Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 2===

'''Mission Report B-01

'''March 21 – 2200 Hours

'''Legitimacy Kingdom New Caledonia District – Special Political Prison “Château de Rouge”



It was pitch black.

Several watchtower searchlights cut through that darkness and pointed toward something quite large.

The never-ending lukewarm downpour implicitly indicated this was a tropical country.

With an eerie rumbling, a giant form directly entered the giant facility that floated on the ocean.

That artificial island in the southern sea was also known as the “Vineyard of Red Wine”. A few foundations that resembled offshore drilling platforms were connected by a jungle gym-like structure made of metal and that jungle gym had square containers hanging down from it.

The entire structure was a hexagon with three kilometers sides and a height of forty meters. The hanging containers were divided into twelve different layers.

The kind of metal passageways and stairways seen at a construction site were attached here and there below the jungle gym, but they were only used by the jailers. The prisoners almost never used them.

The containers were prison cell modules. There were about 1500 of them and that number was equivalent to the current number of prisoners.

The giant form slowly entering that hexagon was an Object.

[[Image:HO_v08_133.jpg|thumb]]

It was a Legitimacy Kingdom second generation Object codenamed Save the Logistics and it was an experimental model with an emphasis on transporting supplies. Simply put, it was too much of a hassle to send multiple Objects to protect fragile transport fleets on long journeys, so they had tried to design an Object to which the containers could be directly attached.

Ultimately, the extra weight had raised the damage rate during high-speed battles and the extremely high Gs of the evasive actions had crushed the contents of the containers, so it had not gotten much use.

As such, it was primarily used for missions other than transporting supplies.

For example, it would escort criminals with a risk of attack or escape during transport, such as mafia bosses or terrorist ringleaders.

Countless boxy containers seemed to cover the Object’s round body and wires from the cranes at the peak of the hexagonal jungle gym attached to them.

The crane arm swung them around so violently one would never think a person was contained within and they would be attached to one of the empty spaces on the jungle gym.

The rain striking one such sturdy container’s roof was quite noisy.

That tropical rain was very different from the rain the prisoner inside had seen back in his safe country.

That prisoner looked around the container cell that contained nothing but a sleeping bag and a flush toilet.

Leaving that cell was forbidden, yet there was no shower or even a sink. The only real water source was the space above the toilet tank meant for washing one’s hands. He would have to use that for everything if he did not want to dry up.

There was of course nothing fancy like an air conditioner and the container did not have a single window. The only connection to the outside world was the long, narrow slit through which he would receive his food tray and the single ventilation fan on the wall. Both of those let in the hot and humid air of the southern hemisphere, so the living conditions were truly horrible. It felt like a human body would melt away if left there for too long.

The prisoner boy wiped sweat from his cheek with the back of his hand and approached the container’s metal wall.

He leaned his back against the wall below the ventilation fan.

“Hey!” he shouted over the downpour.

He had heard about this cruel prison before being thrown into it.

There were a few different ways for prisoners to communicate.

For example, they could send signals by tapping on the metal walls.

Several different code patterns had spread throughout the facility and only one who swore allegiance to a specific group would obtain one. If someone decoded one without doing so, they would be punished for “eavesdropping”. Prisoners were supposedly never allowed out of their cells yet they could punish other prisoners, so there seemed to be some sort of loophole.

And the first step for a newcomer was the ventilation fan.

That was the sole route through which his voice could directly reach the next container, so he had to contact his neighbor. It would be best to learn what groups there were and which one to swear allegiance to, so he had to get that information out of them.

Just because the prisoners could not leave their cells did not mean one could live comfortably on one’s own. If one was viewed as dangerous, every other group would work against them and they could not survive like that.

“What did you do to get in here? It must have been quite something to get you taken to the farthest reaches of the world here, but we might get along depending on what it is. But if it had anything to do with drugs or abducting kids, I’ll never speak with you again.”

“Hyehhh…” he heard through the vent.

It was gentle female voice.

She finally spoke back so weakly that the rain almost drowned her out.

“Th-that wasn’t it. I-I was brought here for something I didn’t do…” A short silence followed as she steadied her breathing. “A-and this is a very strange prison where only innocent people are sent.”

“Yeah,” groaned the prisoner boy as he leaned against the wall.

Lightning struck nearby and produced a flash of light from the vent as if from a camera. The light illuminated the prisoner’s face for just an instant.

He was Quenser Barbotage.

That battlefield student had infiltrated this “very strange prison”. After deciding the voice he heard was the same as the recording he had heard, his tone of voice changed completely.

“I know. This is an official facility that allows the Legitimacy Kingdom’s rotten nobles to imprison commoners they don’t like with made-up crimes. The place is filled with accountants who tried to report a client’s tax evasion, rich farmers who tried to create negotiation groups by bringing together farmers who worked hard but didn’t earn anything, nuns who gave bread to poor children every day, and others like that. At the very least, no one here is a real villain and you’re the same.”

That was another reason the prison was known as the Château de Rouge.

One reason was the way all the container cells hanging down from the jungle gym looked a bit like layers of grapes.

Another was how innocent people were locked up, made to suffer, and had their red blood squeezed from them.

“You are Mariage Nightcap, a graduate student at Cambridge University in the Legitimacy Kingdom’s South Britain district. Your field of study is mechanical engineering and data processing. While in that safe country, you aided the military by revealing the weaknesses of our own Objects.”

Quenser had been unable to bring any documents into the container with him, so this all came from the knowledge in his head.

This environment would not overlook anything even if it was in his stomach.

“The turning point in your life was when you set your sights on enemy Objects instead. Namely, the Capitalist Corporations’ well-known second generation Object known as the Private Bank. That special Object contained the entire main sever of a tax haven bank thought to exist in the Cayman Islands. Officially, this was to better protect the clients’ money and personal information, but it was actually a means of learning about the secret transactions of VIPs from the Legitimacy Kingdom, the Information Alliance, the Capitalist Corporations, and the Faith Organization and to secretly gain their ‘support’. In other words, they tried to create an ‘undefeatable Object’ from a political standpoint rather than a military one.”

Destroying the Object on the battlefield would be destroying the massive account data of important figures from every world power. And if the remains could be recovered and analyzed, their illegal transactions and illicit deeds would come to light.

No one could touch it.

It belonged to the Capitalist Corporations, but it did not even have to obey the orders its superiors gave it.

“That’s when you sent a virus into the Private Bank’s main server and swiped all the personal information. In reality, you just created a fake list that ''looked like'' you had done that, but the general populous didn’t know how to recognize the secret data and couldn’t tell if it was real or not. You then began a multi-wave attack of information warfare to convince people that you had penetrated every line of defense and acquired all the data.”

“The secret VIPs decided there was no more reason to support the Private Bank and they decided to destroy it to take revenge. By the time they realized it was all a bluff on my part, the Private Bank was already a pile of scrap metal at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.”

Mariage had taken the initiative before that “powerless dictator” could spread its threat around the entire world.

But the leaders of the different world powers would not necessarily rejoice at having that problem removed. Quenser himself had almost been killed on the battlefield after getting involved in something similar in the past. Mariage had been in a safe country, so a different method had been used.

And she now spoke through the vent while sounding on the verge of tears.

“What is your point? D-don’t tell me they’ve sent an assassin after me now. That would just be too much. I’m already being punished by spending the rest of my life in this horrible place.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” spat out Quenser. “I want your help, so I’ll be breaking you out of this prison that doesn’t even have the moral decency to separate the men from the women. In exchange, I want you to work with me to find a certain Object’s weakness. This New Model is a fully submerged type that was secretly constructed by the Capitalist Corporations’ Island Nation. It’s known as the Megalodiver.”

Mariage Nightcap was solely in charge of ideas. She would not work to destroy the Object like Quenser and Heivia. She would not leave the boundaries of the “clean wars” where the finishing blow was left to another Object.

But she would still be useful.

She had ended a war without leaving her safe country, so in a way, she had made a much more clever choice than the two idiots.

The problem was how the fools at the top of the military judged her actions.

“W-wait a second. What is this New Model? I’ve been in here, so I don’t know much about the outside world.”

“Don’t lie,” insisted Quenser. He spoke loudly enough to be heard over the tropical rain. “You may look like a pitiable princess in a birdcage, but no prisoner in the world is more financially active than you. You get royalties from ebooks, advertising income from your blog, and you make financial transactions with that money. You even have private rooms you don’t actually use at the London Stock Exchange and Wall Street. I don’t know how you’re gaining access from here, but you probably know more about the outside world than me. Especially when it comes to suspicious actions related to Objects.”

“…”

“I took a look at your data and your trade records are way in the red. To be blunt, a safe country housewife trading in her spare time would do better. You may just be addicted to it like the people who are obsessed with horseracing or casinos and love using the money more than whether they actually win. But then how are you making up for all those losses? This is just speculation, but I think you’re anonymously selling information to the military. Like how to defeat supposedly undefeatable Objects.” Quenser quietly continued. “If so, this is no time to be picky. I want you to hand over all the data you have on the Megalodiver and to lend us your brains until it’s been destroyed.”

“And my reward is being freed from this ridiculous prison?”

“By the way, it seems Cambridge’s chancellor is a sensible guy. He’s willing to treat you as having taken a temporary leave of absence, so you can start back up right where you left off. You can’t get much better than that.”

“But will this really work? The security here is super strict.”

“I’m not planning to tunnel out with a spoon or anything,” spat back Quenser. “The military is willing to use its tax money to bring an end to the nobles’ fun. I have the military on my side, so we won’t be sneaking out through a hole. We’ll blow up the prison and have a triumphant return.”

Quenser fell silent for a moment and continued in a troubled tone.

“If we don’t, our princess will be destroyed by the Megalodiver. We need to find a way to defeat it before that happens.”

“Um, where are we supposed to start?”

“We have time until the operation begins. Rather than waste it, let’s talk. It’ll help to hear from someone who’s directly dealt with the Megalodiver, right?”