Last and First Idol, page 21
The Samidare touched down in Pwyll City. The entire top layer of the city was a spaceport, and there was a constant stream of ships coming and going. The destruction of Earth had repercussions even all the way out here, and transit was a mess. They’d been worried they’d get caught by customs in the airport, but they needn’t have worried; Jupiter law enforcement was all civilian-run.
“Sushi, sushi, I love sushi!♪” Sachii sang the whole way to the restaurant.
They’d been living on preserved rations for a while, so she was excited.
They ran quickly through the mainstays — salmon, ikura, mackerel, and tuna. Then Akane checked the beacon. The Black Swan, with the Dark Seiyuu on board, had accelerated rapidly, escaping the Jupiter system, heading not for Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. Her path was leading her out of the solar system entirely.
“She’s gonna ditch the solar system!” Akane said, standing up. “We’d better go!”
“Nah, Senpai! You’re worrying about nothing,” said Sachii, waving her down. “First of all, leaving the solar system in a ship not designed for interstellar travel is way too dangerous. The force of the aether gets crazy out there. We’d have to hit up a shipyard and get some work done first.”
“That would take ages! Let’s just hijack a better one.”
“Not many interstellar ships round Jupiter. Gotta get further out before you see many of those.”
As Sachii talked, she put her cheek against Akane’s chest, and took a selfie. Akane looked down at her screen and saw her posting to social media. She captioned the selfie, “#pwyllcitylife.”
She had way more followers than Akane’s account. She wasn’t super popular for nothing. Akane checked her own account, but it had been frozen after the hijacking.
“Don’t check in a few days and the number of replies gets craaazy.” Sachii scrolled through them a bit. There was everything from dumbasses going, “I heard the Earth blew up. Are you OK?” to people screaming, “Is it true Akane-san hijacked a ship!?”
“You’re not gonna respond?”
“No way I could respond to all of ‘em.”
“Too popular to care, are you?”
“Ohhh, I’m not that popular! You’re making me blush, Senpai!”
Their laid-back conversation was interrupted by two customers entering the next booth. Both of them wore seiyuu police uniforms.
Seiyuu police. A group run by the Seiyuu Surveillance Society, they targeted seiyuu crimes independently from official or civilian law enforcement.
Akane and Sachii glanced at each other and rose to leave. As they did, one of the cops yelled, “Yomokura’s yuri partner, Sachii Amamiya, just posted a photo with her to social media! They’re in Pwyll City!”
“But... That’s here. Ah! Wait!”
They’d spotted Akane. She ran out at top speed, but the cops were right behind.
“Argh, Senpai! I’m so sorry! This is all my fault...”
Sachii had always been an idiot, and it was hardly worth being surprised by now.
“Doesn’t matter! We need to get back to the Samidare and get outta here!”
Akane and Sachii ran up the long escalator to the spaceport. If anyone got in their way, she kicked them out of it with Seiyuu Karate. They fell over, rolling down the escalator, and got stomped on by the pursuing cops.
“Fuck it, Sachii, let’s fly!” She used the low gravity to take a big bound and move quickly upwards.
They reached the top level. The spaceport was four kilometers square, a vast maze of paneled corridors filled with passengers getting on and off ships. Leaping over the heads of the crowd like an action game, they hurried towards the Samidare.
Meanwhile, both cops were out of breath. Born and raised on Jupiter’s moons, their endurance lagged far behind the Earth-born seiyuu. Earth had the strongest gravity of all habitable areas within the solar system. If they fought, they could easily win, but they’d definitely called for backup, so jumping ahead was the best option.
“There! The Samidare!”
Sachii thrust the key into the hatch, punched in the password, and went in. Both raced to the studio, put mics to their sacs, and started manipulating gravity, throwing the ship into an emergency ascent.
Europa was a tiny snowball against the aether luminescent, lightning-covered face of Jupiter. A ship came rocketing from that snowball towards them. A seiyuu police cruiser.
“Senpai, should we shoot them?”
“Nah. While we’re engaged, more of ’em’ll come. We need to get away from Jupiter.”
Akane poured all the power she’d stolen from the helium seiyuu into accelerating the Samidare.
“Where are we going?”
“Out of the solar system!”
“In this ship? That’s crazy!”
“It sure is! But the seiyuu pigs are flying an interplanetary ship, too. If we leave the solar system, they won’t be able to follow us!”
“Won’t other ships intercept us?”
“Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all on the other side of the sun from Jupiter. Even if they send an aether transmission calling for backup, they’ll never catch us. And outside the solar system all signals get reflected back. If we can just get out, we can get away clean before word spreads. Then we just have to follow the beacon, catch up with the Dark Seiyuu, and rip her apart.”
“You never do plan small! Of course, I’m with you!”
And with that, the Samidare charged out of the solar system with a thunderous roar.
Twenty days later, they reached the furthest reaches of the solar system, the heliopause. The point fifty AU from the sun where the solar winds and the Milky Way aether flow collide. Beyond that, the aether concentration gets much higher, and the environment is totally different from inside the solar system.
As they approached the heliopause, another ship approached from the distance. It was on course to crash into the Samidare head on, moving very fast with no attempt to slow down, but this was no cause for alarm. This ship was the Samidare itself. The discrepancy between the aether density within and without the solar system at the heliopause was so great it reflected all light originating within the solar system. It functioned like a gigantic mirror, and every ship that approached could see itself.
Behind the Samidare’s reflection was the entire warped sphere that formed the Milky Way. The light that made it in from outside was heavily refracted, and to anyone inside it was like looking through a fish-eye lens, like the whole world was inside a tiny orb.
The actual shape of the Milky Way was a round disc, thicker in the center. Our solar system lay on the outskirts of it, and viewed from there, the Milky Way resembled a dorayaki seen from the side. The swollen center portion let out a blinding white light, and as you went right the light went from white to blue, and to the left it went from white to red.
The Milky Way was divided into three sectors based on the qualities of the aether flow — the Laminar, Turbulent, and Critical sectors. What gave these sectors their defining properties was the Reynolds number, which predicts how easily a flow will be disrupted. Generally speaking, the greater the concentration and speed of a fluid, the higher the Reynolds number. For example, when you first turn on the tap, the water flows out smoothly, but as the flow gets stronger it starts to churn, spraying in unpredictable directions.
Areas of the Milky Way with low Reynolds numbers were called the Laminar Sector. In these regions, it was easy to predict the aether flow; whirlpools and storms did not occur, and it was easy to fly through. Most settled areas were in the Laminar Sector, and viewed from the solar system they were either blue or red. When the aether flow was smooth, positions along the spiral from the Milky Way’s center looked blue when they were approaching and red when they were retreating. In this sector, it was possible to use the aether flow to connect regions with aether transmissions and use the aethernet.
Meanwhile, aether pulled towards the massive gravitational force at the center of the Milky Way (the maelstrom) reached far greater speeds, in correspondence with the law of conservation of angular momentum. As aether flow speed increases, the Reynolds number goes up, and the behavior becomes impossible to predict. A small change in density can cause eddies, and those eddies cause other eddies. Eddies expand like dominoes, becoming storms, with no way to tell when these storms will appear. Turbulent aether generates heat and radiation, creating environments that can’t be navigated. This was the Turbulent Sector. During the Great Seiyuu Age, a number of daredevil seiyuu braved the turbulence, but only a handful ever returned. These days, the sector had been officially declared off-limits. From a distance, it appeared to be giving off a white light. Turbulent aether released all types of light and it all blended together, looking white.
Between the Laminar and Turbulent sectors was the Critical Sector. While this area was generally laminar, it was so close to the turbulent sectors that at any moment it might be disrupted. As the Reynolds number corresponded to the length of physical objects in the flow, it was difficult to navigate with larger vessels. Aether transmissions were also easily disrupted, making this a frontier frequently isolated from the Laminar sections and civilization.
Akane and Sachii passed through the heliosphere, making preparations to travel through the Milky Way. Given the increase in light energy, they applied sunscreen, and dimmed the lights. Heat lost to the void increased as aether grew thicker, so they began wearing extra layers of clothes. Fortunately, the ship was well stocked for both eventualities.
Once they were ready, Akane gave the order.
“Onward to the realm beyond the solar system! Full speed ahead!”
The Samidare began to move. The reflection of it was uncannily clear. Behind it lay a crystal ball containing the entire Milky Way.
As the reflection grew close, the crystal ball grew larger. The distortion began correcting itself, growing closer to the real appearance.
When the real ship and its reflection hit, the crystal ball filling their field of vision suddenly reversed itself. As if the ball was absorbing their world, the convex surface of the ball came at them, and flattened out.
The dimly lit ship interior began glowing with a mystic blue light. The sounds the ship produced grew much more powerful, and higher-pitched. High-energy light radiated from the light fixtures, and a strange heat unlike anything they’d ever felt before enveloped their skin.
They were outside the solar system.
“Wow! I’ve never been interstellar before!”
Side-eying Sachii’s dance of joy, Akane checked the beacon. Their target was headed towards the galaxy center, into the Turbulent Sector.
“Right! Turbulence, here we come!”
Akane steered the ship into the aether flow, sending them hurtling into the center of the Milky Way.
But the Samidare was an interplanetary ship, and definitely not up to the task of reaching the galaxy center. It was comparatively fine in the Laminar zones, but when they reached the Critical region the seiyuu transistor and aether amps immediately began breaking down. They were damaged by minute aether eddies, most likely. A ship built to navigate the gentle aether flows inside the solar system simply couldn’t handle them.
That’s how the two of them had ended up drifting. For a while they were still drifting towards the location the beacon showed, but now they were going the wrong way. There was nothing to do all day except eat human flesh. She regretted not stocking up on emergency rations, but with the seiyuu police hot on their heels, that hadn’t been an option.
“Ohh... Senpai, there’s a fish!” Sachii whispered.
Akane ignored her. She was most likely just so sushi-deprived she was seeing things.
“I mean it! Look, on the screen!”
She was right. There was a streamlined shadow on the screen, and it was getting larger. It looked like a fish, but the body construction wasn’t symmetrical bilaterally, but radially, centered around the axials connecting the head and tail. The head was divided into ten points like a flower or star, and it had a giant mouth covered in teeth. It had four large eyes, and these were covered by so many smaller eyes they completely buried the head.
It was a space fish. All sorts of creatures lived in the aether flows of the Milky Way, and their distribution was set by the Reynolds numbers. In the calm, low-energy environments of the Laminar sector were forests of giant but not terribly mobile space trees, and space plankton that moved around via cilia and flagella. Closer to the Turbulent sector, as the environment grew dangerously high-energy, you got space fish with enough mobility to avoid being caught in the eddies.
“Let’s catch it! And make sushi out of it!” Sachii yelped.
Space fish just looked sort of like Earth fish, but they were totally different animals. And with their aether amps broken, they lacked the means to kill the fish.
“Fish! I’m gonna eat you up! Eeeeek!”
Sachii suddenly jumped and threw her arms around Akane. The space fish had opened its mouth. It split into four pieces, looking less like a mouth and more like the tentacles on an octopus or squid. As it approached, they began to get a sense of its size. It was big. Like ten times the size of the Samidare. It was coming right towards them, mouth open wide.
“Well, now we’re going to be its dinner! Any ideas, Amamiya?”
“Don’t ask me! I got nothing!”
With their aether amps non-functional, they couldn’t fry it, eat it, or do anything to it. They just watched as the Samidare disappeared into the space fish’s maw and descended into its belly. The screen showed walls of red flesh, but this soon gave way to darkness. The ship rocked for a while but then seemed like it drifted to a stop somewhere stable.
“Well, that seems to have worked out. Let’s go, Senpai!” Sachii said, happily heading towards the hatch.
“Uh... To do what?”
“Get outside and bring home some fish meat!”
“Wait, at least put on a space suit! What if you fill the ship with poison?”
“Don’t worry! It looks like it’s safe outside.”
Certainly, the computer’s analysis showed the outside air was 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. Same as Earth’s atmosphere.
“Well, good. Hang on, do you have anything sharp?”
Her pocketknife seemed hardly up to the task. They searched the ship and found a fire axe. She gave it a little swing and liked the way it felt.
“Right, open up!”
They opened the hatch and took a few cautious steps out. It was warm, damp, and dark. Listening closely, Akane felt like she could hear the blood pumping through the fish’s veins. She shone a lamp around, and found a wall of flesh, sticky and glistening.
“All the fish we can eat!”
Sachii grabbed the axe from Akane and swung wildly. Maybe the muscle was really hard, or the axe was really crap, but she barely scratched it. The flesh did darken, like the internal bleeding that occurs after a blunt impact.
In the face of this potential sushi, they’d completely forgotten themselves. So they failed to notice the shadow approaching from behind.
“Wazzup!?” the shadow yelled, brightly. It slapped them both on the back.
“Aiiiieee!”
They quickly turned the lamp around and found an old woman with an eyepatch over one eye, and silver hair down to her waist. On her head was a skull, the jaw removed, worn like a helmet. This was somewhat intimidating, but her eye was glittering like a laid-back girl pranking a friend.
“What are you!?” Akane said, snatching the axe from Sachii, and holding it ready.
“Hello! I’m a Free Seiyuu! Suzuka Himori! Nice to meet you both.”
A Free Seiyuu. The name for the seiyuu that had escaped into the Turbulent and Critical Sectors after leaving the solar system during the War of Seiyuu Independence.
“Whaat? The real Suzuka-san!? Um, um... I’m Sachii Amamiya, with Holy Cosmos! It’s an honor to meet you!”
Sachii held out a hand, and Suzuka enthusiastically shook it.
“Seems like you were drifting,” Suzuka said, with concern. “Where were you going in that ship? You accidentally wander into the Critical Sector?”
“No, no, the opposite! We’re heading to the Turbulent Sector to kill the shit out of someone!” Sachii said, maybe a bit too honestly. That was really information that should be kept on the down low.
But veterans of the War for Seiyuu Independence were clearly not fussed by these things.
“Oh? Such youthful vigor. But that ship would be scrap the moment it hit the Turbulent Sector.”
“More importantly,” Akane cut in. “Yo, what is this fish? You live in it?”
“Oh, get a load of this! This here fish? It’s actually my ship!”
“Your ship? No way! I can see finding a way to live inside it, but actually flying the thing? Never.”
“I can totally fly it! Space fish nerves work like seiyuu transistors, amplifying aether vibrations. So if you just vibrate aether through the brain, you can change which way it’s going. Little brain surgery here, implant some control devices, and bam. You got yourself a ship. I’m a pretty good surgeon, you know.”
Akane looked doubtful, so Suzuka puffed up her cheeks, sulking. “Hey! You don’t believe me, do you? Well, seeing is believing. Lemme show you the studio! C’mon!”
Suzuka vanished into the darkness. She knew the way even without light. Akane and Sachii hurriedly followed. They walked through an open area for a while, but then Suzuka ducked into a hole in the wall. One just wide enough for a human to pass. Akane put her axe against the wall and followed her in.
The stench grew stronger. It smelled like fish guts dumped in a trash can and left there for months. The putrid odor made her nose burn.
“Tah-dah! This is my studio. I made it all myself!”
Suzuka seemed super proud, but the room was barely large enough to fit the three of them. The walls were made of constantly quivering flesh, with a large number of thin cables running into them. It was a gross spectacle; just looking at something like this was enough to make you unwell. The cables went through some instrument panels to a microphone. Next to the mic was a screen, showing a black and white image of the space vegetation. Must be a view of outside.
