HEAVY OBJECT:Volume12 Chapter 5

Status: Incomplete

3/10 parts completed

   

Day 5

Part 1

One requirement for a military weapon was even more important than destructive power: controllability.

Argeiphontes, the poison gas developed by Hermes Pharmaceuticals was no exception. With a death rate of 99.8%, it was history’s worst invention, but it had still begun development as a military product. It was possible they had a stock of an antidote or reductant.

But if so, why had they not saved the tens of thousands of people during the riot suppression accidents? Frolaytia had a possible answer.

“If that research was not their main focus, they would have had enough in stock for a few dozen people at most, so they could not save the vast majority of them. And once the world discovered an antidote existed, the people might decide the company was actively trying to kill people. That’s why they refused to use it. The best scenario for them was to hire a parade of lawyers and throw doubt onto the cause of the accidental deaths. …They seem to have failed there, though.”

Their busty silver-haired commander was speaking from the top of a tank. The exhaust pipe was attached high in order to cross rivers and a water-resistant firefighting hose had been attached to it. The joint was held on with duct tape and rubber instant glue, so it looked pretty handmade.

Quenser covered the tank’s gun with a giant rubber plug and filled the gaps with putty.

“Will this really work?”

“The submarine tank? They used this technique in old wars and the custom designs I had the old lady draw up are perfect. She even tested it on the smaller Full Helm UGV, so it shouldn’t be a problem. …There, that should do it.”

The busty commander toyed with the duct-taped end of the exhaust pipe and then turned toward Quenser.

“The doctor says Catherine won’t survive two days even if we treat all of her symptoms. I assume you know what you need to do, Quenser.”

“Sneak through the ocean in this to contact a VIP. That piece of shit bought god’s love with a generous donation to Hermes Pharmaceuticals, so they might know how to save Catherine.”

“Well done. With the blockade in place, the Information Alliance of course won’t let us through, so don’t let the Rush notice you.” Frolaytia wiped the sweat from her brow. “Your destination is the Olive Garden 50 km north of here. It’s a modern alternative fuel plant that’s trying to resolve the energy crisis with olive fields instead of petroleum.”

“So they feed you smooth extra virgin olive oil that’s been made more stable and efficient for use in machines? They sound even pickier about their food than us.”

“Well, that might mean we’re a little slimmer than they are. And the Olive Garden is also known as a world-class floating casino. It’s known for buying back the chips for barrels of oil instead of cash.”

“I’m sure it’s just a method of laundering dirty money.”

“The VIP in question is Elizabeth Schnozzle. Her father is the president of an Information Alliance sightseeing company and she was caught in the riots and poison gas after sneaking off to Athens for some fun two years ago. After her miraculous survival, she sent a large sum of money to Hermes Pharmaceuticals. Shockingly, it was enough to buy half an Object.”

Why were they not going after Hermes Pharmaceuticals itself?

They had a simple reason. Hermes Pharmaceuticals had produced the poison gas and was likely to have some of the antidote in stock, but they were an international corporation with more than a million employees and it was impossible to know who had supported the evil deeds. In fact, the majority would be normal, decent people. And Catherine did not have time for them to go searching through them all. To swiftly locate the culprit within Hermes Pharmaceuticals, it was best to track down someone who knew a lot about the situation.

Frolaytia whistled.

“Plus, Elizabeth’s company helped to develop Second Venice, but they also hate it. The island’s popularity exploded, which threw off the corporate group’s power balance, so they’re losing their place in the group. They tried developing different areas along the Mediterranean like crazy to take some of it back, but they keep falling into the red. The Olive Garden is one of those that’s still in the black. Of course, that’s partially because our Resort & Dolce group has been applying pressure from the outside.”

“Do we have any reason to think Elizabeth is there?”

“A red tiltrotor. Elizabeth’s faction originally bought it as a luxury helicopter to take her to and from a nearby desert island she was planning to turn into a private beach, but with Second Venice freely moving around, the couple’s private sex beach was a little too much in the public eye. She was displeased, the plan stalled, and the tiltrotor became her own personal pumpkin carriage. It hasn’t moved since landing at the Olive Garden. We’ve confirmed it by satellite, so there’s no mistaking it.”

“50 km. That’s awfully close to the infection base.”

“She might want to experience it close up. Experience the final moments of the popular destination that’s been weighing on them for so long, that is. And luck would have it Elizabeth and Hermes Pharmaceuticals are enjoying the same casino. They seem to be attending some kind of party together, but more than 500 people from Hermes are scheduled to be in attendance. That’s too many suspects, so getting Elizabeth to talk would be best.”

That said, they did not know when Elizabeth would end her fun and leave on the red tiltrotor. If they did not contact her before she left, they would be unable to save Catherine’s life.

It was a bit forceful, but they would have to cross that sea of death.

And to do so, they had created a makeshift customized submarine tank.

“All I can do is send you off. Once you’re over there, you’re on your own, Quenser.”

“Catherine saved my life. She didn’t hesitate to give me the mask she should have worn. I’m not confident what I would have done if our situations had been reversed. Compared to that loneliness, infiltrating a den of money-wasters is nothing.”

“Is there anything we can do while we wait?”

“Repair the Baby Magnum as quickly as possible. It can only be for show, but make sure she can respond to a high-speed battle. Second Venice is surrounded by the Rush and the Old Fashion and we haven’t entirely wiped out the shadow of that Zombie Object. Whatever the case, we can’t even sit at the table without an Object.”

“I’ll do what I can, but I can’t make any promises. The spare armor panels are being used as roofs on the makeshift lodgings.”

“It doesn’t have to be perfect. We just have to be able to put on a performance to show that the Legitimacy Kingdom Object is operational.”

“If that bluff works, what do we do after hiding in the smokescreen?”

Quenser answered that question with a short sigh.

And then he made an announcement.

“I don’t care how many Objects stand between me and rescuing Catherine. I’ll destroy them all myself.”

“I see,” muttered Frolaytia.

She placed the kiseru in her mouth, scratched her head, and continued.

“Then get to it.”

Part 2

It was midnight as they ventured into the dark sea.

“Oh, god. Are we really using a handmade submarine tank? If water gets in through the gaps in the duct tape, it’s all over. You’re not supposed to go 120 meters deep in a school summer project!!”

“My school built a lunar probe. It was crushed underfoot after we sent it on a mission to the girls shower room, though. Besides, a solid tank can bear a fair bit of water pressure to begin with. We closed up all the holes in the gun and radiator, so with the long snorkels attached to let oxygen in and exhaust out, we can travel along the bottom of the ocean just fine.”

The snorkels he mentioned were the firefighting hoses from before. The ends floated on the water’s surface and the floats were camouflaged as planks of driftwood so they would not be noticed.

They had no sense of direction, so they were reliant on a compass as they travelled through the darkness.

But even if the submarine tank could travel freely along the ocean bottom, they could not travel in a straight line. When avoiding those, they had to keep their detour to a minimum. Otherwise, they could lose their sense of direction in the dark sea and end up driving in circles.

“So I guess that bastard Evans survived. Didn’t he fall to the ocean bottom in a powered suit?”

“If he didn’t survive, than who’s that in front of me right now? I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I can’t believe you two. You forgot about me, didn’t you!? You were so moved by what happened with Catherine that you forgot all about me, didn’t you!?”

“Shut up. What good is wasting valuable memory space on guys? I’m more surprised about Myonri. Didn’t you get shot just three days ago!?”

“Uuh… I really would prefer to be sleeping in a bed in the medical room, but then I heard what happened with Catherine. I’d feel bad sitting around when someone is so much worse off than me.”

“You don’t seem to understand that people normally die on the battlefield, Myonri. But anyway, congrats on your return to hell. I’m just glad we have a nice feminine scent to counteract the rest of us guys.”

“Hmm, well, I guess I’m glad you’re as perverted as ever. If Catherine had awoken a spirit of justice inside you, I figured you were going to die here.”

The submarine tank was an extremely effective way of crossing national borders while slipping past radar and satellites, but it was also slow going. They had to make sure the environment did not crush their hearts, so the topic of conversation kept jumping around. The trick was to avoid any silence.

“Oh, yeah. We got some information on that Zombie Object.”

“The Old Fashion already sank it, right? Do we really need that?”

“Well, it is a Zombie Object.”

“It never hurts to be careful. It’s a Faith Organization Second Generation and our codename for it is Lizard Tail. That means this wasn’t its first battle.”

“Then why didn’t we find anything in our database? Is the electronic simulation division getting lazy?”

“We thought it had been destroyed, so it was removed from the list of search candidates. Tee hee.”

“The first part makes sense, but that last part is unforgivable. If some bearded old man tried to play it off with a ‘tee hee’, I am so punching him.”

“Well, to be more serious, there’s some suspicion that Lizard Tail isn’t the name of a specific Object. It might be a disturbance tactic where different Objects are given similar exteriors to look like they’re the same. The Faith Organization apparently calls it Dionysus. I’m not entirely sure where the name comes from. I just remember it’s the god of a sect with a perverted ritual.”

It was a self-harming Object with a death wish.

That Second Generation increased its own value by destroying itself over and over.

“How bizarre can you be?”

“Yeah. Objects are all really weird, but I’d never want to pilot something like that. Even if it’s an efficient way of staying alive, it’s like how bugs and crabs will let their leg tear off if something grabs it. I can’t bear to watch trivia show footage like that.”

But this was being done by the Faith Organisation that loved gods more than food. The design may have been to fulfill an ideal of reincarnation or human sacrifice rather than efficiency.

“…”

“How many more kilometers is it? We’ve run out of things to talk about, but this silence is going to drive us insane.”

“Then let’s do the usual. Y’know, how we kill time during the night shift on guard duty.”

“Oh, you mean Boobs Concentration?”

They heard someone do a spit take.

It was probably Myonri.

“Wh-wh-wh-what are you talking about!?”

“Do we really have to explain it? If you can name two female soldiers with the same chest size, you get a point. Get one wrong and the other guy gets a turn, so it’s pretty simple. The only problem is it leads to some fights if you don’t have someone else to act as a judge, so can you take that job, Myonri?”

“There’s something wrong with this! Why do so many people know our sizes!?”

“Because we’re bored.”

“And you can make a pretty good guess by looking.”

Part 3

Oh Ho Ho gave an exasperated sigh in the Information Alliance Second Generation Rush’s cockpit.

She was rearranging the songs she would use for her next public performance, and…

“Really, do you have to be so obvious about it?”

An Object was generally meant to be the ruler on land or sea, so anything else was branching off of that. They dealt with the air by shooting down the enemy aircraft with their anti-air lasers, so the Object itself did not actually fly. Similarly, underground and underwater were not the 200,000 ton mass’s main field.

However, that did not mean there was nothing they could do.

Objects were the weapons that had ended the nuclear age. And those old weapons had included many bizarre varieties: nuclear mines set on the sea bottom, nuclear torpedoes that traveled through the ocean, and ship-to-surface nuclear missiles that slowly approached the coast in the ocean but traveled just off the surface at more than Mach 5 after rising from the sea.

Objects of course had weapons to deal with those, just like they had anti-air lasers.

An inability to dive underwater was not the same as an inability to rule the sea.

(Well, I do owe him one after saving me before.)

Oh Ho Ho rhythmically tapped her slender finger on the control panel in time with her own music as she paused in hesitation.

“Oh ho ho. And what better way to thank him than to go all out no matter the situation?”

She ultimately decided to attack.

That may have been due to her Idol Elite side also being military-minded.

Several metal dice were thrown into the dark ocean from the bottom of the Rush.

They looked tiny compared to the Object, but each one was the size of an air cargo container. And they were loaded with explosives. The dice could detect the artificial sounds in the ocean that did not exist in the natural world and they could compare them to the sound patterns of the propellers registered to their own army. Any that did not match would be deemed an enemy and the deadly fish eggs would be fired at the target.

The barrage density and individual accuracy was great enough to perfectly intercept up to twenty simultaneous nuclear torpedoes that travelled through the ocean at Mach speeds using supercavitation.

Thus, a submarine tank digging through the sand on the ocean bottom was hardly a challenge.

(Unlike land battles, the slightest damage is enough to take you out in the sea or in the air, so I don’t even need my plasma or railguns.)

“Oh ho ho. Target X confirmed destroyed. I detected the bubble after the water pressure crushed it and the air escaped.”