disk-flow map; right side zoomed fast along Akari's marked coordinates. The image swept past slowly drifting black ice and debris, then cut into the disk's shadow zone. At first it was just a patch of deeper, colder dark. But as sensor gain climbed and the outline emerged, inch by inch, the thing in my stomach that FTL had just put back in place dropped again. That was not a rock. That was a ship.

A ship so large it looked like a segment of history that had been torn loose and left behind in the universe. It drifted in the shadow, half-lit by the oblique light of the binary stars, the other half still submerged in the dark cast by the debris band. Nothing like the Yukikaze's relatively modern, streamlined profile. This ship had almost no visible aerodynamics to speak of. It looked like a mass of heavy steel that had been cut, welded, and stacked into something that flew because it had to.

Armor plated thick to the point of stubbornness. External heat-sink arrays like rows of ribs exposed to space. A hull covered in impact craters from meteorite strikes, and broad black scorch marks from centuries of bombardment by the blue giants' high-energy radiation. The most alarming thing was the stern. The first-generation hyperspace jet engine was gone. Not broken. Not on fire. Not the kind of damage that still leaves room for hope. An entire section of the structure had been torn from the inside out.

The rupture was large enough to swallow a hundred-meter-class shuttle. Twisted steel framing splayed outward, like a great beast that had opened its mouth in its final moment — and never finished the last exhale. Nobody on the bridge said anything. Not because there were no words. Because this kind of thing genuinely makes you forget how words work first.

"…Wow." Jess spoke first, and — rare for her — didn't immediately accelerate toward something sharp.

"Even I don't feel like being sarcastic right now."

"That means it's serious," I said.

"Or it means I actually do have some sense of occasion."

"That sentence is more of an antique than that ship." Jess made a small sound, but didn't follow up. Even she understood: this wasn't the time to run on words.

"Identification match complete." Akari put a new data window on the main display. Old Federal standard codes, expired vessel insignia, historical archive retrieval flags — appearing one after another along the side of the screen.

"Target hull matches Federal first-generation pioneer test vessel data at 91. 7%. Registry designation: KX-03. Vessel name: Texas." Even the air seemed to settle a degree lower. Texas. When that name landed, what surfaced in my head first wasn't naval history. It was the kind of sentence you find in the appendix of a textbook — written in the cold, careful way that suggests the author was afraid someone might actually understand it. UC(Universal Calendar)661.

KX-03 Texas lost contact during a frontier jump test mission. That was it. One line. Not one word more. Like someone had filed several hundred lives into a footnote, then quietly closed the book.

"The one from the textbook?" Lan murmured, like she couldn't quite believe she was asking.

"Apparently," Aida answered, calm.

"History doesn't usually drift into our viewport on its own. Today is an exception." Ash said nothing, just kept his eyes on the hull. At the executive officer's station, Maki had already pulled up the rapid-response protocol, fingers working steadily through several internal confirmations. In moments like this, she moved like a blade — never a motion over, never one short.

"Roy, hold current distance. Do not close further," she said.

"Copy." Roy adjusted course immediately. The Yukikaze's attitude corrected slightly, and the Texas on the main display slowly rotated to reveal a more complete angle. At that moment, the observation window near the bow — still largely intact — was swept directly by the binary stars' light. I saw something inside. Not reflection. Not fracture-shadow. Human silhouettes, fixed in their seats. Indistinct, far away, mostly obscured by the heavy erosion and crystallization on the window's surface.

But because they couldn't be seen clearly, the cold in my spine was worse for it. Those shadows sat too still, too orderly — not the posture you'd expect to find on a ship that had been drifting for two hundred years. More like people who had been forgotten by time and simply never clocked out. My fingers tightened without thinking. If the Kamikaze core hadn't held that day. If our jump field had also collapsed.

If the Yukikaze hadn't dragged herself back from that dead black— The people behind that window could have been us.

"Signal." Lan, this time. She was already leaning toward the comm console, earpiece pressed hard, like if she relaxed her grip even slightly, the voice that had just risen from a two-hundred-year-deep well would sink back down before she caught it.

"Not a current-service frequency. Very old… very old. Old enough that I want to ask why the database hasn't shipped this format to a museum yet."

"Don't ask yet," Ash said.

"I'm not asking, I'm expressing professional dissatisfaction through appropriate channels," Lan said, hands already moving faster than her mouth.

"Catching emergency quantum black-box residual signal. Band matches old Federal rescue spec. Signal is very weak, loop is incomplete, content is being translated." Another layer of quiet settled over the bridge. Nobody pushed her. Because everyone understood: urgency didn't help here. A ship dead for two hundred years wouldn't speak more clearly just because you were anxious. The noise came first. Not the romantic kind from films.

Real noise — crackling broken current, the kind that made your back teeth ache, like old circuitry grinding its own bones in a vacuum. Then, at the center of that almost-dissolving sound, a recording — dry, fragmented, barely recognizable as human — was slowly pulled out.

"…This is… KX-03… Tex… as…"

"…Jump field… destabilizing…"

"…Space… being stretched… navigation… failed…"

"…Outside… no stars… no… reference points…"

"…Life support… three hours… remaining…"

"…Federal… please respond…"

"… We can't find… the way home…" When that last sentence came through, the whole bridge was struck by something, from the inside. Light. But it went straight to bone. For a moment I couldn't breathe properly. Because that sentence wasn't history. It wasn't data. It wasn't a well-crafted line from a novel, placed there to set the mood. That was a distress call.

The last voice of a crew who, in the dark two hundred years ago, had genuinely waited for an answer, genuinely believed the Federal fleet would come, genuinely refused to stop trying to go home even when life support had three hours left. Jess swore under her breath. Low. Short. For once, not aimed at a person. Aimed at the universe. Aida broke the silence first.

"I'm against boarding." She said it too fast — like she'd been waiting for the right moment to put it down since the beginning.

"The reason is simple. Two hundred years doesn't mean clean. It means we don't know what's still inside. Ancient sealed specimens, radioactive contamination, runaway nano-repair clusters, chemical residue in sealed compartments — any one of those is enough to give us a very long time to regret it."

"Agreed." I followed, eyes still not leaving the ship.

"Tactically it's not worth it either. We're in a disk shadow zone — debris flow is complex, observation dead angles are numerous. Adjusting course to approach an ancient wreck means voluntarily putting the Yukikaze into unnecessary risk."

"And the coincidence is too neat," Akari said.

"Dead ship, old frequency, disk shadow, binary gravity well. Any one of those alone is explainable. All of them together is suspicious. Can't rule out disguised wreckage, bait signal, or secondary exploitation." Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Same from the communications side — not recommended to approach," Lan said.

"This residual signal may be nothing but a black-box loop. It may also still be attached to an old response mechanism we don't recognize. Get too close now and we might wake up a dormant system we have no manual for." Maki looked around the room, taking in each assessment like folding blades away one by one into a conclusion.

"Recommendation as follows," she said, voice steady.

"No boarding. No docking. No close-range drone deployment. Maintain current safe observation distance, run passive scan, record coordinates, residual signal band, and hull condition. When this vessel enters a more secure communications window, report to the Federal historical archive and military affairs system." She paused, then added the last line.

"Additionally: the Texas is, by nature, a tomb ship." Aida didn't argue. Neither did I. Because once that sentence was said, all the technical and tactical reasons took a step back. Not erased — placed in their correct position. Yes, dangerous. Yes, not worth it. Yes, possible pathogens, possible traps, possible lingering echoes of ancient disasters. But before all of that, she was a grave.

Jess reached up and rubbed her face, and for once didn't have that particular look that said I really want to stab at something here. She just said, quietly:"I know this sounds unpoetic… but prying open someone's grave to confirm the history isn't respect. It's just not knowing when to keep your hands to yourself." I almost laughed. Really, almost.

The ability to say something that tactless and that accurate in a moment like this — I genuinely suspected Jess had not been human in a previous life, but some kind of tactical device specifically designed to puncture overwrought sentiment. Ash finally spoke. No extended remarks. No expression that said I am now going to say something on behalf of civilization. I appreciated that. People who actually carry weight rarely need word count to prove it.

"No boarding." Three words. Decision made.

"Maintain safe distance. Full record of coordinates, signal band, hull condition, and external imagery. Lan, preserve the residual signal in raw form. Akari, log relative stellar position and disk-plane location in the navigation record. Aida, continuous monitoring of this vessel's biochemical and radiation indicators. Roy, do not let the Yukikaze enter the Texas's debris orbital path."

"Copy."

"Understood."

"Yes, sir." Then Ash looked at the Texas on the main display and was quiet for one second. Not long. But I knew clearly: what came next wasn't a technical order.

"Executive Officer."

"Here."

"Notify all hands." Maki reached for the wall handset immediately. I expected the same cool, hard, distinctly warship-flavored delivery she usually used. But when she opened her mouth, her voice was softer than before. Just slightly. Barely enough to notice. But because it was Maki Kushima, I could tell.

"All hands, attention," she said.

"During the first FTL stable phase, this vessel has identified Federal first-generation pioneer test vessel KX-03, Texas, on the adjacent course." No one on the bridge moved. But I knew: at that moment, every person still awake on the Yukikaze had lifted their head, just like us.

"The vessel has been confirmed as a lost tomb ship. This vessel will not approach, board, or conduct recovery operations. All off-duty personnel, please take position at the nearest observation port or internal observation screen. On-duty personnel, stand by at stations." Her voice dropped slightly lower.

"All hands. Prepare to pay respects to the pioneers." My fingers curled. The pioneers. That was a brutal thing to call them. Because it took that ship — drifting for two hundred years, a historical footnote — and called them back into being people. Lan turned to look at Ash. Ash nodded once. Lan pulled up the residual signal, cleared most of the damaged opening segments, and kept only the last line. No embellishment. No added framing.

And then that voice from two hundred years ago played once more on the bridge of the Yukikaze.

"… We can't find… the way home…" No one spoke. Everyone on the bridge was standing. Even Roy held the helm with one hand and brought the other up in a clean salute. I stood too. My eyes crossed the main display, crossed the viewport, and settled on the ancient ship lying in the disk's shadow. The Texas drifted quietly, half-submerged in the dark of the debris and ice, half-lit by the cold light of the binary stars.

That light fell across her battered, blunt steel armor, and looked — of all things — a little like moonlight on water. Strange. There was no sea in space. But in that moment, I thought of the sea anyway. Thought of ships that had gone out to sea and never come back. I raised my hand and saluted. In the edge of my vision, Maki was standing. Her posture was textbook-perfect, almost cruelly so. But I saw her fingertips press together slightly. I knew it wasn't my imagination.

Because only I would look at a place like that, and only I would, at a time like this, inexplicably notice that even her grip was restrained. … Damn it. Why, even while paying respects to the dead, could I still lose focus to her. I was deeply disappointed in myself. But it wasn't the first time. Fine. For thirty seconds, the Yukikaze held no unnecessary sound. No system prompts. No one doing a theatrical sniffle. No idiot suddenly saying thank you for your service, everyone.

Only the Kamikaze's low resonance deep in the hull — a heart that had finally learned to beat steadily — quietly adding one beat, across two hundred years, for a heart that had long since stopped. I had the sudden sense that going home had never been just a line on a navigation chart. It was also luck. It was skill. It was someone fixing your core. It was someone crawling back alive from a 4. 3G surface under a hostile planet. It was someone keeping their hands steady on the bridge.

It was someone still standing beside you when you almost couldn't hold on. And — It was someone who didn't make it back, so that those who came after would know what making it back was actually worth. After the salute, Ash was the first to lower his hand.

"Once the record is complete, resume original course," he said.

"Yes, sir." Roy answered.

"Lan, archive the residual signal to the ship's historical file. Report to the Federal side when the communications window opens."

"Understood."

"Akari, add a special notation to the target."

"Notation content?" Ash looked at the main display and answered, level.

"KX-03 Texas. Lost vessel. Tomb marker." Something caught lightly in my throat. The name was cold. Cold the way a military archive entry is cold. And because it was cold, it hurt more. Akari nodded and entered the marker into the navigation chart. A very small white symbol appeared beside the ancient ship in the star map — clean, precise, not a trace of sentiment. Like history had finally, two hundred years later, placed the period that had always been owed to her.

"Course correction complete," Roy said. The Yukikaze's bow shifted slightly, slowly moving away from the protoplanetary disk's shadow zone. The Texas retreated in the viewport, inch by inch, sinking back into the cold light woven from the binary stars and the debris field — a ship finally seen by her own era, and choosing still to remain. When Jess sat back down, she didn't say anything sharp first. After a few seconds, she said, very low:"At least now. Someone actually answered her." I didn't respond right away.

Because I knew she wasn't talking about the comm signal. She wasn't talking about the two-hundred-year-old recording. She was saying: we saw her. We remembered. We didn't treat her like a piece of metal that happened to drift into our path. I watched the white marker on the main display grow small, and finally said, quiet:"… Yeah." Then I put my hands back on the tactical console and looked forward. The first FTL stable phase was still running. The binary blue giants still burned in the distance.

The protoplanetary disk still turned, slow and vast. The Yukikaze was still moving forward. Only now, I couldn't treat going home as something that went without saying. After the salute ended, the first thing to come back wasn't sound. It was work. The moment Ash lowered his hand, the silence — the kind that had pressed down on the whole bridge, made even breathing feel like it needed permission — didn't vanish. It was cut.

Like a block of ice not quite fully thawed, one order tapping the first crack into it, and then everyone, with quiet mutual understanding, moving back along that crack to where they needed to be. I sat back down and placed my hands on the tactical console. When my fingertips touched the panel, I noticed my palms were slightly cool. Not fear. Not only the line we can't find the way home still circling in my ears — well. Some of it was still circling. That line was like a fish bone.

Not large, but lodged somewhere inconvenient. You couldn't swallow it down, couldn't cough it out. You just had to keep working and pretend it hadn't caught. The Yukikaze's bridge was professional. Professional enough that even getting caught by something like that had to wait behind the job.

"Course holding normal." Roy spoke first, voice a shade lower than before, but still steady.

"Increasing distance from the Texas. Outer-disk debris flow shows no anomalous deflection. This vessel is not entering her debris orbital path."

"Record complete." Akari said.

"KX-03 Texas lost-vessel tomb marker entered into this vessel's navigation chart. Relative stellar position, disk-shadow coordinates, binary star reference angles — all archived. Available for direct retrieval when filing the Federal report." Akari's voice was still flat — flat in a way that suggested she hadn't just stood with the whole ship to salute a two-hundred-year tomb, but had simply entered an astronomical positioning entry into the database. In a way, I envied her. Not the composure.

The way she could use composure this cleanly.

"Residual signal archived." Lan pulled the last audio track into the encrypted file, then paused before adding: "I made a separate read-only copy as well. Not for now. In case the Federal side receives it someday and gets the itch to clean it up into something more presentable, more suitable for a textbook." I turned to look at Lan. That line was light. Almost a joke. But the barb in it was very real. Because everyone knew what history was actually best at — and it was never remembering people. It was editing them.

Turning a distress call into lost contact. Turning despair into sacrifice. Turning we can't find the way home into mission terminated, died with honor. The words get clean. The people disappear.

"Preserve the original file," Ash said.

"Already done," Lan answered, fast.

"And I'm putting three locks on it. Unless someone plans to dismantle me along with the mainframe."

"That would be too much work," Aida said, mild.

"I don't recommend it." … Right. This was the Yukikaze. Anyone else, after a moment of silence for the dead, might bow their head, gaze out the viewport, say something about how long life was and how vast the universe. Not us. We were more like a group that had spent thirty seconds grieving alongside history, then immediately pivoted to discussing how to prevent the Federal paperwork system from editing a dead crew's last words into administrative copy. Brutal. And, unexpectedly, very human. Hard to explain.

But I was starting to think this ship just had that particular condition built in.

"Technical side nominal." Aida's eyes didn't leave the monitoring board.

"Kamikaze output stable. FTL primary coil showed no additional load from the observation deceleration. Onboard radiation, gas circulation, and biochemical indicators all normal. The Texas has not sent us to meet our ancestors. At least not yet."

"Thank you for delivering every status report like a deferred critical-care notice," Jess said quietly.

"You're welcome," Aida said, still not looking up.

"When you're actually close to dying, I'll use a gentler tone." Jess was quiet for two seconds.

"Hoshino, I've just realized the most dangerous thing on this ship might not be outer space. It might be the Chief Technical Officer."

"You're only realizing that now?" I kept my eyes on the main display, doing my best to sound as normal as usual.

"Your situational awareness is slower than the Texas's navigation system."

"That's a bit harsh."

"She just pre-booked your death notification. I'm being generous." Jess turned to look at me, mouth moving like she wanted to laugh, then deciding that laughing too obviously right now would feel wrong, and ending up with a very strange expression instead. Honestly, I was about in the same place. This was probably the most difficult thing about coming back from a moment of silence. Not the grief. Grief was simple.

The hard part was the way your chest was still heavy while the work couldn't stop, so the feeling got stuck somewhere between your ribs — not fully up, not fully down — and eventually turned into something that felt equally like wanting to laugh and wanting to sigh. Ugly. And very real.

"Executive Officer," Ash said.

"Here." Maki had been sitting straight the whole time. The near-invisible tension from the salute had been folded back away. That was what made her formidable — not that she couldn't be cut, but that after being cut, she could always press the blade back under her uniform and look like nothing had happened. Reliable. Also infuriating.

"Log the silence procedure and full ship status together in the voyage notes," Ash said.

"Addendum: this vessel did not approach, did not board, did not conduct any interventional operations."

"Understood." Maki entered the record quickly, tone smooth to the point of coolness.

"Additional recommendation: note that the tomb ship's coordinates have been marked, and that any future Federal recovery or verification operations will require a dedicated team. This vessel will not take on the assignment."

"Add it."

"Yes, sir." I listened to the exchange and felt something almost absurd settle over me. Two hundred years ago, a ship called for help in the dark. Two hundred years later, another ship saluted her, then wrote this vessel will not take on the assignment into the voyage notes. Pulled out of context, that sounded almost inhumanly cold. But I knew it was the most correct thing we could do right now. Because responding didn't have to mean reaching into a coffin to pull the dead back out.

Sometimes responding only meant acknowledging: I saw you. You died. And I won't spend the living to prove I have a heart. That was the only way to be honest with both the dead and the living.

"Tactical, compile a disk-shadow risk summary," Ash said, eyes landing on me.

"If the Federal side does send a recovery vessel later, I don't want the next crew thinking that place is just a scenic ancient cemetery."

"Copy." I started pulling the surrounding debris flow, binary-star gravity disturbance, shadow-zone observation dead angles, and potential re-dispersal risk from the wreckage into the summary frame. The tactical lines were cold, thin, precise. Precise enough to make me want to laugh, slightly. A few minutes ago we were saluting a failed pioneer vessel. Now I was writing this is dangerous, do not touch for whoever came near her next. No poetry in it. Very Yukikaze.

I was halfway through when a hand appeared from my right side, knuckles tapping lightly on the lower-left corner of my terminal. I turned my head. Maki had finished a portion of her own work at some point and was half-turned toward me, looking at my report.

"Here." She pointed to one of the risk notations.

"The debris flow cycle needs to be listed as bimodal, not single-phase. The shadow angle the Texas passed through wasn't a single static zone — it was pinched out by the outer disk edge and the binary tidal forces together." I looked at the section she'd indicated and stopped for a beat. …Right. She was right. Damn it.

"I know," I said, stubbornly.

"You hadn't corrected it."

"I was about to."

"Mm."

"That 'mm' is asking for a punch." Maki finally looked at me. The expression wasn't quite a smile, but it was softer than usual — barely, in the way of someone hiding under a layer of ice who'd accidentally let a crack form in the surface.

"Hoshino," she said quietly.

"You were distracted just now." My throat tightened.

"I wasn't."

"You were."

"I wasn't."

"You looked at that ship too long." …This woman. Sometimes I genuinely wondered whether she'd allocated part of her Executive Officer skill points to reading my face. How else did she catch me drifting for a few seconds every single time.

"What about you?" I said, keeping my voice low.

"You weren't looking any less than I was." Maki was quiet for half a beat, then said, very calmly:"That's why I'm working now." I nearly choked. Infuriating. And the most infuriating part was that she was right. Beside me, Jess was pretending to be very busy with her deputy monitoring board. I'd bet anything her ears had migrated entirely over to our side of the console. This woman not going into intelligence work was a genuine waste of the universe's resources.

"Tactical deputy," I said, stone-faced.

"Here." Jess answered fast.

"If you keep eavesdropping, I'm handing you the full second-pass disk-flow calibration."

"I wasn't eavesdropping. I was accessing useful information shared in our professional airspace."

"Then I'm making the airspace smaller right now." Jess immediately looked down.

"Yes, Tactical Officer. No problem, Tactical Officer." … At least she knew when to fold. Ahead, the Texas marker on the main display had shrunk to a very fine white point, hanging in the left-rear of the star chart like a punctuation mark written in late. The binary blue giants still burned. The protoplanetary disk still turned. The universe had not paused for even half a second because an ancient ship had finally been seen. That was normal. It was also brutal. But, strangely, I felt a little lighter for it.

If even the universe wouldn't stop, then this ship — still alive — had even less reason to.

"All-ship status report archived," Maki said.

"Maintain current flight profile," Ash ordered.

"First FTL stable phase continuing. Full pressure review in ten minutes."

"Yes, sir." A sequence of responses stitched the bridge back into its normal rhythm. I looked down at the line I'd just added in the lower right corner of the tactical chart: KX-03 Texas. Lost vessel. Tomb marker. Do not approach. Cold. Cold as an official document. But I stared at those words, and thought: this was probably one of the most decent things we could do for her. Not dragging her out. Not disturbing her remains. Not trading her death for a well-written report.

Just making sure the next person who came close would know, first, what was buried here. I drew a breath and submitted the last risk notation.

"Tactical summary complete." Ash nodded.

"Good." Short. Ordinary. But after hearing it, the thing lodged in my chest — the one that had been stuck somewhere it didn't belong — finally settled a little lower. Not gone. Just shifted to a different position. No longer lodged directly across every breath. And right then, Jess said something, in a register only I could catch:"Hoshino."

"What."

"If we ever really almost don't make it back — make sure you stay prickly." I looked at her.

"What kind of terrible request is that." Jess was watching the main display, mouth not curved, voice level.

"Because I don't want the last thing I hear to be you saying I told you to shut up." I went still for half a second. Then, almost on instinct:"Don't worry. If it ever gets to that point, that'll still be the first thing out of my mouth." Jess laughed at that. Very briefly. Short enough to look like she was afraid someone would see. I let the corner of my mouth follow, then looked back toward the front. The Yukikaze was still moving. In this particular minute, technically, nothing significant had happened.

No new hostile contact. No system failure. No FTL destabilization. No one suddenly slamming a fist on the console and declaring they were boarding the wreck against orders. But it was exactly this kind of minute — the kind where nothing happened — that let the weight of the silence before it settle into something solid. Because now we all knew. Knew that someone had genuinely not made it home. Knew that every inch we moved forward was not something owed to us.

So it was only after this minute that the Yukikaze could truly be said to have left that ancient ship behind. Not forgotten. But carrying the sentence she had left behind, and continuing on.