Meanwhile, the soldiers on the battlefield, who were all presumed to be possibly infected, didn’t want to see themselves as targets to be expelled.
“…Human suicide bombs are just messed up. There’s no way a virus can turn people into bombs.”
They weren’t Actaeon. They didn’t have some suicide-bomb virus.
“Are you sure they’re not some kind of new self-propelled mine…? Maybe they just hid it well because it’s indistinguishable from a human…”
After all, if they had a bomb in their body, surely it could be taken out with an operation. If it was a disease, it could be cured. If they were originally humans, they could just say what happened, and everyone would be glad to help them, right?
But they didn’t do it, so they must be some new model of self-propelled mine. Didn’t it prove that they were some hostile weapon that couldn’t be operated on and didn’t obey humans? Right?
“And they all hid the case with the wiretaps, right? The Republic, the Eighty-Six, the high-ranking officers.”
When the chips were down, the major nobles, the generals who sat in the comfort of their safe offices in the capital…
“Maybe they’re hiding something else from us. Something they don’t want us to know.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“—I wish they could take the bombs out of us with an operation.”
Pinning a worm onto a fishhook and throwing it into the water, Citri muttered this as she watched ripples spread over the water’s surface.
They moved through the Vesa territory while avoiding the camps set up by the western front’s army, and they were drawing closer to the defensive formation set along the Saentis-Historics line. But currently, they were in a deep ravine inside the woods, meaning their voices wouldn’t travel too far, so Kiki and the rest were enjoying fishing while chattering loudly. Yuuto did warn them they might scare away the fish, but they turned out to be pretty successful. In fact, Yuuto was the only one who was oddly unsuccessful.
Having apparently given up, he sat by the riverside without his fishing rod and looked at the water sparkling as it reflected the faint winter sunlight filtering down through the treetops. Hearing her comment, he glanced over at Citri, and she continued speaking.
She was quite proud of everything she did today. She made the fishing rod herself, was brave enough to pick up a worm from under an overturned rock, and pinned it to the hook without his help. So since she was capable of doing that…she wanted to talk about this, too.
Yuuto hadn’t asked what clarity did to them in that research laboratory, probably because he could sense they didn’t want to talk about it. And that consideration from him was why she wanted to tell him.
To tell him the story of their…of her weakness and her cunning.
“Like I mentioned at first, the Actaeon were given a set time limit, after which they would detonate, but the setting was incomplete.”
Mines activated by having pressure applied to them, but they also had a safety feature that made them explode after a set time, and this was much the same. Having mines remain buried in a battlefield long after the fight was over was dangerous, and digging up countless mines took time and effort. It was necessary at times to have one’s weapons self-destruct so they didn’t end up hurting the people of your own country.
But in the case of the Dear cells, the researchers weren’t able to perfect this safety feature, both in animal and human experiments.
Yuuto returned his gaze to the glittering stream.
“…And that’s why you all decided to run away from home before December.”
“Yes. Our time limit was set to this year’s Holy Birthday, so we have no way of telling when in December it might happen. Honestly, it’s gotten dangerous even earlier than that, so we should have fled sooner.”
As a safety measure, they were injected with activator cells that would interact with the Dear cells, awakening them after a prescribed time. But they’d activated ahead of schedule, making the Actaeon detonate at unpredictably early times.
If they were set to detonate in ten days, it could end up being several days earlier or several days later. And when set months or years ahead of time, the discrepancy grew even larger. A weapon that could explode unpredictably during transport or standby was a weapon that couldn’t be used, but at the same time, there was no sending a person who’d been turned into a bomb onto the battlefield without a means of disposing of or detonating them. Especially if those people had been forcibly turned into bombs.
The detonation-disposal feature might have been workable had a mechanical component that triggered it been included, but the Dear cells were designed to sow doubt in an enemy country by being injected into people who would be taken prisoner. A mechanical component would be foreign to their bodies and therefore easily detectable, defeating the purpose of the safety device.
“…To begin with, the Dear cells aren’t as simple as the Republic said all those years ago, when they threatened the Empire with turning animals into bombs.
“The activator for it has to be implanted surgically, and we were put to sleep during the surgery, so we don’t know exactly where the cell tissues were placed. And since the Dear cells are made from the Actaeon’s own cells, they aren’t considered a foreign object, and no scan can distinguish them.”
Citri and Yuuto couldn’t hear any birds, perhaps because they were so close to the battlefield, and it was so cold that they couldn’t hear any insects chirping, either. All they could catch was the murmuring of the stream, the occasional rustling of leaves in the distance, and Kiki’s, Ashiha’s, Imeno’s, and Shiohi’s voices as they played together.
“And even if there was some other way of spotting the Dear cells, there’s always the risk of us detonating during the inspection or the operation. The doctor and nurses trying to help us could end up dying, so I doubt the Federacy would even attempt to save us. And if it did, that’s all the more reason those doctors shouldn’t have to die…and more than anything…” Citri paused there.
She decided to tell him about her weakness and cunning. But even so, baring her foul nature for this strong person to see took courage.
“…I was scared the Federacy would treat us like guinea pigs, too. That they’d lock us up, cut us open, and kill us.”
So she ran, never telling a soul. She knew she’d die either way, but nothing scared her more than being treated the same as in the Eighty-Sixth Sector’s laboratory again. The idea of being locked up and killed was scarier than anything.
“You…were scared of dying,” Yuuto whispered softly next to her, so as to not be heard by the others.
She felt a tug on her rod. She caught a fish. She pulled the rod back, catching the splashing fish, and after mustering up the courage, she smacked it against a nearby rock to kill it. This would be their meal for the day.