Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume11 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 2===

“Wow.”

“This is awful.”

Quenser and Heivia wrapped their arms around themselves and shivered in the cold on the flight deck of a small gray aircraft carrier. Their breath was white and the sky was the color of lead. Dull vibrations occasionally ran through the deck because the blade hastily attached to the bow was breaking through some pure white drift ice.

Just to be clear, it was currently mid-July.

They watched two connected icebergs that looked like giant breasts float past the fleet.

“What happened to our summer? For what possible reason were we sent to the tip of the Southern Hemispheeeeerrrrrre!? The seasons are reversed here, so it’s freezing midwinter! There are penguins jumping into the water over there! What happened to my paradise of the Princess and our busty commander in swimsuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuits!?”

“The pamphlet said the average temperature at this time of year is eleven degrees.”

“Like hell it is! Our breath is white! How could it be that far off average!? There’s a giant tits iceberg right over there!!”

“Heivia, it’s your fault for saying you wanted to get out of the heat after that desert. Our higher ups always take things too far.”

“There could have at least been some swimsuits in there somewhere.”

“Sigh. Speaking of swimsuits, Lieutenant Meena was shot. That’s actually a real shock. Both that she was the one behind all that and that I’ll never get to see that great rack that was about as underappreciated as baby’s-breath.”

“Eh? Why do swimsuits make you think of her?”

“What a shock…”

“Hold on! We’re supposed to keep each other informed in this unit, so tell your pal Heivia what happened!!”

Heivia shook Quenser by the shoulders, but Quenser’s soul had half-escaped his mouth and he would not give a proper answer.

Then something else stopped Heivia.

The handheld device in his pocket rang.

“What? Are you using video chat to pretend you’re having phone sex?”

“This is a little classier than that.”

After checking the screen, Heivia walked away from Quenser.

Once he reached the landing on the narrow stairway from the flight deck to the maintenance area directly below, Heivia leaned against the metal railing, touched the screen with his fingertip, and answered the call.

It was not a soldier contacting him.

It was a blonde noble girl in a white dress.

“Took you long enough to answer.”

“I’m not trading stock, so don’t get so upset.”

“Even if it’s over the internet, we still arranged for this date in advance. You’re a disgrace to the title of nobility if you keep a lady waiting, Winchell boy.”

“If you don’t do something about your attitude, you’re going to be in the news for being divorced on your honeymoon, Vanderbilt girl.”

Even if it was a private conversation (in fact, ''because'' it was), this conversation over the military line was being monitored. However, the member of the electronic simulation division monitoring the line may have been wide-eyed in shock.

The Winchell family and the Vanderbilt family were two of the biggest noble families in the Legitimacy Kingdom as well as enemies going back centuries. The dark age that had triggered the collapse of the UN had occurred just under one hundred years before, so they had carried the feud of an older age across the end of civilization.

“Well, um, how should I put this?” said Heivia. “Sorry about interrupting your vacation.”

[[Image:HO_v11_105.jpg|thumb]]

“My, my! That is like work to me, so I don’t mind. I am currently in the middle of the Atlantic – oh, excuse me –enjoying the world’s greatest fireworks festival, so are you having trouble hearing me?”

“No. And you people have to be insane to gather more than five hundred cruise ships and launch fireworks for a full week. Are fireworks even any fun during the day?”

“Oh, dear. Our rocket fireworks reach an altitude of ten thousand meters, you know? I can’t have you thinking the Technopics is the only festival in the Atlantic.”

Heivia nearly said those were normally called surface-to-air missiles or surface-to-surface rockets, but he held his tongue.

“And once night falls, the fireworks and the aurora will create a wonderful collaboration,” she said.

“Where are you right now? It isn’t the Arctic, is it?”

“Ah ha ha. The aurora is created when solar winds reach the ionosphere. Um, I think it’s a large railgun meant to clear debris, but they said something about chemically producing a massive amount of electricity just like a laser known as a COIL.”

“Oh… So instead of firing a huge shell, it uses debris reduced to a sandstorm of metal fragments measured in microns to directly repel the entire ‘field’?”

“Solar winds are streams of plasma and easily influenced by electric and magnetic fields, so that whatever-it’s-called can alter their course to a certain extent. By guiding it to the desired coordinate in the ionosphere, they can create a manmade aurora.”

“Don’t solar winds and the aurora play a role in electromagnetic pulses? Won’t that violate some treaties?”

“It’s okay as long as we aren’t using it for military purposes. It’s the same as X-rays.”

That was truly entertainment for the rich. Although that kind of performance to say “look what we can do” could be seen as a sort of wartime PR.

“So how did things go with the favor I asked of you?” asked Heivia.

“Do you think I can’t accomplish a simple task? Besides, I only had to check through the newspapers and the TV news. That was easier than looking up a fish recipe.”

“I see. I’m awful at that formal stuff, so reading through a week’s worth of newspapers sounds harder than sharpshooting from a thousand meters.”

“If you wish to call yourself my husband, you need to be more cultured.”

“Let’s get back on topic,” insisted Heivia.

The girl on the screen sighed.

“Yes, it was just as you said. There was no article on the Special 15th led by Lieutenant Meena Stinger. Of course, there are wars occurring all over the world every single day, so listing out every last death would fill up the entire paper. Plus, they provide a variety of ‘anesthetic’ to ensure the fear of war does not spread to the safe countries. There was a lot of talk about the surprise visit from that…Blue Rose, was it? Heh heh heh. They may not have had any space left after talking about your little sister so much.”

“Nothing about a drug war either?”

“Hm? Is that something from a movie?”

Heivia silently grimaced when he saw his fiancee’s confused look on the screen.

(No sign of Colorful Vanilla, then. So any news that would disgrace the military as a whole might as well have never happened, is that it? I thought they would at least stick in a cover story that pinned the war crimes on Meena Stinger alone, but they aren’t even showing the lizard’s tail.)

When (supposedly) Quenser had shot the Special 15th as they tried to burn away the ergot containers with white phosphorous, he had used a Capitalist Corporations carbine.

Even when Meena Stinger had been shot in the maintenance base zone, the crushed bullet they had later found was the kind that same faction commonly used for heavy machineguns and anti-materiel rifles.

That meant no further investigation would be done.

There was nothing they could do.

Lieutenant Meena Stinger and her Black Uniform Special Platoon 15 had been killed by enemy soldiers during battle. There was nothing more to say and they were being treated as normal war dead.

That was all.

“If you’re curious, I could look further into it,” suggested the girl on the screen.

“No, knowing what the safe country newspapers and news shows are saying is enough. Besides, what does a civilian know about the military and war?”

“Oh? Nothing is more frightening than the wealthy when they have nothing better to do, you know?”

She bowed with a smile and her image vanished from the screen.

Heivia toyed with the device in his hand for a while and slowly exhaled.

After that, he gave another annoyed comment.

“It’s too clean. Whose plot am I getting involved in here?”