Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 5===

“Tch.”

“What’s that tongue click for, Blodeuwedd?”

“Oh, nothing. How do you do, Hamazura-san? Oh, dear. You have some trash in your hair.”

“???”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet came up with an excuse to snatch something from his hair, crush it between her fingers, and toss it aside.

(That was a transmitter smaller than a grain of rice based on a communication spiritual item. Whether or not they could pull it off, would Dion Fortune be the only one among the Anglicans who would come up this kind of ''idea''? And she has spent the most time with Hamazura Shiage among them.)

But that aside,  they had walked a bit – a good bit – from the airport.

Below the open sky.

“Aneri says ''this area is most suspicious''.”

“I don’t know what it based that conclusion on, but if Aneri-tan says so, maybe it’s true. Doesn’t it worry you that you don’t know what calculations the AI is doing on the inside?”

As long as it was convenient, he didn’t really care. …But did he only see it that way because he lived in a city of science worship?

Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had arrived at a fairly special part of District 23. Special enough that it was on every single tourist map.

It was filled with aircraft.

Except they were packed in close. And there was no rhyme or reason to where they were stopped. Even if they were being maintained or refueled in preparation for takeoff, this haphazard arrangement would leave each individual aircraft unable to move.

But that wasn’t a problem since the aircraft here were all retired.

“Hm. So they took retired airplanes and space shuttles and restored just the residential portions to make hotels, villas, and such out of them?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a look around and commented in amusement, as if she were viewing a tourist attraction.

Hamazura walked past a parked tanker truck and toyed with the cracked phone in his hand.

“It’s called Hotel Town.”

“More info from Aneri-chan?”

Correct.

It may have been like the “towns” made from trailers found in the American desert…but these were small business jets and even large passenger planes. The scale was on another level entirely. It covered a wide horizontal area, but the map also expanded in the vertical direction. All the voluminous fuselages and wings acted like large roofs for anyone walking on the ground.

“Gweh,” groaned Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. “These can carry hundreds of passengers, but that’s with them all stuffed into the cramped economy seats, right? Would anyone really pay a lot of money to spend the night strapped into one of those seats?”

“Maybe there are a lot of airplane nerds, or people who really like being served by flight attendants, even if it’s cramped.”

“A paradise for masochists, huh? Well, I guess you can sell anything if you package it up nice. You can even reserve a tour in the sweltering jungle where you get to enjoy a military-style ‘interrogation’ using metal drums and bats☆”

The girl with zero interest in planes stared into the middle distance.

Now, because these planes were retired, people could enter the ordinarily off-limits areas and snap photos with their phones. Maybe there were people out there who wanted to try sleeping in the cockpit or the cargo space.

The food would probably be airplane food (shipped in from somewhere else of course), but the area was kind of smokey. It smelled of oily smoke, like when cooking yakitori. Apparently the people who still felt hungry were having a cookout. There were grills made by splitting a metal drum down the middle here and there. The earthbound passenger planes had ropes and laundry up on their roofs, but wouldn’t the smoke affect them? Seemed like it would make them smell.

“The place is like a maze… And not just in two dimensions. The map extends overhead too.”

“At least we’ll have plenty of escape routes if we need one. Yeah, now this is a tourist attraction for criminals☆”

There must not have been enough boarding stairs to go around because it looked like people were using ladders and stepladders to enter the entrances located higher up than Hamazura’s head.

The ladders were especially useful because they could also function as makeshift bridges when laid on their side. There were several places where two different passenger planes had their mains wings linked by those bridges. The end result was a messy scene.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet walked below one such bridge as she spoke.

She was finally getting to the point.

“So is the Black_Oneday user really hiding in this niche and messy scrapyard?”

“If they’re sneaking around, it means they know they’re up to no good. They won’t be using their hacking tool while hunched over in a large passenger plane stuffed full of hundreds of people. They’ll have secured some larger space they can have to themselves.”

That meant a villa rather than a hotel.

That was apparently what Aneri predicted to be the optimal conditions for using Black_Oneday.

More specifically, something with the large antenna and signal amplifier used to pick up the special frequencies used in the aerospace industry.

The Hotel Town was full of junk, so there were only so many villas for individual use that also had that much major equipment.

And by further narrowing it down using a criminal’s unique desire for multiple escape routes, only one option remained.

“Hmm.”

Instead of a giant passenger plane, this one had a sleek, streamlined design that combined the fuselage and wings into a single shape. It looked like a long, skinny shovel or shield.

The emaciated girl spoke up in amusement.

“What’s that? A space shuttle?”

“A retired one, yeah. The Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle. Its components can be folded up compactly and transported in a truck and, by attaching an optional solid-fuel rocket, it can be launched from a submarine’s vertical missile launching tube. So says Aneri.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet looked confused.

But not by the technicality of it all.

“Why would you want to launch from a sub?”

“Don’t ask me. Maybe they’re already doing stuff outside the atmosphere they don’t want anyone to know about.”

What an awful age they lived in.

If there really were space aliens, they would see that as unforgivable pollution. It probably wouldn’t be long before they showed up to eradicate humanity so none of the dangerous species could leave the Earth.

As an act of good to protect the rest of the universe.

And while this was strange super technology for Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, it was no more than retired scrap for Academy City. Those arbiters of justice really did like looking down on people, didn’t they?

At any rate, it looked like a small fashionable streamlined jet. It could switch between a jet engine that sucked in air or a rocket engine that used an oxidizer, giving it the extreme engine power needed to fly from runway to space…but they could ignore that since this one was grounded and retired.

How many exits did it have and where were they?

As a spacecraft, did it have thin walls to keep its weight down? Or were its walls sturdy as hell to protect against heat, shocks, and radiation? Hamazura knew a lot about vehicles, but he couldn’t even hazard a guess about something this specialized.

(I know I have to observe it from a distance since I can’t let them know I’m here…but this is so frustrating. If only I could just get the answer right away.)

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head and gestured as if looking at something from below.

“Its basic design is the same as an airplane, right? So can’t we get in through where the wheels are?”

“Are you Kinuhata? This isn’t a cheap movie… There are too many huge-ass gears crammed in there for us to fit.”

What he could tell from enough of a distance to not be noticed was that it was about the size of a small business jet.

…That meant the main problem was the height of the door. It was up higher than Hamazura’s head, so breaking down the door and storming inside would be difficult.

“But on the other hand, the enemy won’t be able to see us if we’re directly below the fuselage, right? Looking down from the cockpit and side windows doesn’t let you see there. So if we can just get there, we should be able get close without being noticed.”

“And then what? And then what?”

“We can walk to the very back of the shuttle and set up a ladder to get up on the roof without them noticing.”

There were ladders all over the Hotel Town. There weren’t enough boarding stairs to go around, so the ladders were used instead. They only had to borrow one of those.

“Prying open that smooth side door would be tough, but if we walk along the roof to the cockpit at the nose, it should be possible to break the glass and get in, don’t you think?

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? We’ll be climbing on top of that streamlined roof shaped like a squat metal coat. We won’t just roll right off, will we?”

Apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded so unusually concerned because magicians couldn’t fly.

But Hamazura didn’t understand the rules ordinary magicians worked under, so he wasn’t sure how to respond to this nervous confession.

“Also, this is a spaceship, right? Won’t the front glass be super sturdy to deal with space debris and the pressure difference with the vacuum? How are you planning on breaking that? Ask me to do it?”

“If we can’t do it ourselves, we just have to make a tool that can.”