Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume14 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 16===

“Hee hee.”

How many people remained on the ship outside of this box?

This box lined with computers and partitioned by clear acrylic panels may have been all that remained of the world. The operators were overcome by that delusion while they silently fulfilled their duties in a desperate attempt to avert their eyes from the reality pressing in on them.

Only the small ruler among them was laughing.

That girl with wavy black hair wore a blue and gold parade coat over a sailor uniform and the baggy sleeves hid all but her fingertips.

She was sitting in her seat with her slender legs resting on the console.

“Ah ha ha ha!! Hee hee ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

She had won.

It was over.

Piranirie Martini Smoky applauded her own results. With the number of movable pawns and mobile cameras reduced, she could no longer command an attack anywhere in the ship. But what did that matter? She only had to lay a trap at the one point she knew the intruders would go.

And they had fallen for it.

There was no way they could escape now. Their one hope of survival was entering the combat command and using Piranirie as a shield, but the walls and door were too thick for that. The door would not break from manpower and bullets and they would have to carefully calculate out how to break all of the rods if they wanted to use explosives. There was simply no way they could do that before the Laser Beam 069’s attack arrived.

“Farewell, my fellow Martini. This is just how life is.”

Her screen showed the Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers rushing for the wall, but that was not going to open the CIC’s door.

But then a small warning icon appeared.

Piranirie used the fingertips poking out of her baggy sleeve to skillfully spin a fountain pen.

(The sprinklers?)

The area was already full of holes, but that should have actually prevented a fire from breaking out. Quite a lot of water was being meaninglessly scattered just 30 or 40 meters down a straight corridor from the CIC’s door.

It was partly to strike a good balance with damage control, but the sprinklers were relatively high cost equipment on a warship that even had to preserve toilet water. As long as there were no electronics with broken shielding in the area, it was better to pump in seawater. So why here and now? When Piranirie frowned and called up a diagram of the corridor in front of the combat command, a series of ominous data points appeared before her eyes.

There was something here. There had to be something to it.

A pipe extended from the wall. The pipe was colored red as a heat warning and it was actually a dedicated duct that traveled from the kitchen gas burners to the main funnel that carried exhaust from the engine.

What would happen if the sprinkler water hit that source of heat?

(It would produce a lot of steam…no, a temperature difference…)

“W-wait, Laster Beam 069!! Cease firing!! I repeat, cease firing…!!”

She was too late.

Piranirie Martini Smoky should have kept in mind one simple fact: lasers could bend.

And the conditions were more or less the same indoors as outdoors.