“It’s an emergency! If we can just escape the Earth, a seiyuu’s life is a small price to pay! If you resist, you’ll be charged with treason and executed!” The director pulled out a pistol and shot the official seiyuu in the leg. She screamed in pain.
“What the... don’t fuck with seiyuu, asshole!” Akane snarled, stepping forward.
“Who the hell are you?”
“A seiyuu who just happened to be passing by.”
“Yeah? Normally that insult alone would count as treason but we’re dangerously short on staff. Get in there and fly this ship.”
She was damned if she was gonna take instructions from a piece of shit like this, but escape was her first priority. Akane grabbed a mic and placed it to her sac. She kicked the wounded seiyuu’s head out of her way, securing her spot. Sachii copied her, kicking the seiyuu’s head again.
The ship’s exterior was shown on screen. The color of the light was the opposite of how it had been — the space in front of them was blue, while the rear of the ship, nearer the surface, was red. With the loss of atmosphere, more aether was encroaching on the lower regions.
The ship was flying between two layers. Ahead of them were the towns blown away by the 500 kps winds, while behind them was a mass of mountains and tectonic plate fragments and lava kicked up by the magnitude 16 earthquake. In the current layer, lava and ocean spheres were colliding, and the steam left visibility extremely poor.
“Lava approaching at five o’clock!” Sachii yelled. Her head was still spinning, but somehow she’d been put in charge of information relay.
The director yelled back, “Focus aether barrier deployment to the rear!”
The impact rocked the ship. Akane was thrown to the floor, but the wounded seiyuu cushioned the blow.
“Report damages!”
“Minor, but there’s more lava coming! I don’t think we can hold!”
“Hard to port! Get us outta here!”
The ship plunged into a steam cloud. They couldn’t see a thing. Zero visibility at top speed. With the aether barrier deployed they couldn’t use the high energy radar. Their only way of avoiding midair obstacles was by sight.
Shadows whipped across the blank wall of white. Pieces of buildings! Akane made the ship turn hard to starboard. This time she was slammed to the floor, but she was used to it now, and no longer needed the flesh cushion.
They managed to avoid a head-on collision, but the danger was hardly averted. A square-shaped building was spinning through the air, headed right for the tail. If it hit, they were doomed!
“Fire a beam! Cancel the barrier!”
Akane didn’t wait for the director’s order, she just made the aether resonate. Her approach was an extremely slapdash one. Just eliminate the obstacle, making it harmless. If the building wasn’t solid, but liquid, or better yet, gas, they could pass through it harmlessly.
Purple beams were fired from the external aether amps. The barrier went down for an instant to let the beams through. There was an ear-splitting crack and the beams melted and vaporized the chunk of building. The ship slammed into the resulting gas.
“Hot!”
Akane leapt up. The floor had suddenly become extremely hot. She quickly jumped up onto the wounded seiyuu’s body. She could smell flesh burning.
“Internal temperature rising! Main computer overheating!”
“Get us in some water!”
The ship veered, aiming for an oceanic sphere some ten kilometers wide. When it tried to enter, it bounced off like a skipping stone. It took several attempts before they managed to enter the boiling sphere.
“Computer damage below 20%. Basic navigation controls remain functional!”
Applying heat in a low pressure environment made water boil away furiously. The sea water vanished, leaving behind furiously churning steam and a pile of salt.
“Height is 800 kilometers. Entering thermosphere!”
Somehow the ship had made it through the rubble layer and had made it to the outer atmosphere, just outside the thermosphere. This was the height satellites roamed at and at which you could clearly tell the Earth was a sphere. Light from the aether friction should have shown the entire rainbow, but the light now was much softer. With much of the atmosphere gone, the aether winds were now scouring the surface, and the light produced was much less intense.
With less light from aether friction, it was actually possible to see the surface — usually it was too bright to make it out. And what they could see of it looked like a map of hell.
The seas were boiling, exposing the sea floors. The earthquakes were still going on, and mountain chains were crumbling, the aftershocks generating boiling tsunami so powerful they changed the very shape of the coasts. Between the plates, the mantle itself was exposed, the crust peeling off and curling like skin. Lava on the surface made peaks higher than Everest. But these, in turn, were destroyed by further quakes.
The noise of it was so loud it could be heard in space. Sound traveled easily in space. With the atmosphere leaking and the discrepancy in aether concentration removed, sounds on the surface went directly into outer space.
The Earth was dying, and every part of it was screaming.
“Halting seiyuu flight. Switching to aether rotor.”
The Samidare was about 5000 kilometers from the Earth. Debris has scattered enough to no longer be a major concern, and the seiyuu were exhausted enough that continuing seiyuu-generated anti-gravity flight was no longer an option.
Sighs of relief could be heard all over the ship. They’d escaped the Earth’s destruction.
“So what happened, anyway?” Akane asked, wiping the sweat from her brow.
The director shook her head, switching the screen to the aethernet broadcast. The aethernet used aether as a medium for transmissions, so as long as you had a receiver, you could access it anywhere in the solar system. The images and sounds were heavily distorted by the turbulence the Earth’s collapse had caused in the aether flow, but the confusion in the announcer’s voice was clear enough. Earth had lost its gravity, and the entire planet had ceased to exist — that was all the information they had. Ships that had managed to escape were being directed not to the Moon but to Mars. It sounded like the Moon was no longer safe. There was a severe danger of it being struck by pieces flung off the collapsing Earth.
Earth was finished. Eight billion people, a quarter of humanity’s total population, had perished.
Strangely enough, Akane felt great. To her, Earth was little more than a symbol of the Surveillance Society’s oppression.
She was far more concerned with whether the Dark Seiyuu had survived. But if she’d managed to survive, there was no way the Dark Seiyuu would have let herself die. Akane swore to track her down and kill her with her own hands.
“Surviving seiyuu, well done! I’m sure you’re all exhausted. Please, get some rest.”
The director’s voice interrupted Akane’s thoughts. She was tempted to confront her again, but she was utterly wiped. She needed to get some sleep.
The hall outside the studio was very cold. She could see her breath. Space was a chilly place. Aether conducted heat, so heat was always draining away. It seemed like the heaters were set quite low to minimize energy loss.
“Senpai, wanna sleep together?”
Akane collapsed on a bed, and Sachii hopped in next to her without waiting for an answer. She considered kicking her out, but Sachii’s warmth made her reconsider. It was so terribly cold. The blankets provided were too thin to be of any use. If she tried to sleep under them anyway, she’d probably catch a cold. Health was everything to a seiyuu, so a cold could be fatal.
“Senpai, you smell amazing.”
Sachii’s warmth spread to her. She was so short her head rested naturally against Akane’s chest. Akane remembered seeing an old movie where a couple had lain like this. She was pretty sure head rubbing was involved. That was probably what manners dictated. Akane dutifully rubbed Sachii’s head, and Sachii let out a happy chuckle, forgetting all the tragedy. As ditzy as this girl could be, she was also pretty resilient.
The two of them embraced, like the seiyuu of old. In the Great Seiyuu Age, seiyuu sent on adventures through the Milky Way moved in pairs — coupling, they called it. Back when aether manipulation was still mostly trial and error, ship interiors had all been freezing, and these pairs had used their body heat to keep each other warm.
Pondering how she would kill the Dark Seiyuu, Akane fell asleep.
As she did, though she wasn’t vibrating the aether, she thought she heard the voice again.