Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume9 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 1===

Frolaytia Capistrano smoked her long, skinny kiseru in the officer’s room of a small aircraft carrier waiting in the Indian Ocean.

She was comparing the situation surrounding Lost Angels with the reports from the intelligence agents undercover on the scene.

Talent trafficking was the sale of potential geniuses to corporations and laboratories.

The Flyaway was thought to be a part of such a plan and it had been defeated, but they had no proof it was the ringleader or that everyone involved had been destroyed.

Putana Highball, who had joined them from the Faith Organization, had reported a few additional facts.

Most of the children had been moved elsewhere.

They were supposedly going to the “Star”.

And the name Nataraja was involved.

“This isn’t enough to say much of anything.”

Frolaytia filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke as she spoke.

The information on her laptop zoomed out from a map of Lost Angels to one of the entire world. A number of red X-marks covered the map.

Those were not the locations of wars.

They were all located in large cities belonging to safe countries.

People were vanishing from large cities of the Legitimacy Kingdom, the Information Alliance, the Capitalist Corporations, and the Faith Organization. Plus, these were not just normal people. 

They were all geniuses driving a field of research and their talents were in a variety of fields: biochemistry, mechanical engineering, low-temperature chemistry, aviation physics, and extreme environment research.

The victims were men, women, boys, and girls of all ages.

The talent trafficking Quenser and the others had mentioned was limited to young “potential geniuses”. This series of incidents included the elderly who had already achieved a stable position on the forefront of their field, so it felt like something else.

(This means the cable car incident may have only looked like the Capitalist Corporations style of talent trafficking. It may have been something else entirely. They might be targeting adults and the elderly and these targets just happened to be young.)

On top of that, the missing geniuses were experts in their fields, but combining their specialties together centered on a truly interesting genre.

Simply put…

“Outer space… The Star, huh?”

She thought about the location of Lost Angels. It contained a major base for constructing and maintaining Objects. That brought countless subsidies and spies to the area which had ruined the rule of law there, but there was a single project that had led to the city’s initial development.

(I believe it was a large-scale launch site. Although they changed their plans once they managed to import a mass driver from the Capitalist Corporations.)

According to Putana Highball, one of the abducted children had said the others had happily gone to the “Star”.

“…”

Of course, there was no way the Legitimacy Kingdom’s surveillance network would fail to detect the launch of an unidentified rocket or shuttle. If a dot on the radar could not be identified, no one could complain if it was shot down by an Object’s anti-air lasers.

However, it was too soon to laugh this off.

Something about it bothered Frolaytia.

(Honestly, that place really is a city of freedom and disaster. It keeps finding new ways to give me a headache.)

At the very end, she focused the map on the Indian Ocean.

A giant red circle was drawn there.

“And it all has to happen when a new Object is headed our way.”