Official Kusari Naval Forces portrait of Nitto Kaisa Kyōko Honda
818 AS, Day of the Foreign Revolution, destroyer KDS Chokai
"Attention on deck!"
Fifteen bridge officers rose from their seats in unison and bowed their heads at the entrance of the Onna Bugeisha of Tau-31. An approving nod and purposeful expression saw the crew back to their duties. Commander Kyōko Honda took her usual place at the center of her command bridge, taking silent note of those on her bridge and the intimate details of their service under her.
Lieutenant Commander Nobuyuki Oda took his place at her side, offering a sharp bow and crisp salute to meet her acknowledging glance. “Nito Kaisa, the day’s briefing.” He slipped a datapad into her hand, and waited for her to digest the day’s shocking events.
In this glorious year, 818 AS, the oppression of Kusari and her people by the Emperors and Shoguns has closed, a chapter of our history that shall soon fade into distant memory! The honorable officers of the Kusari State Police and the Naval Forces have seized the government in conjunction with the Kusari Democratic Alliance, and have declared the Kusari Republic in New Tokyo. Emperor Kogen was killed as a coward, having attempted to flee with his corrupt advisors instead of honorably facing trial for his crimes against the Kusari people. Jiyū banzai! Long live the Kusari Republic!
Though her face betrayed no emotion, a subtle gulp was all the indication required as to Kyoko’s reaction. She returned the datapad to her second-in-command. When Kyoko turned to face him, a brief once-over revealed nothing as to his disposition towards this world-changing briefing. She allowed herself a few extra seconds to gauge his expression.
“Santo Kaisa, what do you think about this news?” Kyoko raised a brow in curiosity, hopeful that she would not get a diluted version of the truth. “Surely such a national tradition of loyalty is does not dissipate in a day.”
“We are at the behest of our command, Captain. Our service surely means more than reverence or lack thereof for tradition.” Nobuyuki paused, mulling over the next layer of his verbal cushion. “It is a tragedy that Kusari should experience a period of civil turmoil. We shall recover, of course, if and when any unrest manifests itself.”
Kyoko folded her hands behind her and straightened her back. Such a passive take on the situation was oddly calming. It served as a minor suppressant to the menagerie of concerns growing within her mind.
“Do you think that the report is correct, Commander?”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you think a revolution really has occurred? Do you think Emperor Kogen is truly dead?”
Nobuyuki furrowed his brows before replying. “I should think so, Captain. The news would take the longest amount of time to reach us here in Shikoku. If it were incorrect in some way, it would’ve been stopped, corrected, or redacted.” He shook his head. “This report has gone through three levels of command, Captain. Emperor Kogen is dead, and we are citizens of the Kusari Republic.”
Commander Kyoko Honda released a deep breath, one that felt as if she had been holding it in for a century. “I’m going to address the crew. Have Itto Kaii Yamada on the bridge when I’m done.”
“Right away, Captain.” Nobuyuki offered a hasty bow before departing.
Kyoko approached the communications officer, who promptly patched her through to the entire ship. If the bridge crew had overheard her and her second-in-command’s conversation, they were reserving themselves out of some form of solemn respect, disbelief, or shock.
“Crew of KDS Chokai, this is Captain Kyoko Honda speaking. As of this morning, Kotei Jien Kogen is dead. A new government, the Kusari Republic, has been formed. I expect each and every one of you to execute your duties without question in the coming days. Our ultimate loyalty lies with the Kusari people and whatever entity represents them. As things stand, we have not received orders from Naval Forces High Command, and as such, in accordance with the Navy Guidelines for Self-Direction under Extraordinary Circumstance, we will be departing from our mooring point within the hour. All crew are expected to be at duty stations by then. Glory to Kusari.”
Lieutenant Takahiro Yamada stood at determined attention, keeping his gaze aligned forward. His undersized form was aggressively accentuated by a wide-shouldered duty uniform, and a wide stance trained into habit over a number of years. The thin beard and mustache on his face were similar tools he manipulated to amplify his image, but for all of the pushing against hygiene and uniform fitting regulation, he could not bring to bear a more imposing stature than most of the ship’s crew.
He offered a sharp 30 degree bow from the waist in salute. “Captain. Have recent… events caused unrest in the crew? Do you want us on standby in case of sabotage?”
The destroyer captain crossed her arms. “Have a little faith in the crew, Yamada. No, we’re going to sortie out to the Kepler gate. Standard procedure calls for us to secure transit areas, and that gate tends to get pretty hot without government overhauls. I’m worried that we may run into defectors or cocky pirates. In either case, I need you and your team ready at a moment’s notice.”
“Of course, Captain.” Yamada’s tone grew hush, and he looked briefly from side-to-side. “Do you really think there will be defections?”
Kyoko’s expression grew somber. “We have no way of knowing, but I’d rather be ready to face it if there are any than be caught by surprise.” She glanced out of the bridge’s viewport “Those Hunters aren’t going out to look for pirates to hit if there’s a risk that the new government will want to ground ships or impose regulations. They may be trigger-happy, but I think staying out of Fuchu is a bigger priority on their minds.”
Yamada nodded. “Their primary interest is money, money alone. Prison costs money. So, that leaves us Naval Forces to secure the lanes, today.”
The captain turned her back to him, and replied with a faint accent of wistfulness apparent in her tone. “They’re not all just in it for the money… yes, it’s just us, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”
Yamada bowed and exited. Crew went to their stations and the security team prepared for duty as the Chokai departed from Deshima Station. The slim hatchet-shaped destroyer eased into the trade lane to the Kepler jump gate, sandwiched between a pair of Samura oxygen transports. The destroyer took up a position to the left of the gate, facing the lane.
It was some time before anything of note actually occurred. As the minutes stretched into hours, the feeling of urgency departed Honda’s mind; transports continued their usual routines, hauling helium, or oxygen, or vanadium, or whatever else that could be shipped needed to be shipped. In fact, the destroyer’s captain had almost slipped into a state of tranquil security when the bridge came alive with activity.
“Captain! Eight Wyrms, a Chimaera, and a Naval Forces gunboat are approaching from within the cloud, they’re not flashing their proper IFF’s. Orders?”
Kyoko’s eyes narrowed. She figured there would be unrest, but never defections in such force. “Prepare for battle. I want all weapons ready and locked. Hail them, and wait for my order to fire.”
“Yes Captain.”
A few tense seconds separated her orders and the opening of a communications channel. Inwardly, she sighed, cursing her own misfortune at having to deal with such a situation. They were betraying the government, yes, but the pilots of the KNF were pure and honorable. They wouldn’t just leave unless they had seriously considered the circumstances and calculated that they could do the people of Kusari the most good by turning on the new government. But where would they go from Kepler? Liberty? A Freeport? The questions continued to rage in Kyoko’s mind when she spoke her clear and firm order to the pilots. “This is Commander Kyoko Honda, KNF. Fighters and gunboat, power down your weapons and engines immediately. Identify yourselves.” Perhaps force of reputation could get them to stand down, if nothing else. Her reputation for dogged pursuit of her goals and her enemies had spread to every nook and cranny of the Naval Forces.
By the time they had obliged, they had pulled well within visual range of the Chokai. All of the ships were damaged in some way or another. The fighters didn’t seem to badly hit, only two of them were actually burning, but all of them were missing some parts. The gunboat, however, sported incredibly impressive battle damage. Its hull was ruptured in numerous locations, and it had more parts missing or destroyed than actually left on the ship.
“Nito Kaisa Kenta Hashimoto speaking” Kyoko immediately noticed his shortness of breath, likely from damage to life support systems. “We cannot swear loyalty to a shell government and leave our people to suffer. We’re leaving, with the rest of the Exiles. Allow us passage, for we are still brothers in arms, but merely with different masters.”
Honda’s brows furrowed. “Hashimoto, you intend to turn your back on the representative body of the Kusari people. Obviously, you’ve done this violently. And now you expect me to forgo my duty so that you may simply raid us later, in Galileo’s bends and between Ames and the gate?”
“You misunderstand! We are leaving to fight for the true ruler of Kusari, Kotei Kogen’s son! If you have any honor, you will grant us passage. You see the state of our vessels. There would be no fight, only an honorless slaughter. I beg of you, as a warrior and a fellow officer, do not make us die here.”
Panic and fear were both easily noted in his voice. Fear of his fight to the jump gate being worthless. Fear of letting down his pilots. Fear of Kusari’s downfall.
Fear of a dishonorable death.
Kyoko did not respond. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and looked down, pinching the bridge of her nose. The defecting pilots soon took their chance and made a dash for the gate, passing the destroyer and entering their codes.
“Captain! They’re escaping! Shall we fire?” Kyoko looked up, opened her eyes, and took in the sight of the display. The defectors were slowly, one by one, passing through the gate. Hashimoto, in his Chimaera, was last to go. He kept his weapons pointed at the Chokai, prepared to go down fighting to buy his subordinates time to escape. “Captain! The last one is about to jump to Kepler! What are your orders!?.”
The defector leader made one last utterance before disappearing into the gate. “Samurai, arigatogozaimasu.”
The destroyer’s captain straightened her back, sighed, and turned to exit the bridge.
By now, Lieutenant Commander Oda had returned to the bridge. “Captain… What happened? Why did you let them escape?” His tone did not indicate any hostility towards her decision, though Kyoko was sure that he could hide any if he actually had some.
Kyoko spoke with deliberate volume, ensuring the entire bridge could hear her. “A power failure, Nobuyuki. The damned power core gave out.”
With that, she stormed off the bridge to confront the one within her head.
Up until the evening, Chokai remained diligently on station at the Kepler gate. No more escape attempts were made by rogue KNF personnel, which was a great relief to both Kyoko and her crew, but the atmosphere remained altogether tense. The stale taste of anxiety was in the air; bridge crew jumped at the passage of little phantoms in the vast expanses of the Keiun Cloud, and shifted whenever a convoy coming down the lane from Deshima Station wasn’t immediately identifiable in composition by ship silhouette alone.
The Chrysanthemums, too, seemed to have caught the scent on the air. Surely they knew of the developments in New Tokyo as soon as or even before Honda and her crew. A single small attack had been attempted by a group of six fighters, but they resolved not to test their luck when the Chokai came into view. It seemed that the Chrysanthemums did not have sufficient fighters and bombers at the ready that day, as they did not return with reinforcements or heavier equipment. Instead, they skirted the edges of the destroyer’s sensor range, popping in and out of sight alone or in groups of two, three, or four. Altogether, those tense hours standing watch at the Kepler gate were anxious and stressful in equal amounts.
Some hour and a half before Honda would’ve ordered supper to be brought to her crew’s duty stations, KNF command had finally sorted itself out. The Chokai was ordered off of sentry duty and directed to return to Deshima. Kyoko sincerely hoped that their patrol wouldn’t be examined with exceptional scrutiny. She trusted her crew and their respect for her and her status as a minor legend, but nobody yet knew how sternly the new government would look upon allowing traitors to escape without a fight. Naturally, she would not divulge this information herself unless pressed, but others might not assume that such knowledge could prove harmful for her career, or possibly, her life.
The captain shoved these thoughts to the furthest recesses of her mind. For the time being, the priority would be sorting fact from fiction about any changes in Naval Forces command and the government itself. KDS Chokai moored at Deshima, alongside a batch of reinforcements in the form of two destroyers and five gunboats. Kyoko assumed they would be deployed to watch the Kepler and Galileo gates soon enough.
Once aboard the station itself, Kyoko, with the help of Nobuyuki, dug up whatever KNF orders or reorganizations had been sent out amidst likely administrative chaos.
“I’ve received one response from command regarding our orders, Captain. We’re to stay at Deshima for the time being, but we must be ready to sortie out on an hour’s notice.”
“I assumed as much. We can be ready in half that time. Anything else?” Kyoko leaned forward at her desk in the station’s Naval Forces Shikoku Squadron offices. A bit cramped, but they served their purpose; only a few captains and administrative officers were there even once a week. Other times, they’d either be on duty aboard their ships, or aboard the Myoko.
“These other ships moored with us are from the Center Reserve Squadron out of Yukawa. They’re the destroyers Mikuma and Mogami, and gunboats Banjo, Atago, Ataka, Chiyodagata, and Tsukushi. I’m sure more ships will arrive soon, but for…”
Honda became too preoccupied with her own thoughts to continue to actively listen to her second-in-command. The Mogami. That was still his ship. At least, that’s what Kyoko thought. She had fallen out of contact with him in the previous few weeks, and the last she had ever heard from him was that there was discussion of scrapping some of the Naval Forces’ older destroyers, the Mogami among them. Surely if that idea had fallen through, he would still be in command. The Onna Bugeisha’s lips curved upward.
“...so that estimate may be off, but I doubt it’s too far from what the figure will turn out to be.”
“I’m going to meet with Commander Takenaka, and discuss what’s going on. Maybe he’ll be privy to information that hasn’t reached Shikoku.”
“He’s the captain of the… Mogami, correct?”
“Yes. Dismissed, Lieutenant Commander. Join the rest of the crew for supper. Kill any rumors or ideas before they get off the ground if you get the opportunity.”
Kyoko stepped out of her claustrophobic workspace. Almost adjacent to the KNF offices was the receiving point for moored State Police and Naval Forces vessels and their crews. It was an inglorious chore for Kyoko to force her way through the tide of disembarking crews from the reinforcing gunboats and destroyers as they pushed onwards to the food courts, but she finally found an officer managing the flow of crew with a datapad in his hand. His collar devices clearly designated his rank.
“You there, Ensign!” To the officer, Kyoko’s commanding tone, pointing, and aggressive way of pressing through the crowd were all warning signs that he had broken some critical regulation and was about to be on the receiving end of a stern lecture and disciplinary action. He froze and stared like a deer in headlights, until Kyoko clarified, “Where is Commander Takenaka? Are you with the Mogami?”
The ensign softened his stance, pressed a few buttons on his datapad, and replied. “Yes ma’am. The captain wrote that he’d be out in the biodomes when he signed out, in case he was needed. If you’re from Fleet Forces, I can-”
“Thank you Ensign, that’s all I needed.” Kyoko turned on her heels just as the words left her mouth.
It was easier for her to exit. Kyoko was at the tail end of the crew mob, and fortunately, her route caused her to part ways with it just as the hundreds of destroyer and gunboat crewmen reached the bottleneck entrance to the food courts. Through the myriad twists and turns and corridors and modules, it took at least ten minutes for the destroyer captain to arrive at the biodome entrances.
Unfortunately, she had neglected to ask which biodome Takenaka had resigned to. Even if she had, he probably hadn’t even specified when he signed out. Kyoko reasoned that the domes to the left and right of the central management module wouldn’t be ideal places to go for a stroll, due to their designation as strict farming domes, but that still left two domes ahead of her.
It couldn’t be exceptionally difficult, at least. For all their size and abundance of flora, the biodomes not restricted to subsistence agriculture didn’t offer many different walking paths. When Kyoko stepped inside the first dome, a rush of cool, fresh air blew past her face and through her hair. She had certainly been inside biodomes before, but the feeling of comfortable and natural air was a special delight to anyone used to working long-term aboard starships.
Honda did her best to take in the refreshing atmosphere of the biodome as she fast-walked through the twisting paths, passing the occasional civilian or Guild member every now and then. When passing through an intersection of walkways in a particularly densely-forested section of the dome, the sight of a yellow leg was caught in the corner of her vision just before it disappeared behind a corner. A yellow leg was a Kusari uniform. The Naval Forces. Takenaka. Kyoko sprinted after it, but just as she turned the corner she saw the yellow uniform disappear behind, she found that she was at yet another intersection.
The destroyer captain sighed. It was almost like he was trying to lose her in the artificial forest. But just as she began to walk down one of the three directions at random, she heard a wonderfully familiar voice behind her.
Kyoko spun on her heels and stuck her nose as high up as it would go, narrowing her eyes and donning an imposing expression of dissatisfaction. “Your games, Captain Takenaka, are childish and unbecoming of an officer.”
Akio threw his oval-shaped head back in ebullient laughter, every reach of his face alight with amusement at Kyoko’s vexation.
“The stake that sticks out gets hammered down, Commander. Maybe you’ll learn that come the next promotion cycle.” Kyoko declared with a mock foreboding tone. Her admonishment apparently served only to further Akio’s amusement.
The taller, lankier officer dramatically placed his hands on his hips and bent at the waist ever so slightly, as if to look down upon the subject of his brief game. “That’s rich, coming from the one who has her own legendary nickname,” he stood up straight and crossed his arms, sighing and looking to the side. “I suppose that if all you came here to do was get angry at me, I should just go…” Akio made a deliberate show of turning and starting away down the path.
Kyoko lunged forward and grabbed a fistful of collar. “You’re an idiot, Akio.” She dropped her act of faux indignation and planted on his lips a clean and proper kiss, as much as one can be. It was an experience closer to receiving a medal than exchanging heartfelt emotion. She pulled away, hands folded behind her back, standing at attention with an expectant glint in her eye.
Akio leaned in, his eyes drifting to the left and then to the right in a brief and furtive assurance of privacy. Such was all the time he decided to waste, and he completed his movement by swooping in and capturing the smaller captain in a tight embrace. The both of them took ample time to expunge weeks of mutual longing in that spot, half assuming privacy, and half uncaring if they had it. Kyoko’s hands crawled up her partner’s back, coming to a rest on his neck, gently pulling the two of them closer together, if his considerable squeeze was not already sufficient.
The two eventually parted, Kyoko holding Akio at arm’s length. “Surprise me, Akio. At least tell me you had a room paid for before you decided to play games with me.”
A chortle. The most reassuring of answers. “My dear, I’m afraid you hold me in such high regard…” Akio expelled a trifle more of his longing by parting Kyoko’s arms and nipping her neck, however quickly he was rebuffed.
“Room first. Then we can enjoy ourselves.” Akio dove in again, only to be rebuffed yet again, with a much rougher shove than last time. Kyoko closed the distance and seized his collar with one hand, intent on dragging him off to a Deshima hotel. Silently, she thanked whatever ethereal entity looking out for her that Akio was behind her, likely staring at her behind, instead of being in a position to see her face. Between the absurdity of the situation and her sincere joy and relief at being reunited with her dear fellow captain, her tight facade fell apart into voiceless laughter.
Once at a hotel, Akio carried up the rear to book a room for the night. Kyoko advanced ahead to a puny, single-bed cell of a room, still aloft a significant cushion of excitement. With as much haste a man about to get lucky could muster, Akio completed his transaction and bolted in pursuit of his “forbidden” rendezvous.
As he entered their room and hastily closed the door behind him, he paused, and grew ferocious in anticipation at the sight before him. Itto-Kaisa Kyoko Honda in none but her underclothes.
An exchange of grins, and the two enjoyed their respite from duty away from the prying eyes of the fleet.