The Samidare thrashed left, right, up and down, dodging the beams. Sudden G Forces almost knocked Akane out. Each time, she thought she heard the voice.
It was like a wave of sadness beating her about the head. The voice was in her very bones, and each time it echoed through her, it felt like a knife twisting. But the strange thing was, the more pain it caused, the more ideas for improved aether sounding came to her.
She could do this! Akane accelerated the Samidare’s gravity control. She narrowly dodged a beam while falling towards Jupiter. Aether was compressed rapidly beneath the ship, giving off a violet light. As Jupiter drew near, the radiation got stronger, but still remained within the levels the aether barrier could ward off. As the atmosphere grew thicker, the radiation decayed, and only visible light remained. The light grew diffuse, and the sky gradually turned blue.
Clouds. Clouds. Clouds. Clouds in all directions. The Samidare flew across the top of them. Unlike Earth, the horizon was a flat line. The planet was too big to give any indication that it was a sphere.
Inside the clouds, an unbelievable amount of lighting flashed. Energy a thousand times what Earth lightning had was spitting out here and there. The Samidare showed no signs of fear, plunging right into the maelstrom.
Just inside the clouds, the light levels quickly grew dim, but the purple light from the aether barrier provided illumination enough. The top layer of clouds was orange, composed largely of lightweight ammonia. As the ammonia gave way to heavier water vapor, the color changed from orange to yellow, from yellow to white, and from white to blue. Warm colors grew darker, until the world around them was shrouded in gloom.
“Shadow at three o’clock!”
That jagged triangle grew close, then shot away, like a boomerang. The Samidare rocked. The beam had hit home. But the impact was much softer than they’d been in space. Aether was thinner in the atmosphere, so the laser beam had less energy; interference from the aether flow in the storm weakened it still further. The storms of Jupiter were probably the least effective place in the entire solar system to use a laser beam.
The Samidare fired beams back, but the other ship was already hidden in the clouds again. She was sticking to her hit and away strategy. The weakened beams meant they weren’t going to be downed in a single hit, but the accumulated damage was still bad news.
To avoid the clouds, the Samidare continued its rapid descent. Rain and hail fell alongside it. Rain of water, ammonia, and sulfuric acid. In the gloomy blue clouds, the rain found friends, merging with them, but eventually the size of the drops stopped expanding. Instead, they vaporized. Boiling into gas, they flowed back upwards, becoming clouds again, a never-ending cycle.
The Samidare escaped the cycle, falling down, down, down... Until...
“The clouds have cleared!”
They found themselves in a calm as removed from the storm as possible. So open...! A clearing as far as the eye could see, lit by the lightning above. Bolts of lightning with all the force of atomic bombs struck around them by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, flickering like a broken fluorescent light.
This was hell. The Samidare was hovering above the surface of hell. A clear layer of hydrogen. Below them was a sea of liquid metallic hydrogen, far enough below that they could have stacked several Earths in the gap. If anyone on board was acrophobic, they’d have gone mad, but Akane’s mind was not so easily bested. A height several times the Earth was no more impressive than a height several times an ant.
Akane thought she heard that voice from this mind-bending landscape. The further into Jupiter they went, the clearer that voice from the edge of the world carried into her brain. The voice seemed filled with sorrow, a feeling as if her flesh was slowly melting away...
“There! Right above us!”
Sachii’s cry dragged Akane out of her reverie. The Black Swan had emerged from the clouds in the distance, wheeling like a bird of prey. The purple light of its aether barrier illuminated the rain around it like fireworks. Akane’s laryngeal sac shook, and a laser beam shot out of the ship’s aether amp. A column of light every bit as strong as the lightning impaled The Black Swan. Where the beam hit the barrier an explosion of light occurred. The shockwave of light rocked the Samidare. When the orchestra of light faded, The Black Swan was unharmed.
The Dark Seiyuu was good. Laser beams were weaker in the heavy atmosphere but surviving a bullseye from a Security Board ship amp was something else. She must have manipulated the flow of aether in an instant, dispersing the energy. They’d never shoot her down with beams like this. They’d need to use a weapon with some actual mass.
“Amamiya, does this ship have any missiles?”
“No missiles. It does have some escape pods!”
Escape pods? Those could be used in place of missiles, but with no explosives aboard...
Explosives... Explosives... Oh! She’d had a good idea.
“All seiyuu, assemble!” Akane yelled into the P.A. system.
Three minutes later all six surviving seiyuu were here. Their names were Kisara, Neshihiki, Teise, Inori, Midokawa, and Sanou. They were all in such frightful condition it was astounding they were still alive. Voir addiction had left them gaunt, as if all the liquid in them had been drained away, leaving nothing but skin and bones behind, their eyes bugged out like a deep sea fish caught on a line. As lifeless as their bodies looked, their laryngeal sacs were in perfect health. They were alive and kicking, sounding the aether around them and generating light. Voir was awful for your health but definitely great at extracting a seiyuu’s subliminal potential.
Akane injected all the remaining stock of Voir into the seiyuu, gave them their instructions, and loaded them onto the escape pods. Their directive was simple. Get as close to The Black Swan as they could, manipulate the aether, and fire laser beams as one, instantly and dramatically raising the heat and pressure. They were surrounded by hydrogen, highly pressurized by the immense weight of Jupiter’s atmosphere. If they concentrated even more heat and pressure, Akane was hoping they could cause a nuclear fusion reaction.
A seiyuu nuke.
Akane knew fusion was a high bar to meet. They needed at least 80 times the pressure at Jupiter’s core. But the strictly managed security board official seiyuu were far more powerful than civilian seiyuu. And they were all junkies injected with so much Voir it was about to kill them. Akane’s experience and gut instincts suggested they just might manage to output enough pressure to cause fusion.
Enough thoughts, action! The missiles with Kisara, Neshihiki, and Teise on board shot away from the Samidare, rocketing towards The Black Swan.
Neshihiki’s missile failed at ignition. It raised pressure and destroyed itself, nothing of any interest occurring. She must have lost her nerve. But Kisara and Teise pulled off their missions admirably. Hydrogen collided with hydrogen, reacting to each other, and pressure beyond the Coulomb force caused fusion, changing them to the more kinetically stable helium, expelling the excess energy outwards. Immediately, two miniature suns appeared in the sky above Jupiter. There was a wave of sound and light that reached even the Samidare some distance away.
“Did we get her?” Akane said, stabilizing the Samidare and searching the screen. The Black Swan was still intact. But it had clearly sustained damage. One wing was missing pieces.
“Nicely done. Keep it up.” The Dark Seiyuu’s voice came over a transmission. She seemed positively delighted to be attacked like this.
“Be ready. I’m about to board your ass and kill you with my own two hands.”
“Looking forward to it! But it seems like we have company. I’ll leave you two alone. We’ll meet again.”
The transmission cut out, and The Black Swan darted off to the sky.
“Wait!”
Akane moved to give chase, but a missile popped out of the clouds, exploding right next to the Samidare.
“Sachii, what’s going on?”
“I have no idea!”
As they reeled, a massive ship descended right in front of them. One three times the size of the Samidare. A long, thin airship-type ship, bristling with aether amps and railguns and missiles. A flashy logo and the ship’s name were drawn on the side.
Rise Detective Agency, Inc.
The Cruadín.