Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 9===

An unpleasant tension stung at Quenser’s skin.

It had begun the moment he had crossed the canal and entered the Capitalist Corporations’ Azuero District. It may have come from his awareness that he was standing in enemy territory.

A double chain-link fence nearly three meters tall blocked the way, but it was not much of an obstacle with so much of it broken and collapsed. There were also guard towers with gun turrets, but they had fallen over.

The entire scenery changed.

The Soberania District had resembled a resort town or forest after a fire, but the Azuero District was covered in asphalt and filled with giant concrete boxes and cylindrical metal tanks. It all looked like an unhealthy industrial sector.

However, the entire place had transformed into a scorching red and black hell with the buildings melted into lava.

Here and there, Quenser saw groups of metal pipes that almost seemed to form a brain. They even passed by overhead like overpasses, so he opened his mouth.

“This is right on the border, so what kind of factory was this?”

“It’s too scorched to read properly, but you can just barely make out ‘Liquid-N’ on the tanks.”

“Liquid nitrogen?”

“It’s probably officially meant for humanitarian medicine, but I bet it was actually being used in research and development for a new type of night assault cannon.”

“Those weapons are meant to silently attack a maintenance base zone and then leave, right?”

“Mortars and multiple rocket launchers are the standard weapons for attacking a base, but they don’t have much initial speed and it takes a few seconds before they hit. If people react to the sound of them being fired and jump out of the way or get down on the ground, the number of casualties goes way down, so everyone wants a way to launch a shell without using any powder.”

“I know our intelligence division was doing some research by launching a baseball with compressed air…but I think that was a failure because it didn’t give the ball much distance for how heavy the unit was.”

“Here, they were probably trying to gain even more power by flash vaporizing liquid nitrogen inside the barrel. It might sound difficult to use, but liquid nitrogen can be safely stored in a thermos.”

“It still doesn’t seem to fit with the ‘firepower above all else’ ideal of the Object worshippers.”

“If the research was actually important, they would never build the factory next to the border, even if it is a border with a blank region. It’s probably a dumping ground for anyone who messes up in defending their home country.”

The industrial sector burned loudly as Quenser and Nyarlathotep walked through it.

The sky was covered by black smoke as far as the eye could see, but it was not coming from the smokestacks. They could not hear a single sound indicating the facilities here were running.

Similarly, no one else seemed to be around.

“Those main cannons we saw back at the Miraflores Water Gate were insanely powerful.”

The facilities were packed in tightly despite how much space there was, so they had poor visibility. Quenser glanced around, but he could not see the giant Object from here.

“Those weren’t normal low-stability plasma cannons. How do they get that much power? Are they compressing a huge amount of catalyst, are they sending in a powerful electric current, or does it have something like a circular particle accelerator inside?”

“It’s probably simpler than that. That’s plasma, but it leaves the category of the low-stability plasma cannon. That’s why it can use an unprecedented level of power.”

“…?”

Quenser initially did not seem to know what the man meant, but…

“Wait, you’re kidding, right? Is that even possible?”

“All of the energy swirling through the JPlevelMHD reactor is directly retrieved and launched from the tubes. …So that’s plasma that can’t be called ‘low-stability’. It’s the overwhelming heat that keeps a two hundred thousand ton giant fighting at speeds in excess of five hundred kph. Do you see now why that would have the destructive power to carve orange paths into the planet?”

“Do you have any proof that’s what it’s doing?”

“No. But I can’t think of any other theory to explain what I saw.”

Quenser was not about to take the words of an enemy spy at face value, but he placed it in a corner of his mind as a possibility.

But if that theory was true…

(The explosion of a test reactor has enough power to stop an Object. If all that energy is being directly sent out, even the Princess would be vaporized in a single hit. And it can keep firing it from eight different cannons?)

Those were some frightening specs, but he still had his doubts.

If that was true, they would need a way past a certain problem present in the design of an Object.

Nyarlathotep pointed forward.

“If you have any doubts, check it out for yourself. That’s the best course of action in an environment filled with both truth and lies.”

After walking around the corner of a giant crumbling factory, Quenser frantically backed up.

The Miskatonic was hidden there.

That nightmarish Object used its eight tentacles to freely fire the energy drawn directly from its reactor.

“Why!? Shouldn’t there at least be guards around it if it’s undergoing maintenance!?”

“Even with heat-resistant suits, they can’t keep soldiers around at all times when it’s ninety degrees here. But if they send the Object back to a safer area, the Legitimacy Kingdom will use that as an opportunity to advance. Instead, they send only the bare minimum of equipment into this scorching region to keep the soldiers out of this sauna as much as possible. …After all, an Object can’t be damaged by a surprise attack from rank and file soldiers. Or so they believe.”

Based on their experience so far, the Miskatonic most likely used the drones for everything but anti-Object targeting. Currently, it was busy having anti-personnel sensors installed because it could not trust its eyes in the sky. It was unlikely it would send out the drones it no longer trusted.

With that in mind, Quenser and Nyarlathotep moved out from the factory wall again. They stayed low and jogged over to the Object.

It used an air cushion propulsion device. The air cushion was shaped like a diagonal “#” with the front two lines stretched out. Overall, it had the silhouette of a double-edged sword. The edges suck out from the Object a little bit and they looked like an aircraft carrier’s flight deck.

“Wow… The entire road is covered in a forest of steel beams. How many of them are there? And the Object is sitting on top of that metal forest.”

“It’s a way of distributing the weight. They do the same thing in shipbuilding. When a seventy thousand ton cruiser is being constructed, it’s supported by countless wooden beams before it’s allowed to float in the water.”

Countless thick wires extended from the surrounding factories and cylindrical tanks and they connected to the Object like it was Gulliver. Maintenance soldiers in fire-resistant suits were traveling up and down those wires. Most of the work was being done overhead, so Quenser and Nyarlathotep rushed into the forest of steel beams so as not to be seen. They were directly below the two hundred thousand ton Miskatonic.

Quenser groaned as he nervously looked overhead.

“That float looks like a sword. It extends so far forward. Wouldn’t half…no, a third as much be able to support it?”

“That’s just how incredibly powerful its main cannons are. It needs this giant float for the recoil.”

They continued to the very back of the metal forest and poked their heads out from below the Object ceiling.

There, they saw the eight flower petals attached to the back of the spherical main body. The eight tentacles attached to those giant reels were far too close.

“They’re basically endoscopes. Do you think they use electromagnets to control the plasma?”

“I don’t see what else they could use. They basically have a small sun trapped in there, so even if they make the walls thicker, the plasma’s heat will still melt the material.”

They did not know if it was the tokamak method or the torus method, but the inside of those tubes had to be filled with extremely high power electromagnets. That immense magnetic line would restrain the plasma and fire it by letting it “escape” in the desired direction.

Quenser pulled his head back to hide below the Object ceiling again.

“I have one question about its targeting.”

“And that is?”

“Our theory was that the Miskatonic uses its own sensors to target Objects and the drones for soldiers and anything else.”

Quenser leaned against one of the steel beams.

“But how? Its main cannons are overwhelming. I’d heard the Legitimacy Kingdom’s observation equipment was blinded in the instant it fired because the values grew too high. In that case, how is it targeting the enemy Object from the center of that vortex of plasma?”

“Now that you mention it, that is strange.”

“It obviously can’t use optical or IR sensors. And all the noise rules out auditory or ultrasonic.”

“That much plasma would also render electromagnetic waves unusable. It couldn’t be using radar.”

Quenser followed up Nyarlathotep’s comment by thinking through a human’s senses.

“What about smell or taste?”

“Do you know how chemical weapons like poison gas are disposed of? Most of the time, they’re incinerated in the high temperature of aluminum of napalm. The particles behind smell can’t be relied on in that plasma.”

“But the particles aren’t wiped out entirely. That would break the conservation of mass. They’ve only been made harmless and invisible, but they’re still floating around, right? The extreme heat simply changes their chemical structure into something else.”

“So you’re suggesting an olfactory sensor that assumes the indicator has been oxidized? In other words, it has a particle collection device? We should have paid attention to the direction of the wind.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s about to fire. It must use something scattered by the target…like a static electricity model’s repellant or an air cushion model’s turbine lubricant. It uses that ‘smell’ to maintain an accurate targeting lock in the middle of this hell of heat and light.”

In exchange, the Object’s own sensors had not been able to accurately target Quenser and the others when they fled into the forest near the Miraflores Water Gate. Humans did not scatter that much material when they breathed.

That was why it had been forced to attack the general area and create those rivers of lava.

It had only been able to assume it had killed them.

Nyarlathotep accepted the idea before saying more.

“But how does that help us? All that lets us do is divert its aim with chaff or a flare when it targets another Object.”

“Not necessarily. We can abuse that method to get it to fire its main cannons wherever we want. And the Miskatonic uses massive plasma cannons. It’s possible we could…”

“Get the enemy to fire on its own forces?”

“…”

Quenser fell silent for a while and finally responded.

“No, let’s wait until later to get greedy. Right now, we just need to take out its anti-personnel sensors. We need to figure out what they’re attaching to it.”

“What a pain. Are we going to walk up one of those wires? That would definitely be hard to do without being spotted. It would be easier if we could get our hands on those fire-resistant suits they’re wearing.”

“All that matters is that we know they aren’t done working yet.”

Quenser grabbed his War Hammer with both hands.

“If I fire at the tip and base of their crane game, I can interrupt their work.”

“I’m all for blowing something up, but wait until after we have an escape route. That has a wireless trigger for remote detonation, right?”

Just as they started discussing their plans, a high-pitched whistle sounded overhead.

It was the same explosive roar as the jet engine hanging down from a large passenger plane’s wing. Quenser looked up without thinking and was amazed to find his body still had enough moisture to sweat.

“Oh, no. The air cushion is starting up! We need to get out of here! We’ll be crushed by the compressed air!!”

They did not have time to worry about the danger of being spotted by the Capitalist Corporations maintenance soldiers. The two of them ran through the forest of steel beams and out from below the roof formed by the Miskatonic.

A moment later, a tremendous wall of air blew through.

Just as the two hundred thousand ton mass began to float, the excess air scattered in every direction. Their bodies seemed to grow weightless and their toes left the scorching asphalt. Quenser swallowed a scream and focused exclusively on not biting his tongue as he was forced to enjoy an aerial swim at more than five meters up.

He lost his balance, crashed into the road again, and rolled another twenty meters.

“Ah…gah! Gh!? Bghah!!”

Occasionally the news would get worked up over a story of a truck dragging someone behind it, but this may have been similar. If not for the thick helmet meant to fight the flames and sensors, his head might have looked like it had been grated.

Similarly, Nyarlathotep was saved by his firefighter’s outfit and he slowly rose to his unsteady feet. Quenser’s mouth was still flapping wordlessly, so the man grabbed his arm and forced him to his feet as well.

There was a good reason for doing that.

A sudden flash of light sliced through the industrial sector.

There was a thick orange afterimage through the air and a white flash of light as if from welding at the point of contact.

The giant concrete factory was roasted through. The Miskatonic snapped its many wires and jumped to the right to escape. The maintenance soldiers working up top were vaporized, set on fire, or sent into a freefall.

Yes, the Miskatonic dodged.

The attack had come from somewhere else.

In other words…

“A laser beam!? Was that the Princess!?”

“So they’ve crossed a line too. I never thought the Legitimacy Kingdom would be the first one to enter the demilitarized zone.”