Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume9 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 12===

Quenser and the others arrived at the Legitimacy Kingdom fleet.

They were nervous enough for their throats to dry up when they surfaced, but fortunately they did not become human torches.

A rope ladder was lowered for them to climb up onto a small aircraft carrier. They roughly secured the small submersibles with ropes and adhesive. They looked a lot like the magnet-attached human torpedoes seen in old war movies.

Frolaytia met the soaking-wet group in a conference room and she got down to business without bothering to greet them.

“Technically, it was the submersibles I wanted here, not you. As you should know, we can approach the battlefield from below using them. It gives us more options than waiting for the final moment as that killer radar approaches.”

“If it’s that bad, why not move the ships back?” asked Heivia.

“You’re not serious, are you?” replied Quenser with a shrug. “We’re up against an Object here. If it wanted to, it could move at five hundred kph. If the Princess messes up holding it back, it’ll chase us to the other side of the planet with its killer radar on at full blast.”

“Exactly. The situation is hopeless. With this much interference, they can even pretend they didn’t receive our White Flag signal. We need to make sure the Princess wins no matter what and that means breaking through the Oriental Magic’s stronghold.”

While speaking, Frolaytia connected the projector to her laptop with a cable.

She displayed some quickly thrown together documents on one wall.

“The biggest bottleneck is that the Princess’s main cannons can’t hit the enemy. We’ve done some scans, but the Oriental Magic’s own movements aren’t all that clever.”

“You mean there’s something diverting the Princess’s shells or screwing with her ballistic calculations?” asked Quenser.

He looked to the projector and saw the many “spears” sticking vertically from the ocean surface.

“We can’t perform any decent scans with all the electromagnetic waves, but we still have some partial information. They seem to be sporadically emitting extremely powerful magnetism, but it isn’t all of the spears all the time. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. Which ones activate must be randomized, but there are always three of them emitting magnetism.”

Quenser groaned quietly when he heard that.

Despite the approaching threat, his curiosity as a promising engineer reared its ugly head.

“The three-body problem? That does sound like something people obsessed with a ‘Star’ would come up with.”

“What’s that?”

“It can be the moon, the earth, or the sun. All celestial bodies have a gravitational pull and all of them are pulling on each other as they move around. Now, here’s the question: how do you find what kind of influence is caused by three celestial bodies pulling on each other?”

“What? How should I know? The rotation of the earth and the revolution of the moon are probably explained by a chalkboard full of cryptic equations. That’s not a very good riddle.”

“No.” Quenser shook his head. “The answer isn’t known. No one can reach an accurate answer.”

“Wait. You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not. You can easily calculate out the influence of two, but there’s nothing we can do when it gets to three or more. Lately, they can reach ‘approximate values’ using a supercomputer, but that’s like saying pi is more or less three. The exact answer is still impossible to find.”

“Yes, this is a control system that artificially creates that three-body problem.” Frolaytia pointed at the projected document with her long, skinny kiseru. “Powerful magnetism can bend the paths of plasma, electron beams, coilguns, or railguns, but if it’s a simple pull in one direction, the post-interference trajectory can be calculated out and corrected for. …That’s when they bring in this randomized three-body problem. Honestly, it’s giving me a headache.”

Still absolutely soaking wet, Millia frowned.

She seemed to be having trouble picturing the situation.

“Major Capistrano, didn’t Quenser just say a supercomputer can produce an ‘approximate value’? Can’t you reassign the Object’s electronic processing time to open up some space for that? For example, you could abandon control of the smaller anti-personnel cannons.”

“We thought about that, but it was no use. The approximate value for a rocket’s trajectory would take months to calculate. With the spears’ magnetism constantly being turned on and off randomly, reaching an instant calculation is impossible. Not to mention that we wouldn’t be able to correct for the error introduced by the approximate value. The shells are useless if they don’t hit. We won’t get a participation trophy just because we graze the Object two centimeters off the side.”

“Um, what about laser beams?” asked Putana. “Those are pure light, so I don’t think the magnetism would affect them.”

“They seem to have another defense system for that. They’ve made unbreakable bubbles by mixing a special rubber adhesive with water and scattered them around to bend any light that hits them. In any other situation, I’d want to take a video and pass it on to the technology division.”

The low-stability plasma cannon, railgun, coilgun, rapid-fire beam cannon, and laser beams could not reach the Oriental Magic.

That meant the Princess could not win as long as that system existed.

“I want one of these.”

Frolaytia used her kiseru to point at the spears on the screen.

“Dive down and collect one. How do they work, how do they coordinate with each other, and how can we break this system? If we can figure that out, we can find a way out of this. At the very least, we can place the Princess in the same ring.”

In other words, their mission was as awful as ever.

Heivia and the others looked on the verge of tears. It almost seemed they were going to give up on it all, board a submersible, and run off on their own, but then they realized something.

The entire unit could not afford for them to reject this mission.

More importantly, running away here would not solve the Nataraja problem. It was using up all of the resources it had stolen to maintain its ten thousand meter form. If those resources were not retrieved soon, everyone would have to bear the debt. The entire world would become a waste dump which would leave the explosive expansion and extinction of the one kind of saprophytic bacteria. That would lead to a world of sludge with no microbes. Every continent would be covered in gray sludge and that would leave no escape.

So they had to do this whether they liked it or not.

They had no choice but to succeed.

(Fortunately, the two objectives are pointed in the same direction. If we can silence the Oriental Magic, we can search this area of ocean like normal. The Nataraja is huge and it wasn’t originally designed to dive down like a submarine. They set up this situation because they were afraid of being heard as they moved through the ocean, so the Nataraja won’t be able to escape.)

Quenser forcibly encouraged himself like that.

With doom only ten minutes away, he tried to give his heart a running start.

But he was being too naïve.

The next problem arrived only a moment later.

The entire small aircraft carrier shook and tilted as if an explosive blast had hit it.