“Um, Senpai, we only have another week of food,” said Sachii, chewing some cartilage. Once stripped of all flesh, the bone was flung against the wall.
“Well, yeah. It ain’t an infinite supply.”
Akane threw her bone as well. The pile of bones was beginning to smell. Over the last week, the mold had take over, oozing a black fluid. Maggots had shown up from god knows where. The Samidare interior was decaying. Only Akane and Sachii were on board, and neither knew how to clean. The rise of entropy showed no bounds. The floor was invisible beneath piles of discarded clothing and ration bags that didn’t make it to the garbage can. Only the studio had gravity control, which maintained some semblance of order. The gravity-free sections of the ship were so filled with dust just stepping into them was enough to cause bronchitis.
Akane tore into her meat. It was not particularly flavorful, but the texture was somewhere between beef and chicken. The lump of meat she was working on had two eyes and a mouth.
After a month of drifting in the Samidare, they’d started sustaining themselves by eating the bodies of the director, staff, and seiyuu preserved in the freezer. Not wanting to deal with any refusals, Akane had told Sachii it was pork, and chopped it up into smaller pieces. You’d think the shape of the bones would be a dead giveaway, but Sachii never complained. Either she was a real idiot or had figured it out and elected not to say anything. It didn’t matter which.
“What’ll we do once we run out of food?” Sachii was using the bones to make a sort of caveman house. It was her way of killing time.
“I’ll just have to eat you.”
“So I’m just so cute you want to eat me up?”
Akane sprawled out on the floor, looking at the screen. Outside the Samidare was some space vegetation three times the size of the ship. It seemed to draw energy from the rotation gained from the aether flow; it had wings arranged like the propellers on a wind turbine, and the tips of each wing had more turbines growing from them. From the center rose a flagellum in a bacteria-like spiral, leaning the body in a direction it could rotate effectively. It seemed to be aiming for the whirls the Samidare generated. It had been following them the last few weeks but seemed harmless, so they’d let it be.
“Or we could eat that,” Akane said, pointing at the space plant. She thought it was a genius idea, but Sachii seemed unenthused.
“Ew, it looks so gross. Is it even edible? And going outside to harvest it would be so haaaard. And dangerous.”
“Yeah, maybe... dunno if I can be bothered.”
Akane flopped back down on the floor. They’d been holed up in this ship so long she’d grown super lazy.
There was nothing to do. Nothing but sleep. Sleeping was easy. Just close your eyes and stop thinking. But since she couldn’t sleep all the time, Akane thought about the past. About what had happened a month ago, after they’d escaped Jupiter.
“We’re out of the atmosphere! In a stable orbit!”
Using the overwhelming power the helium seiyuu had given her, the Samidare escaped the great red spot and made it to orbit around Jupiter.
But the price she paid was high — exhaustion beyond comprehension. It was like all her transplanted laryngeal sacs had turned into bowling balls, leaving all her muscles throbbing.
“I’m bushed. Gonna sleep. You take over gravity control.”
It was all she could do to drop these instructions on Sachii. Akane collapsed on the floor of the studio and slept like she was dead. When she awoke from this dreamless slumber, she found herself lying on a couch with a blanket over her. Sachii must have carried her here.
“Oh, Senpai! You’re awake!” Sachii said, beaming. “Maaan, flying this on my own is haaard! I did manage to move us to Europa, but I’m scared to try landing! Heeelp.”
Europa was the Jupiter system’s main town. It was a moon covered in thick ice, with a giant sea under that ice. The endless supply of water from that sea kept people alive throughout the Jupiter system.
“Good point. I’m starving after all that sleep! Let’s hit up Pwyll City and get some sushi.”
“Yes! It’s been way too long since we had a date.”
Pwyll City was a metropolis built in the heart of the largest crater on Europa, Pwyll Crater. Normally the surface of Europa was covered in ice as dense as any boulder, anywhere from ten to a hundred kilometers thick, but the ice was thin at the center of the crater, as little as five kilometers deep. The city was shaped like a cone with the pointy bit on the bottom, buried deep in the ice. The sheer weight of it melted the ice, moving it slowly downwards, but after it sank a certain distance it caught its balance and lay still. Thanks to the sea below, they had plenty of water for their farms and aquaculture projects; their sushi was said to be every bit as good as Earth’s, if not better. Now that the Earth had blown up, they were definitely the best in the solar system.
The Samidare touched down in Pwyll City. The entire top layer of the city was a spaceport, and there was a constant stream of ships coming and going. The destruction of Earth had repercussions even all the way out here, and transit was a mess. They’d been worried they’d get caught by customs in the airport, but they needn’t have worried; Jupiter law enforcement was all civilian-run.
“Sushi, sushi, I love sushi!♪” Sachii sang the whole way to the restaurant.
They’d been living on preserved rations for a while, so she was excited.
They ran quickly through the mainstays — salmon, ikura, mackerel, and tuna. Then Akane checked the beacon. The Black Swan, with the Dark Seiyuu on board, had accelerated rapidly, escaping the Jupiter system, heading not for Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. Her path was leading her out of the solar system entirely.
“She’s gonna ditch the solar system!” Akane said, standing up. “We’d better go!”
“Nah, Senpai! You’re worrying about nothing,” said Sachii, waving her down. “First of all, leaving the solar system in a ship not designed for interstellar travel is way too dangerous. The force of the aether gets crazy out there. We’d have to hit up a shipyard and get some work done first.”
“That would take ages! Let’s just hijack a better one.”
“Not many interstellar ships round Jupiter. Gotta get further out before you see many of those.”
As Sachii talked, she put her cheek against Akane’s chest, and took a selfie. Akane looked down at her screen and saw her posting to social media. She captioned the selfie, “#pwyllcitylife.”
She had way more followers than Akane’s account. She wasn’t super popular for nothing. Akane checked her own account, but it had been frozen after the hijacking.
“Don’t check in a few days and the number of replies gets craaazy.” Sachii scrolled through them a bit. There was everything from dumbasses going, “I heard the Earth blew up. Are you OK?” to people screaming, “Is it true Akane-san hijacked a ship!?”
“You’re not gonna respond?”
“No way I could respond to all of ‘em.”
“Too popular to care, are you?”
“Ohhh, I’m not that popular! You’re making me blush, Senpai!”