“Onward to the realm beyond the solar system! Full speed ahead!”
The Samidare began to move. The reflection of it was uncannily clear. Behind it lay a crystal ball containing the entire Milky Way.
As the reflection grew close, the crystal ball grew larger. The distortion began correcting itself, growing closer to the real appearance.
When the real ship and its reflection hit, the crystal ball filling their field of vision suddenly reversed itself. As if the ball was absorbing their world, the convex surface of the ball came at them, and flattened out.
The dimly lit ship interior began glowing with a mystic blue light. The sounds the ship produced grew much more powerful, and higher-pitched. High-energy light radiated from the light fixtures, and a strange heat unlike anything they’d ever felt before enveloped their skin.
They were outside the solar system.
“Wow! I’ve never been interstellar before!”
Side-eying Sachii’s dance of joy, Akane checked the beacon. Their target was headed towards the galaxy center, into the Turbulent Sector.
“Right! Turbulence, here we come!”
Akane steered the ship into the aether flow, sending them hurtling into the center of the Milky Way.
But the Samidare was an interplanetary ship, and definitely not up to the task of reaching the galaxy center. It was comparatively fine in the Laminar zones, but when they reached the Critical region the seiyuu transistor and aether amps immediately began breaking down. They were damaged by minute aether eddies, most likely. A ship built to navigate the gentle aether flows inside the solar system simply couldn’t handle them.
That’s how the two of them had ended up drifting. For a while they were still drifting towards the location the beacon showed, but now they were going the wrong way. There was nothing to do all day except eat human flesh. She regretted not stocking up on emergency rations, but with the seiyuu police hot on their heels, that hadn’t been an option.
“Ohh... Senpai, there’s a fish!” Sachii whispered.
Akane ignored her. She was most likely just so sushi-deprived she was seeing things.
“I mean it! Look, on the screen!”
She was right. There was a streamlined shadow on the screen, and it was getting larger. It looked like a fish, but the body construction wasn’t symmetrical bilaterally, but radially, centered around the axials connecting the head and tail. The head was divided into ten points like a flower or star, and it had a giant mouth covered in teeth. It had four large eyes, and these were covered by so many smaller eyes they completely buried the head.
It was a space fish. All sorts of creatures lived in the aether flows of the Milky Way, and their distribution was set by the Reynolds numbers. In the calm, low-energy environments of the Laminar sector were forests of giant but not terribly mobile space trees, and space plankton that moved around via cilia and flagella. Closer to the Turbulent sector, as the environment grew dangerously high-energy, you got space fish with enough mobility to avoid being caught in the eddies.
“Let’s catch it! And make sushi out of it!” Sachii yelped.
Space fish just looked sort of like Earth fish, but they were totally different animals. And with their aether amps broken, they lacked the means to kill the fish.
“Fish! I’m gonna eat you up! Eeeeek!”
Sachii suddenly jumped and threw her arms around Akane. The space fish had opened its mouth. It split into four pieces, looking less like a mouth and more like the tentacles on an octopus or squid. As it approached, they began to get a sense of its size. It was big. Like ten times the size of the Samidare. It was coming right towards them, mouth open wide.
“Well, now we’re going to be its dinner! Any ideas, Amamiya?”
“Don’t ask me! I got nothing!”
With their aether amps non-functional, they couldn’t fry it, eat it, or do anything to it. They just watched as the Samidare disappeared into the space fish’s maw and descended into its belly. The screen showed walls of red flesh, but this soon gave way to darkness. The ship rocked for a while but then seemed like it drifted to a stop somewhere stable.
“Well, that seems to have worked out. Let’s go, Senpai!” Sachii said, happily heading towards the hatch.
“Uh... To do what?”
“Get outside and bring home some fish meat!”
“Wait, at least put on a space suit! What if you fill the ship with poison?”
“Don’t worry! It looks like it’s safe outside.”
Certainly, the computer’s analysis showed the outside air was 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. Same as Earth’s atmosphere.
“Well, good. Hang on, do you have anything sharp?”
Her pocketknife seemed hardly up to the task. They searched the ship and found a fire axe. She gave it a little swing and liked the way it felt.
“Right, open up!”
They opened the hatch and took a few cautious steps out. It was warm, damp, and dark. Listening closely, Akane felt like she could hear the blood pumping through the fish’s veins. She shone a lamp around, and found a wall of flesh, sticky and glistening.
“All the fish we can eat!”
Sachii grabbed the axe from Akane and swung wildly. Maybe the muscle was really hard, or the axe was really crap, but she barely scratched it. The flesh did darken, like the internal bleeding that occurs after a blunt impact.
In the face of this potential sushi, they’d completely forgotten themselves. So they failed to notice the shadow approaching from behind.
“Wazzup!?” the shadow yelled, brightly. It slapped them both on the back.
“Aiiiieee!”
They quickly turned the lamp around and found an old woman with an eyepatch over one eye, and silver hair down to her waist. On her head was a skull, the jaw removed, worn like a helmet. This was somewhat intimidating, but her eye was glittering like a laid-back girl pranking a friend.
“What are you!?” Akane said, snatching the axe from Sachii, and holding it ready.
“Hello! I’m a Free Seiyuu! Suzuka Himori! Nice to meet you both.”
A Free Seiyuu. The name for the seiyuu that had escaped into the Turbulent and Critical Sectors after leaving the solar system during the War of Seiyuu Independence.
“Whaat? The real Suzuka-san!? Um, um... I’m Sachii Amamiya, with Holy Cosmos! It’s an honor to meet you!”
Sachii held out a hand, and Suzuka enthusiastically shook it.
“Seems like you were drifting,” Suzuka said, with concern. “Where were you going in that ship? You accidentally wander into the Critical Sector?”
“No, no, the opposite! We’re heading to the Turbulent Sector to kill the shit out of someone!” Sachii said, maybe a bit too honestly. That was really information that should be kept on the down low.
But veterans of the War for Seiyuu Independence were clearly not fussed by these things.
“Oh? Such youthful vigor. But that ship would be scrap the moment it hit the Turbulent Sector.”
“More importantly,” Akane cut in. “Yo, what is this fish? You live in it?”
“Oh, get a load of this! This here fish? It’s actually my ship!”
“Your ship? No way! I can see finding a way to live inside it, but actually flying the thing? Never.”
“I can totally fly it! Space fish nerves work like seiyuu transistors, amplifying aether vibrations. So if you just vibrate aether through the brain, you can change which way it’s going. Little brain surgery here, implant some control devices, and bam. You got yourself a ship. I’m a pretty good surgeon, you know.”