The space whale swam through the aether sea. Each time it moved its tail, a rainbow of lights shone around it. A single spaceship followed behind it, firing laser beams after them. Akane and Sachii were on the space whale it was attacking. This was all because they’d carelessly responded to a transmission they received.
As they approached the Turbulent Sector and the vibrations increased, they realized they hadn’t named their ship, and got in an argument over which of them had the right to name it. After a furious row, they finally agreed to steal a page from classic literature and name it the Moby-Dick, at which point an aether transmission came in.
“Hello again! Are you ready to die?”
“You thought you could get away clean after rubbing our faces in the dirt? Well, you were wrong!”
It was the detective and her assistant they’d fought on Jupiter, Minerva and Nanase.
“I am exceedingly irate! Because of you, our agency ranks went down! I swear you will pay for that with your lives!”
“Woah, chasing us all the way out here? You people are craaaazy,” Akane said, oblivious to the fact that she was doing the exact same thing.
“Why, I never!” Nanase said, turning beet red. So much for her unflappable disposition. “Listen, we swore an oath to murder you! No matter what!”
“That’s right! We took out a loan to buy this ship, the Mistilteinn, just so we could kill you both!”
Unlike the larger Cruadín, the Mistilteinn was a slim little number. Like a flying fish, except the wings were three times the size. Where the Moby-Dick tried to eliminate eddies as much as possible, this design seemed to prioritize sending the eddies towards the tips of the wings to avoid impacting the main body. Multicolored glowing swirls were flowing off the tips of the wings in the ship’s wake.
“How’d you know this was us? The old lady rat us out?”
“Old lady? I know no old lady! We’re detectives, remember? We’re well aware the Free Seiyuu out here use space fish as ships. The rest was simple deduction! We knew you must be aboard a similar ship. The rest was just approaching them one by one and waiting for a transmission response! You’re idiots, so you responded immediately!”
If they’d ignored the aether transmission, they might have never known it was them. Unfortunately, Akane had answered out of habit.
“Shit. Amamiya! Beams! Can we fire any beams?”
“Nope! No aether amps.”
Even if Akane shook the aether at full power, without an aether amp to output it, laser beams weren’t an option.
“You hear that? They don’t even have any weapons!”
“Hmph. Then we can toy with them as long as we like!”
A barrage of laser beams shot out of the Mistilteinn. This close to the center of the Milky Way, the aether was thick, and unlike the bowels of Jupiter, the beams were quite powerful.
Violet light passed through the Moby-Dick. Literally passed through it. Moby-Dick’s physique allowed aether to pass right through it, and since the beams were just aether vibrations, they passed right through as well. As a result, the damage to the ship was minimal. But they definitely took damage; there was a nasty wound on the surface, and the interior filled with the smell of burning flesh.
“Quite a unique ship you have there! However! If we just shoot a whole lot of beams, I suspect you will eventually die!”
“We’re really smart, so we can figure these things out.”
The Mistilteinn continued to rain violet light down on the Moby-Dick. At this rate, Akane and Sachii’s lives were but a candle in the wind.
“Amamiya! Get the Moby-Dick behind them!”
The Moby-Dick bent its tail like a real whale. The aether resistance slowed it down enough that the Mistilteinn passed it. The Mistilteinn also spread its wings to stay within range.
“My, my! Did you think you could get away so easily?”
“There is no comprehending the thoughts of cockroaches.”
A hammer of light shot out of the Mistilteinn. But it flew off in entirely the wrong direction. Eddies created by the wings lay in the path of the beam, interfering with it. Like leaves in the North Wind, the beam was caught by the eddies and bent in random directions.
The Mistilteinn went up and down, trying to reposition itself, but the Moby-Dick followed suit. The Moby-Dick was the more mobile of the two ships.
“You think you have the advantage now? Take it from a true master detective! Even a poorly aimed cannon will eventually hit its mark!”
“Yeah, well that works for us, too!”
Akane sent aether vibrations into the Moby-Dick’s nerves. They were aimed at the optical nerves. Eyes were an organ that could catch and receive aether vibrations. That might mean they could do the opposite and transmit them as well. If nerves had properties similar to seiyuu transmitters, and if eyes could serve as replacement aether amps, then they could fire laser beams.
Blue light spilled out of the Moby-Dick’s eyes. The volume of it was visibly increasing, until the vibrations enveloped the entire ship. But rather than concentrate, the light scattered. This was less a beam than a bomb. The light split the eyeball, and the liquid inside spurted out.
“Big talk for such a disappointing result.”
“The mediocre rarely achieve the outcome they desire.”
The Mistilteinn unleashed a flurry of beams, trying to overwhelm them. Nearly all of them were scattered by the eddies, but one beam got stuck in an eddy, coming towards them. The eddy gave it a boost of speed, and it came flying at the Moby-Dick like a shuriken.
Akane tried to steer the Moby-Dick and dodge, but it wouldn’t budge. Had she overdone it and destroyed its nerves? The beam-charged whirlpool was almost on them. Akane desperately tried to make the Moby-Dick turn.
“Just move, damn you! I don’t care how! Just do something!”
As if it heard her, the ship suddenly rocked.
But not in the direction Akane had intended. The tail took a big, slow swing. The Moby-Dick had bucked its operator’s controls, moving on its own, and easily avoided the whirlpool. It seemed the Moby-Dick had free will once more. Akane had put too much pressure on it, destroyed the control device in its brain, and freed it from its bondage.
The Moby-Dick’s mouth opened. Inside were hundreds of fangs. Spaces whales were carnivores that hunted to live. Sometimes they took down prey far larger than themselves. With its natural instincts no longer repressed, the first thing it did was unleash the full force of its appetite on the nearest target — the Mistilteinn.
The Moby-Dick wheeled around the Mistilteinn, drawing closer; as if aware of the threat from the laser beams, it made aether waves with its tail, scattering beam after beam. Once it was close enough, it took a huge chomp out of the wings.
The delicate glass-like wings shattered into dust, as if hit with a hundred nailguns. With only one wing, the Mistilteinn began to spin, but a moment later that wing broke off and it regained its balance. Minerva and Nanase’s entire world fortune had gone down the drain. If they didn’t run now, they’d lose their lives, too.
Just before the whale’s fangs shredded the Mistilteinn’s body like scrap paper, a railgun fired an escape pod. It was a simple one, with no propulsion of its own, presumably to keep the weight down. There was no way that would ever make it to the Laminar Sector. Even cockroaches like them faced certain doom.
“Wow! This whale is amazing!” Akane said, pumping her fist. “Now we’ve just got to regain control. Any idea how, Amamiya?”
“None at all! They didn’t exactly give us an emergency manual.”
With no regard to its pilots’ intentions, the whale’s rampage continued. The moment it realized the Mistilteinn was inedible, it spat it out and began swimming rapidly away.
Thus far, they had simply ridden the aether flow, but now it was thrashing its tail up and down, using the aether compression to move in leaps and bounds across the flow. Naturally, this increased the resistance, and the ship rocked quite a lot.
“Where’s this whale going?”
“If it keeps heading this direction, the galactic center,” Akane shouted, scanning the instruments. “We’re going right into the maelstrom!”