It was a short update on Paula’s life: the business she’d started after the divorce, a housekeeping service, was doing well. Recently, the owner of the pub where they’d met had fallen sick. He’d recovered, but would have to close shop. She went to the last day party and saw a lot of old familiar faces.
Of course, their conversation over drinks naturally turned to Richard Mardukas, and those who knew about his dismissal from the Royal Navy expressed their sympathies. One of them, a classmate who’d butted heads with him over this and that during officer school days, had told Paula this:
Mardukas is an essentially honest man. That’s why he can’t help but share unpleasant truths with those around him. The bureaucrats in the military couldn’t stand it. I found it insufferable in my early days, as well. So did you, Paula. But we’re all older now, and you should talk to him again if you can.
Those words had motivated her to write this letter. It wasn’t as if they hated each other, after all. They could meet up for a meal now and then. Wouldn’t he call her if he got the time?
She’d included a picture of the pub. She was with two other couples, smiling in a garden somewhere. She looked about the same as she had back then. No, he felt like she was prettier now than when they’d divorced...
A bit late, isn’t it? part of him felt. But at the same time, Mardukas was surprised to realize he might like to see her again. Ah, well, he thought. If I get through this alive, I’ll drop by Plymouth. He’d been meaning to take it easy, anyway. While he was mentally composing his reply, he heard a heavy sound, and then the control room door behind him opened.
“Mardukas-san,” said Tessa, looking even more haggard than before. Her bloodshot eyes reflected the hardships she was working through.
“Yes, Captain?” said Mardukas.
Tessa thrust a piece of paper at him; it was a list of about twenty-five crew names. “This is the absolute minimum we’ll need,” she told him. “Bring them to the briefing room at once.”
She didn’t require any more conversation; no expressions of comfort or gratitude or apology, either. All he had to do was repeat the words he’d said thousands of times before, meaning, I will obey. “Aye, aye, ma’am.” Then Mardukas left to execute the order.
The resupply was almost complete, but the work on the Laevatein wasn’t anywhere near being finished.
“Dammit!” cursed Ed Sachs, head of the maintenance team, casting his wrench onto the floor of the flight deck. The machine itself was fine; he’d managed to get it into fighting shape. The problem was the emergency deployment booster attached to it. The Laevatein was functionally an M9 model and could use most equipment designed for the M9, but the XL-2 emergency deployment booster was an exception.
The XL-2 was a disposable flight unit that launched an M9 from the deck catapult. Propelled by a single shot of liquid rocket fuel, the XL-2 sped an M9 into the area of operations. But the lambda driver-neutralizing fairy eye, the 165-millimeter demolition gun, and its otherwise full complement of weapons made the Laevatein too heavy to carry. The XL-2 didn’t have enough thrust, and its wings would warp from the strain. He also couldn’t guarantee clearance for the shoulders and the back, and the Laevatein didn’t have the sensors it needed for in-flight tactical maneuvering.
In other words, even if the de Danaan got close enough to Merida Island, the Laevatein had no way to make landfall quickly. That’s why they’d had to use the XL-3.
The XL-3, which hadn’t undergone an official development process, was basically two XL-2s slapped together to make something that could carry the Laevatein. Sachs had anticipated they’d need it for an operation like this, so he’d been working on it for two months, and just barely made it in time.
Rather, he hadn’t made it in time. He’d completed the rig itself, but the processes of attachment and adjustment were presenting difficulties; conflicts kept popping up between the XL-3’s flight control system and the Laevatein’s motion manager that he just couldn’t solve. There were a few other areas giving him trouble, too. It wasn’t something he could fix in just a few hours.
Al, apparently sympathetic, spoke up. 《Lieutenant. All you need to do is finish attaching the unit. I can handle the rest of the fine-tuning myself.》
“No,” Sachs protested, “it’s not just a software issue. Depending on what’s causing the problem, we may need to swap out circuit boards and parts, and bypass wires and piping. Can you handle that?”
《Certainly not.》
“Then be a good machine and shut up.”
《Did you say ‘machine’?》
“What, got a problem with that?”
《It isn’t that... May I ask you a question?》
“Go ahead,” Sachs told him.
《Can you imagine what it would feel like to have wings?》
It was a strange question. “What do you mean by that?”
《Can you?》
“Hmm... Well, I might have done, when I was a kid.”
《Do you feel it’s a rite of passage in human development?》
“Maybe not that specific fantasy, but more or less, yeah.”
《I have a theory that the cause of the problem lies not with the XL-3, but with me.》
“What do you mean by that?” Sachs asked.
《The bodily sensation. The motion manager, system-wise, is considered subordinate to the core unit in which ‘I’ am contained, but the data bus that connects the two of us is transferring far more information than before.》
The motion manager was the composite unit that controlled the movements of an AS. If Al was the machine’s cerebrum, the motion manager was like the cerebellum.