Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 2===

“Countdown – final sequence: 9, 7, 6…ignition. Blast off.”

To Quenser, it felt like riding an amusement park thrill ride.

He was seated in a chair, but sitting in this chair positioned him so he was facing straight down. If he were not strapped in with special belts, he would have fallen straight to the rear of the shuttle.

He felt a great pressure in his gut.

He heard a deafening roar.

But none of it felt like he was actually blasting off from the planet earth. The lack of windows played a definite role there. It was like being trained for a form of torture that gradually squashed him with a thick but invisible wall. Maybe this was the world the Princess lived in while piloting her Object.

“Gwehhhh,” he groaned inside his helmet.

But that skinny boy had only been given a few days’ worth of training in a pool and in a centrifugal artificial gravity generator, so he was lucky “gweh” was the worst he got. He gave a proper report using the communicator installed in his helmet.

“Th-the magnetic oxygen guidance is working for now. We won’t die right away anyway, Frolaytia. Dammit, I’m totally groping those things till the tips turn black!!”

A rapid change in pressure was enough for someone to pass out and they could even die if air bubbles formed in their blood. It was known as barotrauma and was best known in the forms of altitude sickness and decompression sickness.

To prevent that, Quenser and the other 37th potatoes had several electrodes attached below their clothing. Barotrauma could cause everything from fingernail injuries to fainting, but it was mainly caused by two things: a reduced amount of oxygen being transported in the blood and bubbles forming from the nitrogen in the body tissue. So you could solve all of that if you could externally manipulate the iron to stabilize the oxygen transportation and strengthen the bonds of the nitrogen.

“Hah hah hah! Who doesn’t love a secret prototype weapon? You should weep tears of joy at this opportunity! I believe this was originally developed in secret to help Pilot Elites handle the massive Gs of an Object which can reach the double digits at times.”

“B-but, urp, why wasn’t it adopted for general use among Elites?”

“It’s so bad for your health they’d never expose their precious Elites to its effects.”

In the seat behind Quenser, Myonri jumped upon hearing what sounded like metal claws scratching at the wall.

“Gweh. Wh-why am I hearing something from outside!? Ugh, are we going to break apart before even escaping the atmosphere!?”

“That’s just the external rockets separating after using up their fuel. If the heat caused the connections to melt just wrong and they failed to separate, then we’d 100% crash, though. Gwehhh!”

Knowledge was the best way to conquer fear. It did nothing about the pain and suffering pressing down on their bodies, though.

Then Quenser stared in shock at his neighbor.

The other idiot was there.

“Frolaytia, Heivia broke the regulations! Ugh, he must have filled his stomach with a banned drink cause his helmet is now full of carbonated energy drink barf. I’d really prefer not to describe it in any more detail. Urp, just seeing it is enough to make me feel sick!”

“He only has himself to blame,” said Frolaytia over the radio. “Do not remove his helmet even if he is drowning. The instant the gravity is gone, that stuff will fill the entire shuttle.”

Heivia responded with a mysterious code: “Bleh this Monster Girl bleh is from the bottle gwehhh you broke on blehhh my head!” But it was too advanced a code to crack, so Frolaytia ignored it and continued with a report.

“The Princess’s team is searching for a way up from Mother Lady’s ground base, but that is only a diversion. While the Capitalist Corporations’ Federation of Elevator Industries is staring worriedly down at the bottom of the elevator, you will circle around from the other side of the planet to attack them from above. The space station is in geostationary orbit at an altitude of 36,000km, so it really and truly is in outer space. I honestly envy you this trip into space.”

“Maybe if we were here on vacation, I’d agree with you! Gweh, but we’re headed to the most dangerous battlefield in the universe!”

“Ah ha ha. You’ve finally move past the most dangerous in the world, Quenser. That’s a new record.”

It was no use. She was so used to sending them to their deaths that it barely registered as a problem anymore. Myonri must have been used to this too because she stuck a hose similar to a dentist’s saliva ejector into the top of Heivia’s head from her seat behind them. A gross sucking sound followed. The device may have been to help the crew since the helmets prevented them from using a handkerchief to wipe away sweat.

“Mother Lady is being guarded by soldiers recruited from the PMCs they love so much. And they are all top of their class, so be careful. There is one other person you need to be aware of: Louisiana Honeysuckle.”

“…”

Louisiana.

And Honeysuckle.

“The researchers who develop technology with military applications are generally erased from all public records, but a few of her papers for academic conferences slipped through. They were about the influence a colossal structure would have on the planet’s environment. Until the elevator was completed, she was apparently known for her work in preserving rare animals.”

“Preserving rare animals?”

That did not seem to fit.

Especially when he thought back to the dry and cracked desert.

“There are records of her being sued by an environmental protection group, but it was completely shut down by an army of lawyers armed with ample funding. But a researcher of her caliber would have not trouble making money, so the environmental group’s claims seem unlikely to me. They claim she traveled all the way to Africa, stole the genetic information of rare animals there, and then sold that to European zoos.”

Then Frolaytia got back on topic.

“Anyway, Louisiana is the genius researcher who worked out all the problems with the theoretical concept of a wire space elevator and created an actually usable plan. The elevator is everything to her, making her a rare Capitalist Corporations resident who doesn’t care all that much about profit. The intelligence division’s report says she is likely holed up in the space station. She does not behave like a soldier does, so it would be best to kill her before she can cause any trouble.”

The scratching sound grew louder. They were surrounded by it. But this was no longer about the rocket booster connections. The air’s friction itself was probably tearing at the shuttle’s exterior. From the outside, it would look like they had been thrown into a prison of orange heat.

The battalion had split in two, half on the surface and half in space, but Frolaytia did not seem to be having too much trouble. Everything was done over the network these days, so commanding remotely was not a problem at all.

It was while that thought occurred to him that Quenser felt his bangs float up. And that was not all. The pressure bearing down on him completely vanished, and not just because he had gotten used to it.

The concept of up and down was gone.

From his perspective, he might as well have been seated in an ordinary bus. He was now facing forward. The weird part was how his butt had left the seat just like his back had left the chair back. Without the belts, he might have floated up to the ceiling and started slowly spinning.

“Hello, world of zero-g sex. Now we can invent a brand new kama sutra with none of that pesky gravity restricting the glorious possibilities!”

“Let’s see. Which tube is Quenser’s oxygen?”

Myonri’s dangerous hand reached in from behind and Quenser very nearly died of asphyxiation.

The scraping sound on the outer walls ended.

Only silence surrounded them.

This time, not even Myonri made a noise. They were all holding their breath at the painful silence.

“Welcome to space,” said Frolaytia to drive the point home.

It did not feel real. They had not encountered any aliens and they had not rapidly evolved as lifeforms. They were surrounded by thick walls and contained in awkward spacesuits. It only felt like being restrained by those two layers of cramped protection. They were in space that continued forever with no horizon, yet they did not feel remotely free.

There was zero atmospheric pressure.

This was a vacuum devoid of oxygen.

Radiation stabbed directly into them without anything to weaken it.

People would die here if they were simply exposed to it without any protection. It was a lonely place where they could scream in terror and not a peep would reach their awful friend right next to them. It was a profound place where the human beings who had spread across the planet and chewed through its resources were separated out into individuals and forced to face their own insignificance. People were not meant to exist in space. It was a hell colder than the sea and hotter than fire.

“Your next step is to circle across the Atlantic to reach central Africa,” said Frolaytia. “The battle begins once you arrive. Overeagerly unstrapping yourselves now will only get you injured before the fighting even starts, so be careful.”

“You make it sound all fancy, but we’re basically following the long mountain trail around so we can peep on the open-air bath from above, right? Are you sure they won’t notice us???”

“Do you have any idea how many rockets and shuttles are being launched from the Pacific and South America right now? We didn’t paint ‘The Legitimacy Kingdom’s Super Cool New Weapon’ on the side, so you’ll be fine. The official paperwork says you’re a construction crew.”

“Construction?”

“For a lunar villa.”

That was even more outside Quenser’s experiences than an indoor golf course or casino built in the middle of the Las Vegas desert. Rare bugs and plants in the jungle were biological resources, new online possibilities were data resources, and the deep sea – considered to be the final frontier on the planet – was all about oil and shale gas. And now people were attaching price tags to the moon’s land and selling it off. Humanity really knew how to turn anything into a quick buck.

“I almost feel sorry for those lunar villas,” said Frolaytia. “The space station’s jamming has brought down their high-speed wireless internet, so they have no way of knowing what’s going on. And without control signals, they can’t launch any rockets or shuttles. I don’t know if the Federation of Elevator Industries meant to do it, but the moon is like a remote island out in space.”

“Serves ‘em right,” spat out Quenser.

But more importantly…

“Should we really be doing this? Won’t soldiers get in trouble from a number of organizations if we pretend to be civilians for a sneak attack?”

“We have no other choice since physical stealth only goes so far. Oh, and I would recommend not checking outside. That way you won’t have to see all the deadly eggs that have been laid out there.”

“There are that many of them?”

“The space elevator allowed them to send an obscene number of those killer satellites outside the atmosphere, so the area above Africa is filled with tens of thousands of those military satellites that can move around on their own with explosives filling their belly. If the enemy notices you, they’ll approach silently and then – boom – you have a hole in your hull. And you know what even a finger-sized hole means out in space, don’t you?”

“…”

“Explosions in space have a wide lethal range. With no gravity or air, there’s nothing to slow the razor-like shrapnel. To be blunt, not even a pizza delivery worker who knows the side roads by heart could slip through that floating minefield. Which is why – in my infinite kindness – I chose to rewrite the official paperwork.”

“Anyway, we’ve made it into orbit. The first challenge when launching into space is the separation of the booster and tank. 50% of the risk of death comes from that, so now that we’ve gotten past that without incident…”

He was cut off by a quiet clunking sound.

He looked up (from the perspective of his seat and the movable range of his head) and Myonri laughed at him.

“Ah ha ha. So much for sounding smart there, Quenser. Sounds like we still had one more piece to separate off.”

“…”

He fell quiet.

He checked his helmet’s seal and the remaining oxygen meter on his wrist while his thoughts turned to the extravehicular activity unit on his back. He grabbed and then let go of the grip connected to the cable that would emit nitrogen gas from 32 different nozzles. He finally reached for his seatbelt, but he had trouble operating it with the spacesuit’s thick fingers.

Or were his fingers trembling?

“Myonri, you should check your equipment. Like right now.”

“Why?”

“The shuttle only had the booster and tank to separate off, so it should only have happened twice. There is no air friction out here in space, so that just now was something else – an accident! Something’s coming!!”

All of a sudden, the lead-shielded roof of the shuttle was torn away.

The shuttle’s cabin was exposed to the vacuum of space.

The starry sky as seen from earth was like viewing it through the wall of a plastic greenhouse. The real thing was much too distinct. More than that, they could see a shining blue disk overhead. That was the earth. It was a lot smaller than he had expected.

Without the electrodes attached all over his body, the pressure difference might have made his red blood cells rupture, killing him before he could have even seen this.

But he could not just stare at that strange sight.

Something was attached to the shuttle.

A perfect 2m cube shined silver in the sunlight. Much like an attack helicopter, weapons were attached below the solar panels spread out on either side. Work arms with multiple joints were extending this way. The shuttle’s roof had been made to open and close, but the four arms had used a chemical or something to slice through the seam, grab it by force, and pull to either side to tear it open. Just like opening a bag of chips.

“A killer satellite!?” shouted Heivia with eyes wide.

Those satellites were used to destroy other satellites. Human nature had finally made its way into space. The Capitalist Corporations had their space elevator, so to bring quantity to the outer space conflicts, they had created a space minefield made from tens of thousands of killer satellites.

“Dammit, we need to protect the shuttle!!”

“No, Heivia!!”

A few of the soldiers responded to the boy’s voice (that reached them via their helmet transmitters, not by sending vibrations through the air) by pressing their assault rifle stocks against the shoulder of their spacesuits and aiming at the killer satellite.

“Dammit, this round helmet makes it hard to look down the scope!! And these giant gloves make it hard to hold the gun. And that’s after cutting away the trigger guard!!”

But…

“Gah!?”

“Gyah, my eyes!!”

The soldiers groaned before they could fire. They seemed to be writhing in pain and trying to hold their eyes, but the thick helmet got in the way. This was yet another accident. The killer satellite must have struck first while continuing to widen the wound in the shuttle, but it had produced no light or sound.

Or maybe…

(Did it shine its sensor-destroying laser in their eyes?)

“Go to hell!!”

Heivia’s assault rifle finally opened fire.

He had no way of fighting the recoil in space, so he simply had his body pushed back into his seat. The most training they had gotten was wearing VR goggles while submerged in a giant tank of water, but he pulled it off pretty well.

He was firing away in the next seat over, but Quenser could not hear a thing. That suggested he would die if he removed his helmet now.

And the student did not hesitate to remove his seatbelt.

“Watch out, everyone!!”

Did his warning reach them?

What happened next happened whether it did or not.

There was no sound, but he saw a flash of light brighter than a lightning bolt.

The killer satellite had taken enough damage, so it detonated from within, scattering 2000 metal balls smaller than pachinko balls.

Killer satellites were not expected to accurately shoot down fast-moving ballistic missiles with laser beams or railguns like in the SDI program of a former age.

They would generally approach slowly and then self-destruct.

Simple and primitive destructive power was all they needed.

As machines and computers advance over time, they had enough space leftover to do other things before self-destructing. So they now had plenty of optional functions such as shining powerful lasers on the enemy satellite to destroy its sensors from afar or using metal arms to grab and break solar panels.

But in the end, they would still explode.

So they were not given the latest tech; their exteriors were even made from flimsy aluminum foil. They did not need nimble mobility. They were mass-produced for cheap as disposable tools. The wars fought in space were so tediously realistic, with barely any bizarre technology to be found.

“Gahhh!!”

After undoing his belt, Quenser sprayed nitrogen gas from the nozzles on the extravehicular activity unit on his back to slip into the slight space below the seat. He curled up and protected the soft spacesuit with its back – with the metal tank there.

In space, an attack did not need to punch or slice through the enemy. Without any pressure or gravity, a single scratch was enough for the satellite to slip out of stable orbit or for an oxygen-filled shuttle or station to break apart from the difference in internal and exterior pressure.

The trick was to cause as many shallow scratches over as wide an area as you could.

An attack similar to a shotgun with unlimited range was ideal. As long as you did not care if the debris you produced got in your way afterwards.

And in fact…

“Bhhghhwahhh!!”

“Help me out here, Myonri! Hold Cottage’s arms in place while I seal his suit up with airtight tape. He’ll die if we don’t hurry!!”

Quenser had no idea how effective that tape was. It might have been issued to them more to make them feel better than because of any scientific evidence it worked. But he had to believe using it was better than leaving the soldier with a torn spacesuit. While the soldier nearly lost consciousness from a rapid pressure change similar to elevation sickness, Quenser forcibly bound his thigh with a tool similar to duct tape and filled the invisible gaps by melting the adhesive with an electric iron similar to a soldering iron.

“Don’t die, Cottage. You’re being treated by a girl. You’ve dreamed of this situation! So don’t you die!! Listen, your wound is being treated by a soft-skinned girl in a short-sleeved gym shirt and sports bloomers at the sports festival. You’ve never been happier!!”

“Oh, you seem to be doing well given the circumstances, Cottage.”

“Good, more like that, Myonri. Fill him with your medical girl power. If I tried to cheer him up as Quensette, the shock of learning the truth might just kill him!!”

The shuttle had reached its limit.

It was never going to fly normally again after the roof was peeled away like a convertible.

And the Capitalist Corporations’ Federation of Elevator Industries was equipped with killer satellites. That one had been part of a networked minefield. If they continued on like this, the killer satellites waiting up ahead would gather together like a soccer defense. The shuttle was not the most maneuverable craft, so they could not nimbly dodge out of the way. Many more explosions like that one and the shuttle would not last.

Quenser shouted to the others.

His physical voice could not actually reach them in the vacuum of space, but his earth habits were hard to shake.

“You can’t hold onto your weapons with these gloves, so wrap their straps around your wrist and then jump out from the shuttle!!”

“But this is outer space!”

Heivia’s eyes widened, but they had no time. Quenser kicked off his seat while holding still-shaking Cottage. Even though he would have been thrown out from the broken roof anyway.

Heivia waved his hands wildly even though it was program controlled.

“How can you use that extravehicular unit so well? It’s got 32 different nozzles.”

“It’s basically the same as the civilian models I saw back in my safe country school. Those were marine leisure toys that let you float in the sky by spraying pressurized seawater. There hasn’t been much military value in spacewalks, so the civilian side is more advanced. Basically, the controls have been simplified to the point that an amateur can pick up and use it. Paper manuals aren’t a thing anymore. If it’s more complicated than a stick and two buttons, you lose customers fast.”

“Your point?”

“If you volunteered to help with the R&D, you could play around with them all you wanted in the school’s huge 5m-deep experiment pool. Eh heh heh. Which included providing hands-on tandem support for unsuspecting swimsuit girls.”

Whether they had obeyed Quenser or simply been thrown out of the shuttle, most of the potatoes escaped out into deadly outer space while still plastic-wrapped in their spacesuits.

But not all of them made it.

Either they had not trusted Quenser or they had been too panicked to undo their seatbelts, but a few of the soldiers remained inside the torn-up shuttle.

Quenser could have sworn his eyes met theirs through their thick helmets.

A moment later, the many killer satellites gathered together and produced a series of silent explosions. The shuttle was transformed into an orange shooting star as it broke apart while enveloped in explosive flames.

The sharp fragments scattered by the explosion had nothing to slow them in space. Simply watching was risky, but Quenser was in no position to respond to that threat.

There was nothing he could do.

He could only clench his teeth and squeeze his eyes shut.

But then he opened them again.

“…”

“That violent mom just took away our precious shut-in room,” said Heivia. “So what do we do now? What about oxygen!? How many hours will the tanks on our backs last!? I know it’s less than a full day!”

“Focus on regulating your breathing instead of worrying about how much you have left. And avoid talking too much.”

“What kind of bizarre corpses are we gonna leave out here in space!? Dried up mummies? Or maybe something like frozen food!?”

“If you don’t want to die, then use your head! Complaining isn’t going to produce oxygen from your garlicy breath!!”

The student was panicking too.

They were in the silent vacuum of space with nothing to even stand on and mother earth’s blue shine felt like it was rejecting them. When he looked up at the planet hanging above them like a ceiling, he could make out some red dots of light. Those all symbolized human civilization. They were the massive flames of war caused by Objects.

(The earth is blue, my ass. Or does this mean things were still relatively peaceful back when everyone was threatening everyone else with nuclear missiles?)

Quenser cursed to himself before speaking again.

“Which way to that elevator – Mother Lady? Something that damn big should be obvious even from space.”

“You’re still trying to continue the mission!? I think we’ve got bigger issues right now. We can’t keep fighting, so we need to withdraw!!”

“Withdraw to where? Do you think if you ask for help, Frolaytia’s gonna blow the trumpet and lead the cavalry in to rescue us? You’d better hope she can pull a secret space cavalry out of her ass.”

“…”

“If we want to survive this, we have to figure something out ourselves. The only place nearby with plenty of oxygen is the space elevator’s space station. If we don’t pay them a visit before the tanks on our backs run out, we’re all dead. If you get that, then get moving. We don’t have much time. If the Capitalist Corporations was judging the success of their attack using radar, they should assume we all died with the shuttle. We can pass right through the network of killer satellites right now!”

The killer satellites were of course designed for use against large machines like enemy satellites and spaceships. People in space was generally unthinkable, so they did not search for them. Just like the giant doppler radar on an airport control tower would fail to detect skydivers or a pair of panties blown off the clothesline, the killer satellites would likely overlook Quenser and the others since they were outside the design specs.

“No radio. Switch to close-range lasers.”

“Goddammit. Like always, that busty commander goes silent the second things go south.”

“The killer satellites would pick up any transmissions, so this is her way of being nice. It’s just that her tsundere levels are so high it can be really hard to tell.”

“Hmm, hmmm!!”

“If you don’t like that explanation, then how about this? Imagine she shut off the transmission to stick her hand down her underwear and enjoy herself. Pray hard enough and the video footage might just start transmitting by some freak accident.”

They were equipped with extravehicular activity units that sprayed compressed nitrogen gas from nozzles for attitude control, but that was only meant to keep their balance and counterbalance the recoil of gunfire, so it was really like having brakes they could only use a limited number of times. They could not be used as accelerators like a space ship or robot’s rocket boosters.

Orientation was everything in zero-g.

If their nitrogen gas tanks ran out before their oxygen, they would be stuck spinning helpless and alone in the silence of space waiting for their oxygen to run out. Running out of oxygen first would actually be the better way to go.

Quenser operated the LCD screen on his arm. It was designed for use with the fat fingers of the spacesuit, but the screen was less sensitive to his touch than an ordinary phone.

“Man, that thing is sending EM signals everywhere. It must think it’s the king of outer space. Anyway, I found it. The elevator is 50km thataway!”

Compared to space as a whole, 50km was nothing, but the potatoes could not move a single centimeter forward no matter how hard they moved their legs. They could not walk without ground and they could not swim either.

“What do we do now?” asked Heivia.

“There are tons of killer satellites out here and we can’t be the only things they’ve attacked. There has to be some large scraps in a satellite orbit out here. We can calculate out where they’re going and hitch a ride with one of those trucks as it passes through.”

Fortunately, they had countless opportunities.

Space was vast, but satellite orbit around earth was a fairly packed area. 1800 pieces of rocket and satellite wreckage were floating around up there (and that was only the number that had been officially reported and confirmed). Add in all the bolts, nuts, paint chips, and other tiny pieces, and the number had to be close to 3 million. Most of those were abandoned remnants of the Nuclear Age when humanity had been in a race to develop ridiculous rockets while claiming it was some great dream for the future of humanity (while it was actually just an excuse to develop more missile tech). Space development had been more sensibly planned out once the Object Age arrived and people awoke from that particular madness. Although “got bored and lost interest” may have been the more accurate way to phrase it.

Quenser wanted a piece of scrap that was sufficiently large, not moving too fast, and not spinning.

A scorched cylindrical cargo tank (perhaps originally meant to send additional supplies to a space station) was about to pass them by.

(The laser range finger says…good, it isn’t moving so fast it would tear my arm off the instant I touch it!!)

“Try to keep up.”

“Wait, they didn’t teach us this in the pool training!”

Touching it directly could slice his glove open with the jagged edges, so Quenser instead attached a carabiner to the handle sticking out from the door. That way it dragged him along with it.

He was swept through that cramped area of space filled with killer satellites.

After seeing Quenser pull it off, Heivia, Myonri, and the others began locating their own debris and hesitantly following after him.

“Eek, eek, eeeek!?”

“Mute yourself, Heivia. That’s just painful to listen to!!”

“There’s so much trash out in space,” said Myonri. “Do the people in the elevator just use the atmosphere to burn up their trash and defective parts?”

It seemed unlikely elevator parts would end up floating around in space if they were sent straight up the wires, so this had to be intentional. Some of the debris was as large as a bus.

Even if they could transport large quantities of supplies into space, the self-destructing killer satellites were still a limited resource. You would lose one every time they were used, so non-hostile scraps would be registered as such and removed from the attack list to avoid wasting the satellites. By pressing against the scorched side of that scrap, Quenser could slip right past the Federation of Elevator Industries’ defense network.

The moon was always smaller than the earth that seemed to be pressing down on them from overhead.

But even out in space, a mere boy could not reach it.

The moon remained a lonely queen.

“…”

With how terrified he was of the vacuum held at bay only by the thin spacesuit, Quenser could not believe those wealthy people would actually build villas out here. He wondered if he would come to understand it after becoming a successful Object designer and diving into a bathtub full of cash.

But for now…

(We can finally make this an actual battle, even if just barely.)

With no horizon or air in space, there was nothing to block your view. Or so he thought, but the sun and its reflection off the earth itself created a blinding blue shine. That was why he could only see it after moving so close. A long, long line extended unnaturally up from the surface. The spread of the manmade had finally broken free of the planet and arrived in space.

That was the Mother Lady space elevator.

“Hey,” said Heivia through their helmets.

They were using close-range IR at the moment, so he had to be pretty close. He must have been riding on a different scrap.

“Do you honestly think we can arrive there without issue?”

“Wow, Heivia. Frolaytia really has you brainwashed, huh? How can you look at everything that’s happened so far and think ‘without issue’ is even remotely still on the table?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Heivia’s usual worrying nature was rearing its ugly head.

He tended to grow cowardly the instant some unknown technology, like a new Object, showed up. Just like someone who saw new smartphones and tablets and decided they preferred an insular regulated society over a bright future. Quenser was annoyed by that elderly way of thinking, but…

“Yes, we might be able to slip past the killer satellite defense network if we hitch a ride with the registered scraps,” said Heivia. “But there are scraps too big to call debris headed toward the elevator’s space station.”

“If they weren’t, we would be starting an endless journey into space. What’s your point?”

“Ummm, won’t those scraps look like a threat to the space station? Won’t they have defense weapons ready to shoot down the scrap metal???”

The elderly way of thinking contained wisdom this time.

Quenser frantically unhooked his carabiner and kicked off the side of his scrap just before a thick, bluish-white electron beam stabbed through the silent vacuum of space. It pierced the center of the cylindrical cargo tank, causing it to rupture from within.

Incidentally, the supplies that never reached their destination happened to be sex toys.

Since any videos watched or VR data accessed on a space station’s computer equipment would be contained in the logs sent back to the control center back on the ground, Quenser was surrounded by a blizzard of analog paper magazines, silicone tubes, and life-sized dolls.

“Get away from the scraps!!” he shouted “The defense system meant for meteors and large scraps can’t detect anything human-sized!!”

“Oh, no. That cloud of sex toys is floating out into space,” lamented Myonri. “The aliens are going to know all about the most embarrassing side of our civilization.”

“Huh? What are you worried about, Myonri? This is tradition. Have you ever heard of the space probe they launched back when the country called America still existed? The world’s brightest scientists got together and decided the best way to contact aliens was to carve a picture of a naked man and woman into a metal plate. But since being bright doesn’t mean being a good artist, they got some complaints about spreading a poor representation of earth’s civilization.”

If you were not sure how to use the books and dolls, they would only look like detailed examples of human anatomy. With that much reference material, the little green men flying around in saucers and harassing farms could stop abducting humans and pulling out their insides. The books might even be preserved in an alien museum as anatomy textbooks. But right now Quenser had to focus on the space elevator more than the aliens who seemed to have a thing for milk and busty country girls.

He was in the middle of a war between humans.

The Mother Lady built by the Federation of Elevator Industries was right in front of him.

The wires extending all the way from the earth seemed to pierce through a giant disk-like structure that looked something like a flower with petals or like an analog clock face. A donut-shaped block for living space and cargo storage were connected to the central sphere and 8 “flower petals” extended sharply out from there. From the central sphere to the tip of the petals, it had a radius of more than 10km.

The wires seemed to “pierce through” it because they did not stop there. They continued a long, long way up into space. Space had no horizon or atmosphere, but the faint blue light of the planet got in the way, preventing Quenser from seeing the end. It was probably connected to some kind of weight, like a wire reel that was no longer in use.

The space station was located at an altitude of 36 thousand kilometers, but the wires apparently continued past 100 thousand. That was the only way for it to remain balanced, but that meant the distance from the station to the top of the elevator was about twice the distance from the ground to the station.

The moon was even further out at 380 thousand kilometers. The luxury villas disconnected from all the wars on earth seemed to be coldly staring down at the incompetent potatoes who could not stop the killing even after launching into the silence of space.

“Heh. That thing’s the world’s biggest piece of space trash,” spat Heivia.

Even now, the bluish-white rapid-fire beam weapon continued to tear through the vacuum of space to burn away the large scraps the station had created itself. The kilometers-long flower petals were covered with solar panels and had apparently been converted into weapons, so a careless look at the sharp tips could expose your eyes to the blinding light.

But just as Quenser had predicted, the weapons were only attacking the scorched hunks of metal. Once the potatoes let go and floated away, they no longer had to fear the defense weapons.

They soon arrived at the giant station that only looked like a smooth wall from the outside.

They touched it.

“God, this is terrifying!” said Heivia. “Where am I even supposed to grab this thing!? I’m gonna float away from it again!!”

“Don’t come to me for comfort just cause you’re worried. It’s creepy!!” said Quenser. “Using your extravehicular unit to press against the wall would be a waste of gas, so attach yourself with a wire!!”

Something as simple as landing proved to be a trial and error affair. Heivia seriously did end up flipping away into space, so Quenser had to seriously think for a moment whether he would grab at the filthy guy’s waist or let him fly off never to be seen again. He ultimately decided to throw over the other end of the wire he had attached to the wall, snagging it around Heivia’s leg.

Once he had finally arrived safely on the station’s wall, the idiot forgot all about saying thanks as he changed the subject.

“Pant, pant! A-anyway, where do we get in? Let’s not make our space adventures into a trilogy. We only have so much oxygen.”

“We have airtight tape. And since Cottage is still breathing, it must work. Let’s blow a hole in the airlock with a bomb and then seal it up from the inside. We need oxygen too, so no one survives if we just thoughtlessly pop the place open like a balloon.”

They had arrived at the space station, so the killer satellites defending its surroundings would have a hard time aiming for them. The Capitalist Corporations’ Federation of Elevator Industries would not want to blow a hole in the wall and dump themselves out into the vacuum of space.

Using the extravehicular activity unit’s gas for movement was not recommended, but they had no choice at the moment. Trusting that he could steal some equipment from the station, Quenser used the nitrogen gas to approach one of the large flower petals. Instead of the sharp tip, he was interested in the donut-shaped living space and cargo block located inward of the petals. He felt like a bug going for the flower’s nectar.

He pressed up against a rectangular section reminiscent of an elevator door reinforced with a rubber seal.

“Is this the airlock? I was expecting something more like a bank vault door, but this is pretty flimsy. Hey, Heivia, let me use your rifle’s sensors. I’ll check the material and thickness of the door with the ultrasound sensor and then set up the plastic explosive.”

He held out his hand while staring at the airlock and then looked over to see someone there.

They shined silver and stood over 3m tall.

It was a Capitalist Corporations powered suit used for extravehicular activity.

“……………………………………………………………………………………………”

His mind went blank.

A beat later, a scream too high-pitched to even call girly erupted from Quensette’s mouth, signaling the beginning of a battle between Legitimacy Kingdom shoulder-fired missiles and a Capitalist Corporation shotgun.

“Kyaaaaahhhhh!!”

“Stop worrying about your nitrogen supply, Quenser! Get away from that wall!!”