Ulyanovsk slowly shut the wardrobe doors.
He counted to ten, then opened them again.
The women’s clothes were still there.
If anything, the three French maid costumes, the kind that belonged in a sex shop, not a closet, seemed to smirk at him through their plunging necklines, like the grin of something diabolical.
“Alright, who’s the prankster here?” he muttered, rifling through the hangers.
“And whoever it was has expensive taste.” He ran a thumb across the fabric of a pair of black slacks.
Genuinely not bad.
Suspects were thin on the ground.
The Type 7 destroyer pranksters, infamous fleet-wide, never messed with staff officers.
Their victims were usually drill instructors, sergeants, the occasional CO.
Internal security didn’t pull stunts like backwards dresser drawers; it wasn’t in their professional DNA.
And nobody with that brand of twisted humor worked in counterintel.
A buzzer cut through his thoughts.
He closed the wardrobe and went to answer the door, hoping it was just the supply detail the base administrator had sent over, and not a pair of stone-faced officers with a polite suggestion to “come with us.” “Good afternoon, Rear Admiral.” The sailor on the step snapped a salute.
“Packages from the base administrator, sir.
And a delivery from HQ.” Five sailors were waiting outside.
Two were loaded down with opaque bags.
Two more stood by a steel crate, roughly the size of a small dresser.
The fifth held out a tablet with a delivery form.
“Who sent the crate?” Ulyanovsk scrawled two signatures and stepped aside.
“Bring it in.
Bags straight ahead and left, leave them on the kitchen floor.
Crate in the hallway.” “Can’t say, sir.
Captain First Rank Makarov handed it over personally.” “Understood.
Pass my thanks to the Captain for the quick turnaround.” “Aye, sir.
Permission to be dismissed?” “Dismissed.” He unpacked the grocery bags quickly enough.
The crate was a different story.
“They actually finished it.” A genuine smile crossed his face as he read the labels on the small boxes stacked on top.
“Only good news this month.” To a civilian, the contents would have looked like scale model aircraft kits, fuselage sections, wings, landing gear, each piece nestled in a plastic blister pack.
Meticulously detailed.
He lifted the crate without apparent effort, despite the fact that two grown men had been straining to carry it, and hauled it to his workshop.
The room would have sent any serious modeler into cardiac arrest from sheer envy.
He ran a quick inventory: six Su-33 kits, six MiG-29Ks, two Yak-44 AWACS platforms, and a full arsenal of weapons loadouts.
Half the ordnance was P-270 Moskit anti-ship missiles.
Thirty-six canisters holding components for the P-700 Granit, his main battery, in every sense.
The real prize?
Twelve kits for carrier-based Su-57s, machined from some kind of advanced composite that felt almost like the actual material used in full-scale production.
Plus two squadrons of Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters, four birds each, both complete with weapons packages.
“Looks like someone’s planning live-fire drills,” he concluded.
“Su-57 carrying three Moskits instead of one, good.
Attack helicopters with anti-ship missiles, also good.
Question is: why?
I don’t exactly have a habit of letting Abyssals get close enough for rotary-wing work…” A soft thud and a muffled yelp came from the bedroom.
Ulyanovsk’s brow furrowed.
He left the crate and moved toward the sound, spinning up a Ka-31 radar surveillance helicopter on the way, better safe than sorry.
Given the noise was coming from the same room as the wardrobe, extra caution seemed entirely appropriate.
“God help me if it’s someone from the Condors or the Bubbleheads,” he muttered, pushing the bedroom door open.
He stopped cold.
The wardrobe was wide open.
It looked like something had detonated inside, doors blown back, clothes scattered across the room.
And right at the presumed blast epicenter lay a girl.
He looked her over.
His first thought was that someone had sent him a descendant of Harry Houdini, except with the talent running in reverse.
Not escape artistry.
The opposite: the absolute mastery of getting completely, catastrophically tangled up.
One arm was pinned to her body by a maid costume.
The other was lashed to her leg by a pair of stockings, with the crotch of said stockings wedged squarely over her face as a gag.
One heel had somehow hooked her own underwear elastic, and she was afraid to move that leg for fear of tearing the already-stretched garment.
Her black skirt had ridden up onto her back, presenting the room with an unobstructed view of a very appealing stern.
Which should have been covered by white lace underwear, except the aforementioned heel had the underwear well in hand.
So the unfortunate light cruiser lay flat on the floor, functionally bare-assed, blinking up at him with wide brown eyes that were almost red.
[image] The whole thing had far more in common with a low-budget adult film than any scenario Ulyanovsk wanted to be involved in, but his primary reaction was an overwhelming urge to laugh.
He checked the wardrobe: women’s clothes still present, half the hangers now empty.
How she’d managed to pull out an entire underwear drawer while falling remained a mystery.
Said drawer was on the floor beside a small pile of bras, one of which had landed on the wardrobe door.
He traced the trajectory.
Two more lacey structural achievements had ended up draped across the curtain rod.
“Well, damn.” He exhaled.
Words weren’t quite getting there.
He went to the kitchen, filled a glass with boiled water, and returned to whoever his wardrobe had decided to produce today.
Crouching beside the chaos, he held the glass near her face and used his other hand to shade her eyes, checking her pupils.
They didn’t glow.
And she didn’t flinch from the water like it was a glass of vomit.
“So.
Who are you?” He studied her.
“Your acoustic signature doesn’t match anything in the database.
And I’ve never heard of a submarine with a talent for getting tangled in fishing nets.” “Hlpff mf!” She shook her head urgently.
He tugged the stocking-gag clear, holding it below her chin.
“Please, help me!” she said, in clean, unaccented English.
“You don’t speak Russian?” She shook her head, shame flickering across her face.
“Please.
Help me.” Ulyanovsk took a moment to mentally catalogue the security failures that were about to require explanation.
A foreign kanmusu had slipped, undetected, onto a classified military installation.
Alone.
By his rough estimate, her mass and dimensions put her somewhere between an Arleigh Burke destroyer and a large frigate.
A vessel belonging to a potential adversary, quietly infiltrating a restricted base, he could already picture the chair cushions melted from below, the careers evaporating like morning fog over the Barents Sea.
“Name, hull number, country of origin,” he said, switching to English.
“His Majesty’s light cruiser Sirius, Dido-class, hull number eighty-two!” she blurted, visibly frightened.
He replaced the gag and waved off the Ka-31, which had been buzzing under the ceiling like a middle schooler’s drone the entire time.
Sirius-class kanmusu worked North Sea convoy routes.
The Royal Navy didn’t send them to the Pacific, certainly not solo.
He pulled up his mental file on the Dido-class and compared it to what was lying on his floor.
Two things matched: height and hair color.
Everything else was…
significantly different.
Still, she was unquestionably a kanmusu.
Her radar signature had the same profile as a Dido, just like she’d said.
Which made the situation worse, not better.
Two kanmusu of the same ship didn’t exist.
In rare historical cases where a vessel changed names and nations, two incarnations had been documented, but those were well-studied edge cases, not something you found tangled in your wardrobe.
Logic said he should hand her to command immediately.
But then came the uncomfortable questions.
Specifically: how exactly had a foreign kanmusu, not just any girl, which command might have reluctantly swallowed, but an actual card-carrying Royal Navy shipgirl, materialized in his private quarters.
The bureaucratic hemorrhage alone would be career-defining.
He pulled the gag down again.
“How did you get here?” he asked, watching her closely.
“I wanted to change clothes, and I tripped and…” She went red.
“Fell into my wardrobe,” she finished, quietly.
“How?” The word left his mouth before he could stop it, because he was looking at the evidence.
She mumbled something incoherent.
Then there was a crack, and— “Aah!” She gasped, face going scarlet.
A scrap of white lace traced a neat arc through the air and draped itself over the wardrobe door.
Ulyanovsk’s gaze moved to the newly unencumbered stern of the bound light cruiser.
“Right.
Enough of that.” He exhaled slowly.
“You fell into your wardrobe and came out of mine?” She squirmed, apparently trying to hide the exposed section.
Realizing he wasn’t going to get an answer right now, and that his skill set didn’t extend to enhanced interrogation, there was really only one viable path forward.
He had no appetite for grilling anyone after the day he’d already had.
Even if she turned out to be a disguised Abyssal.
“Okay.
I’m going to untie you,” he said.
“Then we clean this up and figure out what the hell happened.
Good?” “Yes,” said Sirius.
“Try not to fall.” He pulled her skirt down to cover the hull.
He went for the stocking-knot first.
It turned out to be a proper sailor’s hitch, the kind a seasoned dockhand couldn’t undo quickly.
After five minutes of carefully trying not to damage the stockings, he gave up and simply tore them.
The moment her arm was free, she sat up, pulled her legs underneath her, and started extracting herself from the maid costume that had her left arm pinned behind her back.
He decided he’d provided sufficient aid to a colleague in distress, and turned to the wardrobe, keeping passive radar contact the whole time.
“You said you tripped trying to change?” He knocked on the back panel of the wardrobe.
“That’s right,” she confirmed from behind him.
“I might be missing something.” He rapped the fiberboard again for emphasis.
“But that’s a solid wall.” The rustle of a skirt, and she appeared beside him, studying the wardrobe with visible unease.
He stepped aside to give her room, and to get a better look now that the various restraining elements were no longer part of the picture.
“Excuse me, do kanmusu in England work part-time at cafes?” he asked, taking in her outfit and thinking of Japanese maid cafés.
“I beg your pardon?” She turned to look at him.
A different occupation had crossed his mind, considerably older than waitressing, but he’d opted for tact.
Though, to be fair, the outfit wasn’t exactly helping his restraint.
A short chocolate-brown dress with a white apron, a plunging neckline, and what might generously be called a collar, two thin strips of fabric running down the front, which seemed designed less to hold anything in place and more to frame what didn’t need framing.
For the record, nature had already handled that job with some enthusiasm.
Her back wasn’t helping either, the dress started well below the shoulder blades, leaving a substantial amount of skin unchecked.
A little bow sat at the neckline as a nominal counterweight to the anchor-shaped pendant in front.
“I might be wrong, and this could just be a hobby, but…” He gestured top to bottom.
White stockings to mid-thigh.
A skirt that ended precisely far enough to fail to bridge the gap.
He’d be the first to admit that on most kanmusu-cruisers, or some battleships, the outfit would register as merely provocative.
On this particular kanmusu, it was something else entirely.
An innocent face, barely 165 centimeters, with the displacement of a Yamato or Iowa.
The exact combination that was, he suspected, the leading reason why the majority of officers who worked with kanmusu trended toward court-martial.
“This is the standard uniform of a Kansen from the Royal Navy Maid Division!” Sirius said, with a distinct edge of indignation, turning fully to face him.
She crossed her arms.
The effect was not what she was aiming for.
“Different world, different rules, got it,” he said, filing that argument away.
“But what do we do about the wall?
It can’t be a secret passage.
The kitchen is right behind it.” “Hmm.” She thought it over.
“I clearly remember that when I tripped, I hit my head on the back panel.
Then a flash, and I was on the floor here.” Her account lined up with what he’d found.
The backwards dresser drawers, one still on the floor, told him which direction her wardrobe door should have been facing.
The whole situation reminded him of an old fantasy story about a group of teenagers who stumbled through an antique wardrobe into a magical kingdom full of talking animals and assorted enchantments.
Except that was an antique wardrobe.
She had apparently fallen through IKEA flatpack furniture.
And neither of them was a child.
And the idea that one lone light cruiser could turn the tide against the Abyssal Fleet was, objectively, mathematically funny.
He didn’t entertain the notion that the Abyssals were just some unknown species of wildlife, as most of the public had been told.
But he also couldn’t accept the current academic consensus that these things, whatever they were, could be held at the existing front lines indefinitely.
In the course of his service, he’d had occasion to converse with senior Abyssal individuals.
What he’d seen bore no resemblance to the official data.
The gap ran entirely in the wrong direction.
If one of the Orlans had come through that wardrobe, the idea of outside help wouldn’t seem so absurd, he thought.
“Here’s where we stand,” he said.
“The evidence supports your version.
Your position when I found you, the bra ballistics”, he gestured toward the curtain rod, “it’s unorthodox, but it fits.
However—” “I’m so sorry for the mess!” Sirius interrupted.
“I’ll clean everything up right now!” And she was already crouching down, smoothing her skirt with one hand, refolding the scattered bras into the drawer, stacking blouses and skirts with such professional precision that he briefly considered asking her for a masterclass in folding shirts.
“The problem,” he said, retrieving the items from the curtain rod, “is that your story requires cross-dimensional teleportation.
A kanmusu from another world.
Which sounds exactly like the plot of a cheap Japanese isekai novel.” He retrieved the torn underwear from the wardrobe door and handed it to her, which produced a fresh wave of color to her face, then crouched to meet her at eye level.
“Fact is, you’re here, and you shouldn’t be.
So the question is: what do I do with you?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer.
“Here’s the situation.
A Royal Navy kanmusu, alone, on a classified military installation.
By the book, I report this to counterintelligence, and what happens after that is above my pay grade.
Given your…” he glanced briefly at the uniform, “…appearance, that’s going to be a very interesting conversation for you.” “I—” She sputtered with indignation.
“I would never violate the laws of the Northern Parliament, an ally of the Royal Navy!
I have the International Maritime Code behind me!” She was on her feet now.
Nearly close enough to give him a black eye, in a manner of speaking.
“I don’t know anything about a Northern Parliament.” He decided not to mention his country’s ongoing rebranding discussions.
“And this isn’t about espionage.
Frankly, you’re a terrible spy.” He raised both hands, conciliatory.
“So, what do we do with you?” She fell silent, processing.
“I see two options.
One: I hand you to the security services, and that’s their problem from there.
Two: we wait here until the portal-wardrobe decides to reactivate and send you back.” “But there’s no telling when that might happen,” she finished quietly, deflating.
“I don’t have a choice, do I?” He almost felt guilty, looking at her face.
Almost.
But the regs were the regs, and he’d at least read the first page.
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“Nuclear heavy aviation cruiser Ulyanovsk.
Welcome to the Russian Federation, light cruiser of the Royal Navy, Sirius.” He let the formal tone go.
“You’ll stay here until the wardrobe portal opens and takes you back.
Internment is a last resort, don’t even think about it for now.” “You’re going to break regulations?” she asked, surprised, and making no effort to hide how relieved that made her.
“I have my reasons.
And try explaining this one to my psych team as it is…” “Thank you!” Her whole face lit up.
“I won’t cause any trouble!” Ulyanovsk’s gaze drifted involuntarily to the clothes that had been scattered across the floor, which were now arranged in a neat, perfectly folded stack.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Sirius said quickly, looking away as the color returned to her cheeks.