Castles of Steel - Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad

You hesitated. You wanted to speak up, but something stopped you. It just didn't feel like the right time to try and speak up about this, even if you were reasonably sure you could trust them. Maybe it would be better to wait, to try and address them in Akitsukuni later when you had a chance. You could just wait for the next cruise. It would give you more time to think about what to say. So instead you simply sat back and let the cruise run its course. You finished your navigation exercise and then turned to head back towards Hachinosu with your head full of worries and uncertain futures.

---

Your cousin, Captain Nashimoto Hisanobu, seemed to have taken months to cotton on entirely to the fact that the ship was, increasingly, no longer his private playground. Or perhaps he had noticed earlier, but had taken some time to formulate a response. In either case, the first step of his attempt to wrangle back control came in the form of a book which every officer found lying on their pillows in their cabins after their watch ended, a slim black and gold volume entitled Into a Heroic Age. The foreword promised a detailed and comprehensive examination of Akitsukuni's place in the world in the modern day and the future, and you were unsurprised to find the symbols of the Purity Club embossed on the rear cover. There, but small, like it was trying not to draw attention to itself.

You put it on your desk. You'd read it, if nothing else then to get an insight into your cousin and his breed of imbeciles, but not yet. You had to finish your book about the silk seductresses, first.

---

The next training outing on the submarine was probably the most dangerous. The sub was designed for a rapid "crash dive", which would put it fifteen meters below the surface in three minutes. Unfortunately, the systems for doing so were fairly delicate, and a precise procedure had to be followed. A small misstep could sink the boat, either by flooding it or sending it too deep underwater. It was also frightening even when done right, as the sudden change of pressure would make the hull flex and strain noisily. The little pops and groans of the hull as the water pressure increased always made the hair stand up on the back of your neck. At least if the hull failed, it'd probably be a quick death, right?

The lingering, nightmarish feeling of water in your lungs said otherwise.

This would be the first time performing a crash dive outside of a controlled environment, right next to the ship where a crane could pick you up, in shallow waters where you couldn't go too deep. This was a test under operational conditions, including a miserable few hours of basic navigating to wear down the crew before the radio would give the go-ahead. You would navigate a course and stop every hour or so to radio back to the ship. You might get the order to crash dive on the first stop or the last--you wouldn't know until it happened, to simulate the emergency situation where such a dive would be required.

You were on your sixth radio check in when your headset crackled with the order.

"Boat Number Six, execute your diving exercise!" You hurriedly acknowledged the alert and then bundled up your radio equipment and slithered backwards into the conning tower. You'd gotten pretty good at it--you hardly ever clipped your elbow on the receiver of the machine gun, now. As you dogged the hatch closed and twisted the lock hard, you yelled down into the boat.

"Alert! Crash dive immediately!" You winced at how loud your own voice sounded bouncing off the inside of the boat and then you felt the boat shudder. Kwon swirled a valve and then pulled a lever all the way, and there was the rumbling, swishing sound of the ballast tanks flooding. You felt the boat begin to drop down beneath the waves, nose first, everything tilting and sloshing as the water poured in through the forward ports, driven in by the forward motion and engines. You heard Ota curse as the sudden change in orientation banged his head into something in the forward compartment, then sputter as filthy water, tainted with lubricating oil from the engine, valves, and gun, flowed into his station.

"Shit--! Whoever decided we needed to lay down in the forward section was an idiot!"

"Quiet!" You snapped, your nerves feeling tense and frayed as you listened to the sounds of the boat's hull. Your eyes were locked on the simple dials and gauges that hanging at eye-level next to you which displayed the boat's depth, speed, and dive angle. You counted in your head. Three, two, one…

"Level out!" You ordered, and Kwon moved the appropriate gauges. Something snapped closed, and the boat began slowly rocking back to level. Water trickled around your feet back to a neutral position, and you hoped none got into the batteries.

There was a tense few moments as you watched the gauges stop vibrating and settle, listening to the pops and creaks subside until the only sound was your breathing and the drip-drip-drip of water from above.

"Nice job, lads. I think we just survived a crash dive." You said, and you could hear the sighs of relief. "Now we just have to stay down here for an hour before we surface and report back. Ugh." With the time it would take to get back to the Hachinosu, you were pretty sure you'd be in the boat for well over ten hours by that point.

"My mouth tastes like salt water," you heard Ota complain, then spit. "Salt water and lubricant."

"Not the first time, I am sure." Kwon said dryly. You couldn't help it. You started laughing in a quite undignified manner.

"You set the princess off. Good job, Ji-Hu," you heard Ota say in Joseon.

"She knows a good joke when she hears one," Kwon replied, more than a little smug.

You finally got yourself under control, wiping away the tears of mirth. You realized it was probably the sudden contrast of stress that had done it, from the potential lethality of the dive to your crewmember, who three months ago barely understood the language, snapping out with such wit.

"Kwon, if there was any justice in this Navy, I could write you up for a commendation for that." You said. "But, obviously, it goes without saying that nobody outside this sub knows I found that funny. If anyone asks, I was stoney-faced the entire time, alright?"

"Aye-aye, ma'am. Not even a smile." He replied.

Perfect. That truly excellent joke had set up the idea of confidentiality inside the boat.

You let your crew talk for a while, which they did mostly in your native tongue, dropping to Joseon just for little subversive jabs and comments. They were getting daring, which meant they were probably pretty comfortable around you by this point. That was good. You could use that.

"I don't know why our princess was worried. If we can keep quiet about torpedo, then we can keep quiet about anything," Kwon said with a laugh. "I'm not going to turn her in for laughing."

"I still don't know what she was playing at with that. Like, man, I can't see anything down here, so I have to take your guy's word on it. Was there even a real boat?"

"I saw it a few times, I think." Kwon said. He didn't exactly have the best view most of the time. "What, do you think the whole thing was made up, to like, lure us into a trap?"

"Sure! I mean, look, why else would a Joseon nationalist and an anarcho-communist end up on the same boat with the person they would be most sure is loyal? I bet it was a ploy to get us to open up. The princess refuses a blatantly illegal order, we think she's on the level, we say something stupid, she turns us in."

What the hell is an anarcho-communist? You thought. Like, anarchists are the guys with the bombs who wanted no governments, and the communists are the ones running all the unions who wanted to run the governments too, right? How could you be both?

"You're out of your mind, man. You think they'd drag a princess out here and set us up for months of training for that? Too much work. The Tokkeitai would have just shot us by now. Much simpler. Less chance of drowning royalty. More likely they just want her to fuck up somehow so they have an excuse not to let more women in the navy. Look, why don't you just ask her?"

"What?"

"Seriously, just ask her why she didn't shoot. It's not against the rules to ask our officers questions, if they let us. And it's not like you have anything to do in your station right now."

There was a long pause.

"Um, lieutenant, permission to ask you a question?"

"You just did, sailor." You said, smiling again. That was mean, he thought you were going to get him killed. He was probably terrified. "But yes. Go ahead and ask away, Ota."

"Do you remember that fishing boat a month ago?" He said absurdly. "The one we were asked to torpedo?"

"Vaguely." You said, feigning disinterest.

"Um, okay. Could I ask why we… didn't? Shoot it, I mean."

You hesitated for a moment, trying to think about how to answer.

"Well, it was an illegal order, and…" You remembered the missive from the last Empress you'd been made to memorize in the Academy. "I didn't want to be one of those great, um, women who failed to discern right and wrong because of my private desires. I didn't want to put career above what was right. Again."

There was silence in the boat. You felt like you'd given the right answer, the most effective answer, one drawing on the foundational document of the modern Akitsukuni military… but for some reason, you kept talking.

"All I could think about was seeing the girl in the blue dress."You said, slowly, picking each of your words carefully.

"The girl in the blue dress, ma'am?" That was Kwon now, sounding confused.

"Sorry. Um, she was one of the…" Rioters, the report said. Rebels. Savages. "... protesters. In Heijo. Er, Hwangsong. When things got bad there. We were trying to force our way back to the trucks, and the crowd didn't have anywhere to go…"

Okay, the careful word selection was breaking down a bit as you redirected your efforts to not crying in front of your subordinates, to not going back there in this moment.

"There was a girl. A young woman wearing Akitsukuni blue and white and she was just there to hear the stupid patriotic speeches and she got a bayonet through the guts for her trouble." You'd spent a while in the hospital asking nurses, hypothetically, speculatively, how survivable that was. None of the answers were good, even the ones where she might live. The word sepsis was burned into your mind. "It wasn't her fault. It wasn't the crowd's fault. It wasn't even the soldier's fault for listening when I said to fix bayonets. It was me. I did that. I agreed to take a stupid picture with the flag when I should've known better. And then another good man died after all of that because I was too much of a coward to take responsibility for that. I was too worried about my damn career. So I wrote what they wanted to hear and a man who was just doing his job shot himself to try and make things better."

The words came tumbling out all at once and you couldn't really contain the raw emotion behind them, even if you managed not to cry, at the least.

"I wasn't going to do it again." You finished. "Not here. I wasn't going to just pass on the order and let innocent people die because I was too hesitant to do something."

There was silence in the boat. How do you respond to that?

"... Ma'am, I think you picked wrong career." Kwon said. Ota giggled absurdly.

"Maybe." You admitted. "Look, I wanted to fight Caspian battleships and catch smugglers and pirates and blow stuff up for the glory of my nation, not torpedo random fishermen who are theoretically under our protection." You said. "Maybe wear a cape on the bridge, though our captain has certainly ruined that image for me."

"Yeah, well, I wanted to go to university, not inhale shitty seawater in a metal tube." Ota said. "... ma'am." He added as an afterthought, as though it would make it okay.

"I would like to serve my country, too," Kwon said after a moment. "This is as close as I can come now, unless I join a revolutionary group. They don't pay as good though. Wife would not be happy."

"Kwon, you're married?" You said. He shrugged, pulling something out of his pocket. A little picture of a woman in one of those quaint little traditional Joseon dresses.

"Ooh. Cute." You said. Kwon laughed.

"Don't say that in the ship, ma'am." He said. "We got a paper passed around to us by the captain. What did it say again?" Kwon's spoken Akitsukuni was getting good, but he still couldn't read it worth anything.

Ota moaned. "Yeah, this Purity Club pamphlet about the dangers of miscegenation with the inferior stock of Joseon. Cool stuff. Terrible prose. At least the paper was soft."

"Oh, gross." You said.

"What about you, Lieutenant?" Ota said, with more amusement than you expected. "Anyone special?" Your mind flashed to Aiko.

"No. Yes." Wait, wrong. "Maybe. It's complicated," you said.

"Complicated?" Kwon asked.

"...She's a commoner," you replied, feeling kind of like an idiot for saying it that simple.

"Pfft," Ota made a noise. "And here we see yet another issue with our class system. We get rid of that, nothing to stop you two from getting cozy." He said.

"Well, except the part where your revolutionary friends probably hang me, Ota. Or what's that thing from Gallia? Laquiante? The big sword droppy thing?" You said. "They taught me all about their royal family getting the chop last century. For some reason, I'm less eager about
that part."

"Told you, Atsumori. Nobody wants your head-choppy machines." Kwon said. He switched back to Joseon. "Still, reformist princess is a step up from regular princess."

"We don't have to chop anyone's heads off, it's just the monied classes won't give up power voluntar-"

"She has literally just turned this boat into a subversive submersible." He said. Good pun. "I think we can probably just let her date her peasant girl or whatever."

"Lads, it's terribly impolite to speak a language not everyone can understand in the middle of a conversation." You said, trying to keep your voice light. "Anyway, backing up a moment. Ota, you wanted to go to university? I figured you must have some learning, what with the poem the other day…"

"Well, self-taught, ma'am. There wasn't a university in the country that would take in the brother of an assassin." He said. "Had to find my own books, and it's an expensive habit. Combined with a lack of deferment… here I am, I guess."

"Rather short sighted of them." You said. "Wonderful idea, let's leave this young man with no education and no options but to read his brother's books, and then we'll teach him to blow stuff up. I swear…"

"When you put it that way, it sounds even more stupid, ma'am."

"What sort of things did you read?"

"Politics, mostly." (Kwon gave a gasp of mock surprise.) "A lot of local writers, and some Europan writers, when I could find translators."

"You got any recommendations?" You asked.

"The Right to Well-Being? It's… a musing on a theoretical structure for society." He said cautiously. "It's a bit out there, but I think it has some interesting ideas."

Oooh, that's a recruitment pitch if you ever heard one. And that title sounded vaguely familiar.

"Sounds like a real page-turner. I'll give it a shot when I finish my current book. Get this, lads: it's a Gallian author's best guess at what a lesbian is…"

---

As the little sub came back to the surface and started back, you went back to your Officer Voice and the conversation, even in Joseon, stopped, becoming just serious, business-like exchanges about the functioning of the submarine. What happened underwater stayed there.

A mail carrier had caught up with the ship in your absence, so you had a lot of mail when you got back aboard. A lot. More than you were expecting, honestly. The usual letter from your mother, one from Hideaki (with a picture from the wedding you had taken with him, Osamu, and the other naval types. It was a good photo), and… something like five or six all from Aiko. All written in the month or so you'd been in the hospital. Apparently they'd taken some time to catch up. They'd gone first to the Hachinosu, then to the hospital, then back to the Hachinosu. That… that was worrying. You started with the earliest which was full of talk about the wedding and how lovely it had been and she'd had a good time and also a lot of worrying about you and your health. She'd heard all about the incident and has been so worried! So worried. The next letter was mostly about her anxiety over university. She'd been accepted into Horonai University in Tokei and was excited, but anxious. The third and fourth were much the same, but she was fretting a lot about not hearing back from you, though she understood that you were sick and so forth. The fifth letter…. wasn't great.


Fuck.

How did you answer this?