Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 15===

The engine roared.

They could not see in the sandstorm. Even with the headlights on, visibility was limited to a few meters ahead at the most. On top of that, their radios and the map on their mobile devices were still useless thanks to the jamming.

After searching out the direction of the barely-visible orange sun, they had to take a straight shot toward the maintenance base zone. If they got lost even once, it was all over. With zero visibility, they could easily end up driving in endless circles.

The Lunchboxes were not functioning either.

Their cameras, microphones, and sensors were useless with the sandstorm scraping against them and the sand might also be blocking their transmissions. The Capitalist Corporations were probably using ultrasound or infrared transmissions to avoid their own jamming, but not even that was perfect. During the day, the desert sand would be hotter than a human body and it would be mixed with plenty of iron sand. The sandstorm might function even better than chaff or a flare.

Quenser and Heivia crossed a few different humps in the road in quick succession.

The buggy flew off of those like a ramp.

They passed by only a few meters from something like big hunk of rock. No, that was probably one of the Capitalist Corporations’ unmanned ground vehicles. They heard machinegun fire shortly afterwards, but they could not even imagine where the bullets were flying.

The buggy had no roof.

Heivia held the collar of his uniform over his mouth as he shouted.

“We should’ve just waited for this in the first place!! Then we wouldn’t have had to risk our lives getting so close to the damn things!!”

“It wouldn’t work out that well. Do you know a space elevator’s biggest weakness, Heivia?”

“Huh?”

“The carbon nanotube wires are resistant enough to heat to be constantly exposed to the thermosphere, but they’re still weak to high-voltage currents – in other words, lightning. The Capitalist Corporations has to be using defensive meteorological weapons to avoid that!!”

With a loud bursting noise, things cleared up overhead.

Some kind of giant explosion had blown away the sandstorm. Several large holes had formed in the filthy screen and the blue sky was visible beyond like a famous model’s head pasted onto a nude body, but each of those holes had to be kilometers across.

“What the hell!? Did Mother Lady drop something again!?”

“There was no flash of light or explosive boom, so that was probably concentrated sulfuric acid or something.”

“Those greedy bastards are dropping that dangerous stuff on our heads!?”

Heivia’s eyes bugged out, but Quenser maintained a serious expression as he continued.

Whatever it was had detonated at more than 10,000 meters up, so it would not fall straight down. But it would contaminate the ground somewhere. Either as a mist or as acid rain after absorbing more moisture.

In other words…

“Similar to a thermobaric, weapon, they cram it into the warhead in a concentrated state and it spreads out over kilometers in a mist-like state once it detonates. Sulfuric acid can dissolve metal, but it can also be used as a rapid drying agent. Clouds are basically collections of moisture, right? If you want to chemically eliminate the thunderclouds, there’s no cheaper and more effective chemical. If you don’t give a crap about the local environment, that is!!”

Rapidly removing the moisture would change the density of the air, causing a large shift in the atmosphere. In other words, it created wind. The localized sandstorm vanished like they were waking from a dream.

A single space elevator made all of this possible.

Weather forecasts were no longer necessary. Whether it was sunny or rainy, the direction of the wind, and the humidity could all be manipulated from one hour to the next.

And for fleeing Quenser and Heivia, the sandstorm had been a thick curtain protecting them from harm. With it suddenly stripped away, they were exposed to the Lunchboxes’ eyes.

“Can you use those little drones of yours!?” asked Heivia.

“The Kitchen Knives can only move as fast as a toy and they’re wired! You can’t just throw one out of a moving car and expect it to work!!”

Quenser instead grabbed the shoulder-fired missile launcher that Heivia had been walking around with.

He had not been trained in its use, so he could not fire a missile from it.

However.

The instant he leaned out from the passenger seat with the launcher on his shoulder, the machinegun fire strayed away from them.

“The hell? What’d you do!?”

“This thing has to use a really powerful IR laser for targeting, so I aimed that at the Lunchbox’s camera lens. It’s the same as a rude spectator shining a laser pointer in a soccer player’s eyes. That trick works on machines too!!”

But it would not work every time.

If something that simple would have worked consistently, the Lunchboxes never would have been such a threat.

Quenser knew they would have to use every trick in the book here, so…

“How much further to the maintenance base zone!?”

“We’re going 120km/h right now!! I’m flooring this thing to the point that it’ll burn out the lawnmower-size engine eventually, so I doubt it’ll take even an hour!!”

The 30cm Kitchen Knives were no longer helpful.

To avoid being shot from behind, Quenser leaned out and dumped the contents of his water bottle and the black powder on the exposed rear wheel. The power of the tire launched the stuff backwards.

“Everything you’re doing is like a makeshift weapon built from items at a dollar store, but these are cutting-edge Capitalist Corporations weapons. Can you really keep tricking them like this!?”

Several grenades were launched in an arc so they fell in a line, but they exploded a decent distance away from the two boys. The air overhead must have been so unstable that they veered off course. That meant it had nothing at all to do with Quenser and Heivia’s efforts. Without the wind, that would have killed them since the simple buggy had no roof or walls.

“Figure something out already!!” snapped Heivia while holding the steering wheel in both hands.

“Shut up and give me time to think!!”

Needless to say, driving along an unpaved area of land was enough of a risk in and of itself. Doing so at more than 100km/h was tantamount to suicide. The buggy was made for off-roading, but as it bounced around, it could have lost its balance and tilted up onto two wheels at any time.

“They have to be using IR – we just can’t see it ourselves. And even if the grenades fly in an arc, they have to have a direct line of sight when targeting. Distance is more important than direction. If we can get them to mistake our distance, they won’t be able to hit us.”

“Here it comes, Quenser!!”

“Dammit!!”

Heivia heard the sound of splitting plastic and looked over in shock.

“Why are you destroying your own equipment!? Have you gone insane!?”

“Shut up and watch where you’re driving!!”

Quenser removed his uniform’s jacket, dismantled one of his Kitchen Knives, and removed the black powder. He coated the outside of the jacket with the powder but left the inside clean. Then he tied the two sleeves to the metal bar on top of the buggy so it flew like a flag.

It flapped wildly like a pirate flag in the 120km/h wind.

The unusually round sounds of weapons fire continued, but the soaring grenades exploded well before reaching the buggy.

This time, it was no coincidence.

“Black absorbs light and white reflects it. That’s true for the invisible infrared range too. Laser range finders shine a straight-line laser and measure the reflection and attenuation, so they can’t deal with something that rapidly switches between white and black. The value keeps changing, so they can’t figure out the actual distance.”

They continued racing across the desert.

They drove ever closer to the maintenance base zone.

But none of their makeshift countermeasures were a fundamental solution. The Lunchboxes could retry no matter how may times their attacks failed and the Mother Lady space elevator could drop more cargo tanks from the heavens if need be.

Some unnatural static burst from the buggy’s radio.

They were under the effects of some powerful jamming, but this was something else.

“Radar targeting? We can’t do anything about that!!”

“Hang on tight!!”

Heivia slammed down the gas pedal even more.

With their thick armor, the Lunchboxes could only move as fast as a scooter, so the buggy could lose them while zooming 120km/h down the wasteland.

But losing the physical machines did not necessarily mean they could escape firing range. The heavy machineguns that fired anti-materiel bullets thicker than someone’s thumb could blow away a soldier’s head from a range of 2000m. The grenades launched along parabolic arcs could reach even further than that.

And there was an even more horrifying possibility than either of those.

What if the targeting data from the surface was being shared with the giant space elevator?

“What?” Heivia was not watching where he was driving. “It’s midday, but there are stars shining in the sky.”

“That’s Mother Lady’s artificial meteor shower, dammit!!”

A kilometers-long wall of dust clouds rose from beyond the horizon behind them. And it did not end there. Another row appeared and then yet another like a giant copier printing something on the ground here. The ground was torn apart evenly, thoroughly, and mercilessly.

It did not matter that the allies giving the elevator its targeting data were still in that area. The Lunchboxes were unmanned. And for that matter, would the elevator have responded any differently had the data come from living soldiers?

The explosions were advancing faster than the buggy.

Heivia Winchell knew only one way they could survive this.

He had noticed something earlier.

The buggy flew right past a Legitimacy Kingdom turret.

Or more accurately, a tank hiding in a hole in the ground to keep it low and harder to detect.

The instant they passed by, the deafening roar of a cannon slammed into the buggy and the two idiots within.

But not from the tank.

The Capitalist Corporations were not the only ones who could share targeting information. A colossal weapon had received that data via IR or ultrasound and then fired.

The attack came from one of the Baby Magnum’s main cannons.

The roar of the cannon really did flip the buggy over as it drove. Quenser and Heivia nearly had their crushed flesh and blood soak into the dry African land, but the massive beam of energy tore through the lights in the sky. A hole was opened in the artificial meteor shower and the Legitimacy Kingdom potatoes were spared that orbital bombing.

The unmanned ground vehicles were fully-armored, but they were only 3m long.

The Lunchboxes were obliterated by the friendly fire.

Either being within 10m was close enough or the tank was loaded with powerful equipment because they heard a staticky voice over their radio for the first time in a long while.

“Quenserrrr, Heiviaaa. You certainly took your sweet time. Did you finally decide to return so you could be thrown into the detention barracks for deserting?”

“It was your friendly fire that got us into this mess, Myonri!!!!!!”