Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume9 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 11===

Putana Highball stood near the bent, twisted, and broken cable car rail.

Moving around her military flashlight was enough to spot the cars that had fallen and lost their connections.

However…

“Yes, that’s exactly it, teacher. I can’t find anything that might be corpses.”

The accident had occurred earlier that same day. With bodies covering a large area, it would take at least a day or two to recover them all.

Nevertheless, there was not even one in evidence.

In fact, there was not even a single bloodstain or possession of the deceased.

“That’s an area of suspicion,” explained Quenser. “If either the Legitimacy Kingdom or Faith Organization’s investigation team holds a press conference, their credibility will only be about 50/50. If they insist there were no bodies or that the people vanished, the other side will claim they stole the evidence and it will all end in a giant gray zone. Someone used that situation to pull off a large-scale kidnapping.”

“Then what happened to the people who were supposed to be on the cable cars?”

“Wait a second. Wait, wait. One of the computers here is still functioning. There might still be some surveillance camera footage on here.”

Putana turned off her military flashlight and held her breath.

The bottom of the valley grew pitch black, but she confidently sharpened her eyes.

(I sense a gaze.)

The gaze was sweeping about in every direction. She guessed they had noticed the light but did not know how many people were there. This gaze did not home in on her as if obscenely licking across her body.

(There’s just one of them. Probably a scout, or…)

She moved through the mud to avoid the gaze.

She circled around a cable car lying on its side and made her way behind the owner of the gaze.

She lightly tapped the metal surface with the back of her hand.

“!?”

She shined her extremely powerful military flashlight toward the person who turned around in surprise.

The beam of light seemed to stab into their brain and she aimed for the moment they froze in place. She took advantage of the high-capacity battery’s weight to use the flashlight like a club and beat them on the side of the head.

They groaned after collapsing to the dirt, so she beat them a second and third time to knock them out cold.

She fished through their pockets and found a cellphone, a wallet, and an ID.

“I found a Faith Organization scout,” she whispered into her radio. “However, he isn’t from the Garuda’s…I mean, the Flyaway’s unit. I think he’s from Viridian Edge, the Faith Organization gang back in the city.”

She also found a handgun, but it was the type with a maintenance chip contained in the grip cover. It had a GPS transmitter embedded inside. The transmitter required a special tool to remove, so she gave up on it.

Once the transmitter stopped moving, the main unit would quickly notice something was wrong.

Regardless, Putana checked the data on the cellphone.

It seemed he really was part of an intelligence agency. The machine’s default password lock was one thing, but the data inside was encrypted and there was nothing she could do. However, she could still see the filenames and a few terms stuck out to her.

“Nataraja?”



Back in the cable car station, Quenser and Heivia checked through the surveillance camera footage on the functioning computer.

They were most interested in the footage from just before the accident.

“Oh, goddammit,” groaned Heivia “There it is.”

The grainy footage showed several masked men walking across the cable car station’s platform. A few dozen people who seemed to be on a trip were being led outside the building with their hands up.

Lastly, the cable cars in question were sent out empty.

“It’s a large-scale kidnapping. But what for? Are they going to be making a bunch of ransom calls with helium voices?”

The masked men must not have expected this footage to remain.

It was possible the bribed worker…no, driver had failed to delete it to keep as a sort of “insurance”.

“We have no way of tracking down the masked men, but what about the kidnapped people? It looks like a lot of them are kids, but we can actually see their faces. Is there no kind of hint?”

“I don’t have any powerful facial recognition software if that’s what you’re asking. …No, but wait.”

“What is it?”

“These kids all have the same badge on their chests. Can you zoom in on that?”

“It’ll probably still be really grainy.”

Quenser did as he was told and Heivia fell silent.

After a while, the rich noble spoke up.

“These kids are probably from the Capitalist Corporations. They’re from California Biochemistry University. That school of geniuses loves taking in kids who skipped grades, so they produce tons of nine or ten year olds with PhDs. But while they do great in academics, the kids have no social experience, so people call them a twisted factory school.”

“Why do you know so much about this? Do you have a thing for genius girls or something?”

“It’s not unusual for the Legitimacy Kingdom’s royals and nobles to get genetic disorders unique to their bloodline. They can’t exactly let it get out, but it’s pretty common for people to be secretly funding projects to research their rare diseases.”

“In that case…”

“These weren’t just any old kids who were abducted. They’re all researchers with PhDs in the biochemistry field. Worst case, their heads might be packed full of technical data related to Pilot Elites.”

“Then this kidnapping wasn’t for a ransom.” Quenser gulped. “This is talent trafficking. Are they going to sell them on the black market as current or future talent?”



Talent trafficking.

Putana Highball recalled that dreadful word.

That form of organized crime was especially common in the safe countries of the Capitalist Corporations. Small children expected to be geniuses were abducted and they were legally recognized as someone else who “simply looks a lot like them” thanks to an army of corporate lawyers abusing the fact that a DNA test will not get a 100% match even with a sample from the same person. Afterwards, they were sold to a large company that wanted their talent.

There was an element of luck in whether the child would actually become a genius, but Putana had heard that made it a target for financial speculators.

(This was a case of talent trafficking?)

As she looked at the cable cars lying here and there, she felt anger scorching her nerves.

She did not know what the word Nataraja in “their” cellphone meant, but…

(Were they targeted by a local group while here on a trip? Or was the trip itself part of the kidnapping plan?)

She had no guarantee, but she felt she should assume it was the latter.

Capitalist Corporations safe countries had specialized school PMCs to completely guard the children from talent trafficking, but there was an opening as soon as they entered a country without that system.

Not to mention that anywhere near Lost Angels was an odd choice for a trip. It seemed likely it was chosen because it would make the children easy to abduct.

“Teacher.”

After some thought, Putana brought the radio to her mouth.

“I knocked out one of their scouts, so the main unit should show up soon. However, that also means their main unit is probably still nearby. If I check around here, I might be able to take out the talent trafficking group.”

“The main unit? You mean the abducted children might not have been taken away just yet?”

“It’s possible. For one, it can’t be easy to sneak out more than eighty people. It would be reasonable to assume they would wait until it was dark to start moving, don’t you think?”

“Understood, Putana. But you don’t have a gun, do you? We’ll head there and-…”

“No.”

A rumbling shook the mountains.

The Baby Magnum and the Flyaway were still battling on the steep slope. And since the surprise attack had failed, the Flyaway would have the upper hand on its home turf.

“You two head back up. If the Baby Magnum is taken out, we lose our escape route. Even if we did rescue the eighty or more people, it would be impossible to sneak all of them out without being caught by the Object’s sensors.”

“Putana…”

“Please go.”

The girl in a green special suit directly denied him as she stared into the darkness.

“I will be taking the credit today, teacher.”