Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume14 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 17===

It was more of a gamble than a split-second decision.

The only data in his mind was the general idea that light was bent from warm air to cold air.

“No hard feelings if anyone gets hit!!”

After noticing one pipe with a high temperature warning label, Quenser immediately activated the sprinkler linked up to the fire alarm, producing lots of white steam.

From there, it was a matter of seconds.

A massive beam wrapped in bluish-white approached from directly ahead.

No, it had to have already passed through by the time he saw it. Quenser and the others were only seeing the afterimage left from scorching the dust and moisture in the air.

But if they could see the afterimage of the laser beam after it passed through, then they could not have been vaporized.

“It…bent!?”

Just as Heivia shouted that, the destruction finally caught up.

After being diverted aside just before reaching them, the nitrogen laser had pierced the combat command right next to them. That was a solid box similar to a panic room and it clearly swelled out from within. The air inside must have explosively expanded. That wall would have been difficult to blow down with plastic explosives, but a force within the room tore through the wall and stabbed into the opposite wall.

“…Bh…!!!???”

“——————!!”

They could no longer hear their own shouting voices.

They feared they would never hear anything more than this ringing in their ears.

But they had survived.

They were actually able to feel fear again.

“Damn…it… I think I’m going to pay for life insurance from now on…”

“Look, things are pretty bad there too.”

The inside of the combat command was a complete mess.

The thick walls had been blown out or melted and the computers had all been blown away. The liquid splattered across the floor was probably the melted acrylic panels or glass.

Then there were the people.

“Wow. What is this? Every last operator is piled on top of each other. Can you really get people to work together so perfectly on the verge of death?”

Heivia groaned, but Wraith shook her head as if to cut him off.

“The odds are good Piranirie is at the bottom. They believed she was their ticket to safety. Since they couldn’t ensure their own lives if she died, they acted as meat cushions to protect her. Talk about getting the cart before the horse.”

“…”

Katarina viewed the scene with a difficult look on her face.

Things were just as bad as she had expected. But since she had acted to protect Wraith when it came down to it, could she really celebrate this attack on Piranirie?

Even if the outcome here could change the overall direction the Martini Series took.

And Quenser’s group had to ask her about the weaponized cloud attack on Manhattan.

Just then, a warning icon appeared on one of the few remaining monitors in the shredded and scorched CIC.

“This is bad,” muttered Wraith. “The Nitrogen Mirage isn’t stopping. This is displaying the predicted line of fire for that shockingly stupid Object’s main cannon, and it’s aimed right at this combat command!! If it fires now, there really is no saving us!!”

“We’ll just have to do something about that,” said Quenser. “Myonri, check to see if Piranirie is hiding in that pile of corpses. If she’s breathing, treat her injuries! And Lilim! I need the help of the electronic simulation division! The external cases might have melted like cheese, but hook these computers together again and find a way to fire the ship’s guns. And if that Anastasia supercomputer in the central computer room is still functioning, connect it to this monitor!!”

“What good is moving a ship that’s as full of holes as Swiss cheese!? And a normal ship’s guns aren’t going to do anything to a nuke-resistant Object!!”

“I don’t need direct firepower. I’ll be doing the same thing as before.”

“?”

“Okay, they use heavy oil for the standard fire smokescreen. They scatter oil on the sea and ignite it to create the smokescreen. That gives us what we need.”

Wraith frowned.

“Are you trying to create another mirage using temperature differences? Their Pilot Elite has to be learning. It won’t be long before this doesn’t work anymore.”

“They’ll be worried about a mirage, yes. But that’s why the odds are good they’ll overlook a different method.”

“Quenser, the datalink is online! The aft main gun can still turn!!”

“Let Anastasia handle the calculations for auto-aiming. The first shot only needs to be a smokescreen. Fire!!”

The young man and Katarina immediately sheltered young Wraith.

Were they trying to protect her ears?

With an incredible tremor, the supposedly 70,000-ton ship definitely slid to the side.

Unlike a missile, unguided ship’s guns were exposed to a variety of influences: from the wind and the waves to the earth’s gravity and rotation. It was a very general form of attack that was meant to hit the enemy just 50 times when firing 100 times. The initial smokescreen was not just to blind the enemy. It was to check the margin of error between the ideal targeting and where the shell actually fell so corrections could be made before firing the next shell.

“Even with automatic loading, it would take too long to prepare a physical shell now!!”

“That’s not what I want.” Time seemed to flow differently for Quenser as he responded to Heivia’s flustered warning. “The Nitrogen Mirage creates artificial mirages by producing extreme temperature differences using liquid nitrogen or iron oxide and aluminum. And it uses those to bend its nitrogen laser main cannon however it likes.”

“Hm? What about it?”

“But what will happen if a heavy oil-based smokescreen shell is fired into that? The heavy oil is mixed with naphtha, a flammable substance that released a lot of hydrocarbons. That gives us dense nitrogen and hydrocarbons. Now, if a nitrogen laser, which is much further into the ultraviolet realm than natural light, hits that, it will produce a certain optical reaction. Anyone who lives in a safe country metropolis is probably familiar with it.” Quenser grinned. “Photochemical smog. That’s a prism that bends light with a refractive index entirely different to an artificial mirage and that Object won’t be expecting it at all.”

A fearsome light burst out.

But this was not a mere failure where the laser veered off in the wrong direction. The Anastasia DNA computer could perform complex calculations far faster than the old style of computer, so it had accurately lined the pieces up on the board.

The complex artificial mirages the Nitrogen Mirage had created itself revealed a new side to themselves. The powerful laser it had fired was bent again and again in ways the Object had not expected and it ultimately made a wide U-turn and returned right to its firer.

The Pilot Elite probably could not see it in the final moment.

There was no way to follow the nitrogen laser by eye when it moved at the speed of light.

“Is it…over?” hesitantly asked Heivia.

There was a large hole leading from the front of the ship. It looked like a dark tunnel to them and it gave them a view of a giant pillar of water in the distance.

After some time passed, an incredible tremor shook the already badly damaged Flagship 019. It creaked so much they were amazed it did not just break in half.

It really was over.

The Nitrogen Mirage had sunk into the sea and the resultant waves were crashing against the ship.

Meanwhile, Myonri had found someone within the fallen operators.

“H-here she is. She looks a lot different from the other operators and it’s the same girl we saw with the spy robot.”

Katarina confirmed it with a deep voice.

“That girl is #7, Piranirie Martini Smoky. She is definitely one of the mothers I created.”

“…Oh…”

While lying on her back, a crack seemed to form in the girl’s dried lips and her throat trembled.

She probably did not have long.

Quenser was not a medical expert, but he could somehow tell.

He saw Katarina bite her lip.

“Answer our questions.” Here, Wraith remained cold. “How many weaponized clouds are you using to attack Manhattan? Give me the full list. Your plan has failed.”

“Who…who do you think messed with my head?”

Piranirie’s eyes were unfocused, so were Wraith’s words really reaching her?

That Martini almost seemed to have a smile on her lips as she continued.

“I succumbed to the correctness of the Capulet administrative system in control of the Information Alliance. But in the end, what really was the Martini Series? I could have sworn Katarina Martini was to blame for all this. As our designer, I thought she had set the alarm clock and then tried to escape the Information Alliance on her own so she could safely watch the disaster she had started…”

“That is not what I was asking. Where are the excited clouds that will cause rapid electrolytic corrosion on a citywide scale!?”

“…But it wasn’t Katarina Martini…”

“Hey!!”

“Oh, I get it now. It didn’t have to be an internal culprit that drove the Martini Series berserk… That’s right. It was someone on the outside that did this to us. All so they could do critical damage to the Information Alliance as a whole…”

Their first aid would be too little too late.

Even if they applied a tourniquet over the wounds and injected saline into her veins to keep her blood pressure from dropping, her life would still be lost.

It seemed a dying person did not shut their eyes in the final moment like they did in dramas.

With her eyes still open, their faint focus faded and the girl uttered her final word.

“…Mom…”

That was all.

Piranirie Martini Smoky would never move again.

While applying pressure to her wounds, Myonri checked the girl’s pulse and then shook her head. Someone grabbed Myonri’s shoulder and pushed her aside.

“Kh.”

It was Katarina Martini.

She placed her hands on the girl’s shredded chest and pressed down with her own body weight. She did so rhythmically and forcefully. Then she pressed her mouth against the girl’s red-stained lips and breathed into them.

Again and again. Over and over.

[[Image:HO_v14_415.jpg|thumb]]

Piranirie’s slight chest rose and fell, but that was not the product of her own will. It was nothing more than her lungs mechanically inflating like a balloon as air was sent into them.

The old woman looked on the verge of tears.

“Katarina…”

“Just a little longer.”

“It’s no use. This is war.”

“I know this isn’t the right thing to do!! But just let me keep going a little longer!! Just a little longer!!”

When Myonri gently placed a hand on Katarina’s shoulder, it seemed to break something deep inside her. The old woman’s hands wandered aimlessly and then she buried her face in the girl’s unmoving chest. She shouted something no one could make out. Meanwhile, the air breathed into Piranirie left her mouth and her chest returned to its normal level.

Quenser had done this.

So everyone else could survive.

Katarina finally wiped the blood from her hands, reached for the girl’s opened eyelids, and shut them. Then she gently kissed her forehead.

“Rest now, sweet child.”

That may have been how her mother Cassandra had put her to bed. Regardless, the rampage of the Martini Series, the story of a single girl, had come to a close.

But what did this mean?

Just how many bomb clouds were on their way to Manhattan?

And who was this person who had driven the Martini Series berserk from outside the Information Alliance?

This was more than an internal conflict. Suspicions would fall on the Legitimacy Kingdom, Capitalist Corporations, and Faith Organization.

“What do we do?” groaned Heivia. And his voice quickly rose to a shout. “Is this battle still not over!?”

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