Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 10===

Quenser and the others paled when Frolaytia informed them that intercepting the manned missile hovercraft was wearing down the Princess’s psyche.

“Are they insane? Are they trying to turn the clean wars in the exact opposite direction!?”

“There’s the standard army, navy, and air force and then the marines as the fourth branch of the military. Lately, space development and cyber-warfare have been suggested as candidates for a fifth branch, but this isn’t any of those. They’ve gone even further.”

This was different from the simple information warfare used by the intelligence division.

Their tactics offensively used manipulation of morale and management of battlefield stress.

“This is a sixth branch of the military. They’ve made a unit to fight in the ‘tiny world’ inside the human heart.”

“We’re doing our best to lessen the burden, but it’s only a stopgap measure,” said Frolaytia. “Take control of that factory and stop this attack as soon as possible. If the Princess’s psyche gives out, you won’t have anywhere to return to!!”

Some Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers waved over from a short distance away. They had apparently found a useable hovercraft among the capsized ones. Quenser’s group paddled through the mud using pieces of armor as body boards.

The light weight and small size of the hovercraft came in handy.

The deep marsh made it difficult, but with a dozen of them, they managed to flip the boat back over. The Crocodile Gatling gun was covered in mud and useless, but the rear propulsion fan was working.

They climbed on and got the boat moving.

They were exceeding the hovercraft’s maximum capacity, but they still used it to reach the copied weapons factory.

“Here they come! Look out up ahead!! It’s those manned missile hovercraft!!”

“Wait, don’t shoot them! We’ll be caught in the blast!! Let them pass and continue toward the factory. For now, just get down!!”

The weapons passed by like solid gusts of wind.

The enemy machineguns roared, but their hovercraft were moving at over 800 kph. They had no way to aim accurately and only punctured the mud like a giant sewing machine.

Heivia raised his head, looked back, and spoke.

“Did you see that, Quenser?”

“The rocket nozzle didn’t have any adjustable wings and it can’t adjust its speed. Once those things ignite, they’ll take you to the moon or wherever else they’re pointed.”

The enemy had been unable to reproduce missiles, so they had attached rocket motors to hovercraft.

They had been unable to create rocket engines with adjustable thrust, so they had used an incomplete product.

The end result looked like a piece of junk, but that actually gave it more exposed humanity. The sight overturned the current system of war that protected the people who controlled the murderous machines that digitally dealt out death.

“This isn’t even a war anymore…”

“They aren’t an officially registered army and they aren’t protected by the international treaties. They’re trying to create a new framework or something.”

The enemy was focusing on the maintenance base zone because their goal was to force the Object to intercept, not to destroy the base. They had barely sent any hovercraft out to intercept the approaching soldiers.

“Wait, does that mean what I think it does?”

“Let’s do what we can. Turning back to the maintenance base won’t help us protect the Princess.”

The swamp came to an end.

They crossed the thick concrete embankment like it was a ramp. Beyond, they found a facility covered in asphalt like an airfield, but it had no runways or aircraft. There was an open space large enough for a soccer game in the center and buildings larger than port warehouses were lined up around it. A salty smell filled the air, so the freezing sea had to be nearby.

Quenser and Heivia jumped out of the slowed hovercraft and landed on the hard but stable ground. They had never imagined something so normal and expected could feel so reliable.

Heivia used his muddy hands to display an offline map on his handheld device.

“We have twenty people here, so let’s split into groups of four and check through the buildings one at a time! One group for the production facilities, one for the warehouses, one for the port, one for the residential area, and one to protect the hovercraft. If we lose that, we can’t escape the factory. I don’t know what’s going to happen, so protect it with your life!!”

“Heivia, how do we tell the production facilities from the warehouses?”

“The ones with smokestacks are probably the factories. We’re checking them all either way, so it doesn’t matter if you get it wrong a few times.”

The soldiers quickly got to work and Quenser stuck with Heivia.

“Hey, Heivia, about what you almost said earlier…”

“Yeah, it’s too quiet. It’s not that I ''want'' a welcome party, but I don’t want to find the place empty either.”

The factory was divided into a few different sections. Some buildings were full of machine tools and lathes like a downtown workshop and others were equipped with blast furnaces. It mostly seemed set up for handmade work, so there were none of the conveyer belts and robot arms of automobile or semiconductor factories. The place seemed dangerous enough for a major accident to occur at any time.

Also, there was no one there.

The warmth and smells of people remained in the empty space, so they felt like they had stumbled into a bizarre story about a ghost ship.

“Did they all already escape?”

“Don’t be stupid. There had to have been more than a hundred people living in a facility this big. Even with a submarine for smuggling stuff in and out, it wouldn’t be some giant missile submarine. With the kind of civilian sub used by criminals, they’d be lucky to fit twenty onboard.”

“Then…”

“Just as I’d feared, they’ve all gone out to attack! They’re pretending they’re some sixth branch of the military and using those manned missiles!! Shit!!”

They then heard an explosion from outside. The factory windows were double-pane to keep out the cold, but they shattered from the shockwave. Heivia held his ears, grimaced, and shouted again.

“What is it now, dammit!?”

“Sorry,” said someone over the radio. “I found that command vehicle that controls the antiaircraft guns, so I blew it up. The explosion was bigger than I expected, though.”

“Damn, he stole the best part,” muttered Quenser as he regretfully stroked his pouch of electric fuses.

They exited the building and saw black smoke rising. The source had apparently been a six-wheeled armored vehicle with TV antennae covering every surface.

The soldier who had blown it up spoke triumphantly over the radio.

“Let’s search the warehouses now.”

“Hey, wait a second. If the advance team is going to do everything, why are the rest of us even here? Just let us sleep in at the base instead!!”

Heivia complained while also heading to one of the warehouses, but Quenser was messing with his handheld device. The soldiers already inside the building were sharing the footage from their helmet cameras.

The space was large enough to hold an entire school building and it was packed full of countless “products”. The weapons contained inside were an odd mix. There were old-fashioned tanks, armored vehicles, piles of assault rifles, and all sorts of shells. There was even a helicopter that had been thrown inside half-constructed. They may not have been able to reproduce all of the technology necessary.

Quenser spoke as he ran along the runway-like asphalt.

“The source and technology level of these weapons are all over the place. It looks like they tried to reproduce every single design they could get their hands on. I guess this is what happens when you rely on existing plans without building up your technology from scratch.”

This was not a simple case of being at too low a level.

With the antiaircraft guns and the thermobaric rounds, even some excellent weapons had been left inside this toy box.

“Look, Heivia. There’s even an electromagnetic pulse weapon. There hasn’t been any news of that prototype since it was announced at a weapons show a few years back. How did they steal the plans for that?”

“Wait, please tell me that isn’t the thing where they trigger a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere to fry all of a nation’s electronics! That doesn’t have a nuclear warhead, does it!?”

Heivia’s eyes widened, but Quenser remained calm.

Or rather, he feigned calm while growing excited in a different way.

“No one would even indirectly use nuclear tech in the age of Objects. It’s a meteorological weapon called an Elefish.”

“A meteorological weapon? That sounds fancy, but wouldn’t it just be something like dry ice or silver iodide? By changing the atmospheric pressure with an extreme temperature difference, you can change the density of the clouds and cause rain, but how do you make an electromagnetic pulse weapon out of that?”

“This thing scatters a ton of metal foil in the clouds to induce consecutive lightning strikes on a level you’d never see in nature. If I remember right, it can cause about twenty seconds of sustained discharge and even lightning causes an electromagnetic pulse.”

“Twenty seconds? That’s not even enough time to make instant noodles. Can you really fry a military network with that?”

“Heivia, even multiple lightning strikes in nature only last about 0.2 seconds. This is two hundred times as much and the power of the electromagnetic pulse it causes is even more. The surge of electricity will apparently destroy any semiconductors over an area of ten kilometers. If the specs I’ve seen are accurate, it will blow away an entire city’s infrastructure: power, water, sewage, gas, TV, phones, internet, etc. It would bring about a new ecological society without electricity.”

However, modern military weaponry was built with countermeasures for electromagnetic pulses. Their cables were shielded and some of their semiconductors were inside vacuum tubes. Objects in particular would never have their internal circuitry fried because they had been designed for absolute victory over the nuclear age.

“Clear.”

“The west end is clear too! No readings on my sensors!!”

Voices spoke over the footage on the handheld device and the multiple cameras finally started converging on the center of the warehouse.

Computers were stacked up on a work bench. There was also everything from cellphones to some kind of circuit boards piled up all over the bench.

“They’ve all been destroyed.”

“Can they be repaired?” suggested Quenser. “We could hand them over to the electronic simulation division or the intelligence division.”

“We’ll retrieve them of course, but it doesn’t look good. They were opened up and molten metal was pumped inside.”

Only one screen had light coming from it. The soldiers dug it out and found a cheap laptop computer. It had no disk drive or hard disk, so it seemed to run off of flash memory. The entire thing was as small as a handbag.

“What is that?” asked Quenser.

“We’re checking. …It looks like most of the initial settings are intact. There’s only been a single video file added and it’s already been accessed.”

The soldier on the screen messed with the laptop and moved the video player’s slider along to play just the important parts of the file that was only a few minutes long.

Watching a laptop screen through his handheld device felt strange.

The video file seemed to have been filmed with a small handheld camera.

The shaky footage was of the factory grounds they had seen earlier. The only difference was the line of hovercraft equipped with rocket motors.

“We will leave this manual for the future. This message is meant for all of our latent comrades trapped in the quagmire of war around the world. Today, the Crown of the Northern Lights will challenge a new weakness in the Objects that rule our current age and we will guide us all to a certain result. This will lead to your age. Make full use of the psychological warfare we will present to you and create for yourselves a Sixth Branch of the military. Your righteous view is sure to bring this world back onto the right path.”

The situation gradually sank in.

Quenser and Heivia exchanged a glance outside.

“This is bad. Has this already been transmitted!? This thing is revealing the plans for those manned missile hovercraft!!”

“If this place is empty, where did their leader…what was he called? Newsmaker? Where did he go!? We can’t have him follow through with this and die. That will only spread this idea of a Sixth Branch of the military. They’ve hit the switch for that!!”

“If he dies and is viewed as a martyr, we’ll never be able to stop this. Everyone will stop fighting to live and will start fighting to die. How can we stop this?”

“We have to capture him alive. I just don’t know how to do that!!”

The enemy did not need to win.

They only needed to leave behind the fact that they fought the Object and died in a blaze of glory.

Their deaths would place pressure on the Pilot Elite Princess and lead her to a mental breakdown. And if the so-called “latent comrades” viewed that as a success, similar attacks would be made against Objects all around the world.

Those ultra high-speed weapons were a one-way ticket.

The Sixth Branch would use aircraft, vehicles, and ships packed full of shells and rocket fuel and those outdated weapons would be used to crush the psyches of the maintenance base zones and Pilot Elites.

“No, wait,” said the soldier on the handheld device. “The time of the upload to the video site doesn’t make sense. It was only a few minutes ago.”

“Couldn’t it have been set to automatically upload?”

“There’s no timer on this thing. It was uploaded after we arrived at the factory, so Newsmaker must still be-…”

The soldier trailed off.

The targeting lens of a hovercraft blending into the background behind him had made a whirring noise.