Rocket Girls: The Last Planet (6 page)

AKANE FOUND HERSELF
being called into the principal’s office. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen it coming. She knew that technically, she had been truant. But she firmly believed that it had been for a good cause. She wouldn’t have even been surprised if they had given her some kind of award.

But here she was enduring this, this
inquisition
.

“So,” the school counselor said for the tenth time, “Yukari Morita coerced you into getting onto that helicopter. Isn’t that right?”

“No, it isn’t,” Akane said once again. “She asked me if I would join them, and I went of my own free will.”

How many times did they have to go through this? What do these people want to know?

“You sure you weren’t coerced?”

“All Miss Morita said was that the experiment was really important. And when I met the researcher conducting the experiment, he confirmed that. They were investigating vestibular functions in goldfish as a way of determining optimal environments for people in space—”

“We’re not concerned with any of that. So basically, you were threatened with the failure of this very important experiment and found yourself unable to refuse. Right?”

Not concerned? What?!

Akane grew increasingly sure that something wasn’t right here.

“They were so grateful to me for saving those goldfish,” Akane said, desperation creeping into her voice. “Why aren’t you?”

CHAPTER TWO

OF FIGS AND SWALLOWS

IF YOU LOOK
at a globe, just to the east of New Guinea and south of the red line of the equator lies a small chain of islands stretching from the northwest to the southeast: the Solomon Islands.

Most Japanese knew them for Guadalcanal, where lots of the heavy fighting took place during the war in the Pacific. These islands first appeared in Western history books in the sixteenth century when Spaniards discovered them, but oceanic peoples had been living there since at least one thousand BCE.

Most tourists visiting the islands were Japanese come to see the old battlegrounds, but in recent years their numbers had dwindled. It wasn’t until four years ago that new ties were formed between Japan and the Solomon Islands with the construction of the Solomon Space Association on Maltide, a small island ringed with coral reefs and covered in jungle.

The SSA existed entirely on the funding of the OECF, Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund. The association’s founder was one Isao Nasuda, a relatively unknown space enthusiast at the time. How he had managed to lobby his way into a position of such power was still something of a mystery.

“As part of our overseas development aid, we need to provide the Solomon Islands with broadcast education and a complete communications network,” he had argued. “And the best way to do that is with communication satellites.

“Building dams and bridges is all very well and good, but if we build them and don’t provide for their upkeep properly, we get burned by the critics. Maintaining a communications satellite network is no different, and it costs a hefty amount of money.”

Everything up to this point in Nasuda’s argument was pretty standard fare. It was the next part that upped the ante.

“In order to pull this off at the lowest possible price point, we need to deploy a manned spaceflight support network.”

Nasuda was nothing if not self-serving.

Anyone with the least bit of experience in space development would have seen through his ploy in a moment. What he was suggesting was akin to building a factory in order to fix a flat tire on a bicycle. However, thanks to the uninformed officials hearing his case, the program had passed with no objections. Of course, what Nasuda really wanted was to realize low-cost manned spaceflight in order to seize a piece of the growing pie that was the global space industry.

Due to a general lack of media interest in foreign aid efforts, construction on the base had begun without the slightest reaction from taxpayers. Development of an entirely proprietary manned spaceflight system was soon under way. Everything was going swimmingly until plans stalled during the testing phase of their large-scale booster rocket. Nasuda had just received official notice that he had six months left to realize manned flight or the entire thing would be scrapped. That was right about the time Yukari Morita visited the island.

With a single, lightweight pilot like her in the orbiter, they might just be able to get away with the small-scale rockets they had already developed. Finding the similarly built Matsuri for a backup crew had just been icing on the cake.

In the end, they were able to send someone into space before their deadline, and the SSA survived. Not only that, but they were able to realize such a dramatic cost improvement that Nasuda’s lie had transformed into a truth of sorts overnight. They had realized his vision of a manned space-repair service. Now the eyes of the world were on the SSA.

It was after this that they rolled out the MOB2 series of multiple-seat orbiters. However, they were still obliged to use the smallest astronauts possible. By reducing the weight of a crewmember by a single kilogram, they could shave all of seventy from the total weight of the rockets. By limiting crew height to 155 cm, they could reduce the weight of the orbiter alone by a whole seven hundred kilograms.

Which is how the future of the SSA came to rely on short, female pilots. Of which at present, they had only two. Two pilots to NASA’s five hundred…

Five days after the orbiter’s emergency splashdown in Yokohama.

The top staff were gathered in the meeting room on the third floor of the main SSA building for a roundup of the last mission.

“…Luckily, the soy sauce and vinegar compound did little damage to the cockpit controls. All of the electronic components are shielded, of course, to resist the effects of a small amount of moisture,” chief engineer Hiroyuki Mukai reported. “As long as nothing seeps in through the outer hull.”

“What about the momentary loss of power due to water damage? Is that something we should work on improving?” Kazuya Kinoshita asked. Kinoshita was the number two man at the SSA.

“I doubt there’s any need. After splashdown, it doesn’t really matter what breaks.”

“Well, as long as the fuel cells don’t explode.”

“Which is why they jettison them before splashdown.”

“But Yukari likes hanging on to them,” Kinoshita noted. “Fuel cells make for a lot more power once you’re on the ground. You can operate the air conditioning and use the radio without worrying about your batteries.”

“Well, we’ll just have to train her not to expect those luxuries.”

“That’s a possibility,” Asahikawa noted. She was the chief medical officer in charge of every aspect of the astronauts’ daily lives. “But there are limits. Actually, the problem with Yukari is she’s been trained so well, she’s starting to look for shortcuts to everything.”

The room filled with laughter.

“Who would’ve thought that following fashions and studying for school tests would prepare someone so well for a career as an astronaut? Memorizing an orbiter manual is nothing to a homework-hardened schoolgirl,” Nasuda said.

“Let’s not underestimate Matsuri, either. Recall that she was somehow able to smuggle an entire durian into that capsule.”

“How did she do that, anyway? We checked that capsule completely before liftoff,” Mukai asked. He had been responsible for the prelaunch check.

“Apparently, she used a sort of hypnosis. By placing the inspection crew under a kind of trance, she made them unable to physically see the durian.”

“Excuse me? Is that even possible?”

“I can’t see any other way that she could have pulled it off. The Taliho tribe claims to have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, after all.”

Satsuki had already debriefed the inspection crew. She had even tried hypnosis on them herself to get to the bottom of what had happened just before the rocket took off—but no clear answers were forthcoming.

“But wait,” Mukai cut in. “If they can do that, why don’t the Taliho all go off and make a killing robbing banks?”

“Let’s just be grateful that they seem to have wisdom in equal amounts to their power. Mind you, I’m going to keep Matsuri confined to quarters until we’re ready to strap her in next time.”

“What happens if she hypnotizes the guards at her door?”

Satsuki frowned.

“We just have to trust them, both of them,” Nasuda said. “Thankfully, the durian did no real damage, and Yukari jettisoned the fuel cells as she was supposed to. If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss the malfunction in the sequencer next.”

“Malfunction? You make it sound like there was something wrong with the electronics.” Mukai snorted. “What happened was, Yukari left the protective cover on the activation switch open while she was dealing with the goldfish, and she accidentally bumped the switch. Yukari says so herself, and that account fits the telemetry records.”

“So it was operator error.”

“Not that I blame her. Everything happened with incredibly bad timing,” Kinoshita said. “What Yukari is saying is that we can’t have one person doing two jobs up there. Well, I suppose it’s two people doing two jobs, but both of them are supposed to be checking the other’s operations, so when you add an experiment to their list of duties, it’s too much. They get confused.”

“So they need a third person?” Nasuda crossed his arms.

Everyone in the room was aware that on the U.S. space shuttle, duties were divided between mission specialists and payload specialists.

“How is development going on the three-person orbiter?”

“As smoothly as could be wished for. All we’re basically doing is cramming another seat into the MOB2 transport locker space.”

“The trick is finding a mission specialist with the same dimensions as Yukari and Matsuri.”

“No kidding. Whoever it is, they’ll have to cram into a space barely fifty centimeters across.”

“
YOU KNOW WHAT
we really need here? A disco.”

It was lunch break. Yukari and Matsuri were sitting in the shade of a palm tree along the beach, sipping coconut milk.

“
Hoi?
What’s a disco?”

“It’s a place for young people to get together and dance and drink and stuff like that.”

“Sounds like a sing-sing.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where everyone sings and dances, and men choose good women. The women decorate themselves and shake their hips and busts to attract the men. Oh, it’s lots of fun.”

“Erm…I guess that sounds similar,” Yukari agreed, a vivid image rising in her mind of tribal people in a circle, beating on drums. “My point is, if we’re going to try to get another high school girl out on this island, we need a disco, at least. You saw what it was like in Yokohama, right? There are boutiques and accessory shops and fast food and all kinds of stuff like that. Here, there’s, well, this!”

Yukari gestured across the scene in front of them.

Palm trees. White sand. Coral reefs. The South Pacific.

“Sure, it’s beautiful when you first get here, but the ‘ooh’ factor only lasts a couple days. No one is going to stay here long if there isn’t a real potential for sustained fun, you know what I mean?”

“But you’re here, Yukari.”

“I don’t have anyplace to go home to.”

“
Hoi?
”

“I got kicked out of school, remember?”

“Oh.” Matsuri made a sort of confused half smile. She reached down and pulled something resembling a rockfish, baked whole, from beside their little campfire. “Perfectly done!” she declared.

“Yeah.”

Matsuri took a bite of the fish and passed it to Yukari.

It didn’t taste bad once you got used to it, but boy did she miss the pizza back in Yokohama. Yukari checked the Omega Speedmaster on her left wrist. Lunch break would be over soon. “Guess we should be heading back.”

Yukari slipped a light jacket on over her swimsuit and pressed the button on her transceiver. “Hi there, security? Pick up, please.”

“Roger. We’re on our way.”

A short while later, a Humvee appeared down the beach. Using base security as a taxi service was one of the perks of being an astronaut.

With the entire future of the SSA resting on their shoulders, Yukari and Matsuri could get away with quite a bit. As long as they had a reasonable excuse, they could take chopper rides to the Chinatown on the other side of the island and use the private Gulfstream jet to go shopping in Australia. If they tried to pull a stunt like that as public officials in Japan, there would have been a firestorm of criticism, but here where the media rarely trod, there was no one to watch them.

The people on base called it “Solomon sickness”: a feeling that grew with time spent on the islands that it was okay to do whatever you liked as long as you could get away with it. It was a pretty pleasant condition, as sicknesses went.

The Humvee drove past the launch platform and onto the two-kilometer-long road that went straight from the launching pad to the vehicle assembly building.

The white, crushed-coral pavement shimmered in the heat. Palm trees stood to either side of the road, like some ritzy boulevard in an exotic city—but here there was no one else but them.

The CB radio on the dashboard squawked.

“Car 5, Car 5, what’s your current position?”

“Just passed the VAB, over.”

“Mind stopping by the front gate? We’ve got a visitor there who won’t budge.”

“Roger that.”

The driver returned his radio mic back to the dashboard and said to Yukari, “Sounds like we’re going to take a little detour if that’s all right.”

“Sure. What’s this ‘visitor who won’t budge’ all about?”

“Probably a local taro-root salesman. They’re pretty persistent.”

“You think?”

Up ahead, a red-and-white striped crossing bar came into view. Off to the right of the road stood a small guard post and a stand of the broad-leaved tropical trees that grew all over the island.

Yukari spotted two people in the shade of the trees.

One, standing, was clearly a security guard, and the other—probably the visitor—was sitting on the ground. She wore a skirt, and her head hung slumped down between pale white shoulders. A wide-brimmed hat covered her face from view.

The Humvee stopped and the guard walked over to them. “It’s a girl. Just arrived here by taxi. Seems like she got a little carsick—that is, the driver tells me that by the time she arrived at the port in Sanchago, she was already half-dead with motion sickness. I doubt the ride here made it any better.”

When civilians visited the island, they had to take a rusty old ferry that left once every three days from Guadalcanal. Once they arrived, they had to take the sole taxi on the island over the mountains along twenty kilometers of dirt road. Anyone who wasn’t riding in a Humvee or other vehicle made for off-roading was in for a nightmarish trip in the “taxi,” which in this case was a makeshift collection of scrapped Datsun parts that might as well have had a bumper sticker reading A
UTOMOBILE INSPECTION?
W
HAT’S THAT?

The security guard jumped out of the Humvee and knelt in front of the girl. Her hat shifted and she looked up, revealing her face.

Yukari practically leapt out of the car. “Akane! What in the name—”

Akane Miura’s eyes swam up to Yukari. “Well,” she croaked, “I’m here.”

“I can see you’re here! But why?”

“I thought…I thought I might become an astronaut.”

“For real? But what about school?”

“I dropped out. There’s no going back,” she said, her head slumping forward again.