Chapter 10: Gear Up

Ichijima

Ellie blinked, once, twice, trying to process what she'd just heard. "You're Greta," she said.

"Yes."

"The Greta."

"That's right."

Ellie looked back to the two vessels one more time, and asked, "What's a 'spaceship'?"

Greta laughed. "Sorry, sorry, got carried away there. I forgot that you're not from Falmart, so you probably don't know, because the news never got to you. So let's start with the obvious question; what's beyond the sky?"

"Stars, I guess?"

"Good answer. Now, what's between here and the stars?"

"The moon?"

"And between us and the moon?"

Ellie started to say 'air,' but as her lips parted to say the word, her gut stopped her, and she thought back about her own attempts to get up to the Night Triangle. The higher she went, the more she had to beat her wings, and the harder it became to breathe. When she dropped back down, she'd feel a pressure on the inside of her ears...and sometimes inside her face if she was recovering from illness. Was it because there was less air the higher one went?

So if there was less air up there, and even less still the higher one went, then the stuff between the moon and the stars would be…

"Nothing," Ellie concluded. "Above the air there's nothing."

"Exactly," Greta said with a grin. "In Earth terms, that 'nothing' is called space, and there's a lot of it between us and the moon, and even more between the moon and the stars."

"So, when you say it's a space-ship," Ellie concluded, "it's a ship designed to fly above the air and into the Nothing?"

"Exactly!"

So there it was. She had wanted to know how to reach the place where the Night Triangle was, and there it sat, right in front of her. "How?" She asked.

Greta waved her over to one of the plane-like fliers. Up close, it seemed larger than it had looked from the edge of the hangar. "So with a normal plane, like a MagThree or an Efftoo, the vehicle takes air from out in front of it and pushes it behind it at a high speed. The higher you go, the harder it becomes to push the air. So you have two choices; you can either find a way to push little bits of air even faster, or you need to carry your own air with you. My spaceships do both."

She pointed to a set of funnel-like holes towards the front of each wing. "The air goes in here, and then the magic happens, both figuratively and literally. In a MagThree, you only have one magic ward pushing the air. My new design stacks wards, one behind the other, so as the air goes through each new ward, it goes even faster! I had a chance to see the Japanese open up the side of one of their fighter planes, and that's how jet engines seem to work—lots of stacked pieces designed to help speed up the air...except mine is faster, because the air goes straight through instead of bumping into compressors and turbines. The Americans call my kind of design a ramjet, and they say that it's very hard for them to use on Earth."

She seemed absolutely giddy at this last point, and Ellie thought she could understand why. So far, everything from Earth seemed to be leagues more advanced in utility and capability than its Falmart counterpart, but to claim that the Americans were impressed… that was an accomplishment.

"But what about when you're high enough that the air runs out?" Ellie asked.

"That's the tricky part." Greta said. "We carry air aboard the airplane, forced into a steel bottle by magic and held shut by a valve. When you hit the edge of the atmosphere, the magician stops trying to take air in through the air intakes, lets air out of the bottle… and explodes it."

Ellie was following along calmly and simply until they hit the last two words, at which point she stopped and did a double-take. "Wait, what?"

"So once you're above the thicker air, you need a way to keep up your speed. The easiest way is to take air that you're already carrying, explode it, and ride the shock energy from that. When Earth countries do it, they combine a starting fuel like kerosene or hydrogen with liquid oxygen… you don't need to know what those words mean, just know that when you put them together and light a spark, they tend to want to explode. Since we don't have the technology to make an engine that controls the explosion, and we don't have a safe way to make or store liquid oxygen, we found a way to rig Lelei La Leleina's research into multi-layered explosion spells into something that works the same way with stored air."

The end result was hard for her to picture. Despite her best effort, Ellie could feel the incredulity leaking onto her face.

"I know what you're thinking," Greta said, seemingly not bothered, "Riding into space on an explosion sounds ridiculous, but if I hadn't already done it myself on an American rocket, I wouldn't have been willing to consider it for these ships. I've had a chance to test it up at 190-thousand feet so far, and it's a bumpy ride, but it does work."

"How far is a foot?"

Greta showed her. "It's a good start, but it's not space. The official start for that is up at 330-thousand feet."

"It's amazing that you can go as high as you've gone," Ellie admitted. "But what if you want to change the way you're pointing? The… what were the names, Rudder? Elevator? They won't work if there's no air."

Greta pointed back to the front of the plane. "More compressed air nozzles in the nose, which can be controlled by the pilot. Their force is not as strong as the engines in the back, but it is enough to reorient the spacecraft. The proper name for this is Reaction Control System."

"It sounds complicated."

"It's really not! Here, let me show you the cockpit."

This time they passed one of the landing gear back to the edge of the spacecraft. "Wait here, I'll get a ladder," Greta said, and ran off.

As Ellie watched her go, she shook her head. Never in her life had she seen someone so wrapped up in a project. She had heard stories of sages and other learned men getting deep into books or knowledge quests for days on end, but to actually witness such an obsession put Ellie slightly on edge. Was this woman fully sane? What would her reaction be to Ellie's newfound aversion to flying in aircraft?

Greta returned trailing a ladder and frame on wheels. After pulling it up next to the craft, Greta practically sprang up the stairs and bade Ellie to follow.

From the top of the ladder, Ellie could see down into the control compartment of the spacecraft. Unlike a MagThree, it was completely enclosed, and was accessed by a hatch that opened inward.

The insides were also significantly more cramped than a MagThree, and only had room for a crew of two. From here, Greta pointed to and explained the controls for the RCS system, but Ellie wasn't paying much attention. She was looking forward towards the nose of the spacecraft. It lacked the big windows like the Osprey that had brought her to the island, or even the shining bubble-like canopy of the F-2. Instead of window panes, this aircraft had a bunch of small circles, like portholes, dotting the front. The reason for this was obvious—Falmart simply didn't have the technology to male large, perfect glass panes designed for exploring places beyond the sky, so these smaller blocks of thick glass would have to do.

Anyone flying this thing would be doing it half-blind.

"Oh, I see you noticed," Greta said.

"Hmm?"

Greta pointed to a box towards the front of the vehicle that was decidedly not from their world. Emblazoned on the side, two hyphenated words, and a picture of some small, black and white creature. On top of the box was a handful of numbered dials. "This is from our Earth sponsor, Lockheed-Martin," Greta explained. "They give us funds that we can use for buying materials in Falmart, and in exchange we give them flight information that's recorded by that box. The Americans are very interested in magic-based propulsion, but are limited in how much they can do at home because the best magic experts are all here, on this island."

Ellie looked back at the rest of the aircraft again. With this much metal, she had thought that the metal must have come from Earth, but what Greta just said contradicted that. "But the rest of this was created here?" She asked.

"Of course!" Greta said. "And while blacksmithing is nowhere near as good as Earth metalworking, we found a few clever cheats that let us pass some major hurdles. For example, the metal you're standing on?"

Ellie nodded, but then, taking a closer look at it, noticed an odd sort of glow to it. "Steel?"

"It's actually elven steel," Greta explained. "A combination of material choices and enchantment gives us something that's tough, but really light. The Americans and Japanese use a special metal called Titanium in their spaceships, but refused to tell me or my coworkers the secret of how to refine it. Compare to the metal bottles holding the high-pressure air—those are dwarven-made. A bit heavier, but much more rugged. And then there's my favorite example...spacecraft returning from space require a shield against air that heats up as they push through it at high speeds. This is called a "Thermal Protection System. On American spacecraft, they use special materials that require chemicals that are still far, far beyond what our alchemists have been able to puzzle out, but we found a different way. Take another look at the belly of the spacecraft."

Ellie descended to the floor of the hangar once more and looked up at the bottom of the spacecraft again. From a distance, she had assumed that the bottom of each was red or blue because they had been painted that way, but a closer inspection revealed the truth.

"Are those...scales?"

"They sure are!" Greta joined her on the ground. "One set was taken from the hide of the fire dragon Itami slew in the Tuba Mountains, and the other was from the Ice Dragon that Kamikoda shot down over Alnus. While they won't protect you from canon fire, giant dragon scales have great shock resistance, and are designed to resist the air friction of the beast forcing itself through the air at high speeds. It probably wouldn't be enough protection for an orbital reentry, but for a suborbital reentry, at a fraction of the speed of an orbital one, it should suit us just fine."

So the rumors were true. The Earth people were capable of taking down giant beasts. She wondered if Greta had Armored Whale pieces hidden somewhere in her spacecraft too.

"And the best part," Greta said, with the biggest grin of all. "The Japanese recommended you to pilot it!"

Ellie's reply was immediate. "No."

A flash of panic passed over Greta's face before she calmed herself and repeated, "No?"

"I, uh, had a bad experience with the last plane I flew, and the American bending-wing Osprey… I'll help you however I can, but I can't fly your plane."

Ellie thought that Greta would be angry with her. When she gave similar excuses to Andromache, her mentor usually was, but that wasn't how Greta responded. Instead, the woman stepped back over to her aircraft and placed a hand on the landing gear. This wasn't a wheel like the ones on the bottom of the MagThree, but an enormous skid on a hinge that looked like it could be folded up against the airframe. She looked up at it, at its varying complexities and careful, if crude design, and opened her mouth to speak. When she did, her voice wavered slightly. "But you can help me with flight dynamics, right? Recovering from unstable flight and stunt flying?"

"I can do that."

Greta's mood improved, perhaps a little too quickly. "Good!" she said. "That's—that's good! I can work with that! You wait there while I grab my flight profile charts, and we can start talking today!"

As Ellie watched her dash to the other side of the hangar, she couldn't help but feel like something was off about Greta's whole response. I expected her to be angry, she thought. She should have been angry, but she wasn't. She's…

At that moment, she felt a cold chill down her back, and noticed that the hangar seemed to darken a little, like the light from the door was being blocked.

Ellie glanced over her shoulder. There, in the doorway, she spotted a young girl in a dark black and red dress, leaning against a weapon easily twice her size. She had been watching Greta, but as she noticed Ellie's attention on her, the girl's lips curled into a sinister smile.

It took a moment for Ellie to figure out who she was staring at, but ultimately she remembered. Giselle was one of two Apostles on the island. Therefore, this…

It dawned on her what that smile meant.

"Wait!" Ellie called out to her. "Why are you here? What do you want with me? What do you want with Greta?"

The girl laughed, a cold, cruel chuckle, and stepped away from the doorway. Ellie ran after her, but by the time that she reached the doorway and looked around, Rory Mercury was gone.

The Council Building, Rondel

Years ago, Flat had posed Itami with a difficult question. "If elves don't exist on Earth, how could people from Earth have possibly known what elves were before the arrival of the Gate?"

In response, Itami had provided him with a wide selection of book titles, in English and Japanese, that made up the core of Earth-elf lore (high fantasy, apparently, was unrealistic enough that the halt on Earth information allowed a few key titles to go through). While much of the depictions of elves written by Tolkien, Paolini, and Gygax/Ameson were surprisingly on point, there were a number of ideas that were not.

The top incorrect generalization was that Elves were good at silent motion and effective spying. While this may have been true for elves living out in nature, for Flat, who had spent most of his life in a city, it was patently false. Arpeggio had often joked after that about how much of a klutz he was, "always dropping things, some elf you are…" or would sneak up on him for her own amusement.

Therefore, Flat was painfully aware of his own deficiencies as he slipped up the servants' stairs and ducked into the office of his department head. Tarinium was out, which was good, and it allowed him to open the door by a thin crack—just enough to see out into the hall and in the direction of Chairman Delsus' office.

This particular occasion was special, as the Chairman's secretary had informed Flat that a block of time had been reserved, and that no visitors or callers were to be permitted. For Delsus, as the leader of a country at war, this seemed highly suspicious, and Flat hoped that whatever it was, it would be enough to help the Japanese end the war.

No one had gone in or out of the office for some time, so when Flat saw one of the Rondel Guardsmen coming up the hallway, followed by a second figure, he opened the door a hair further, just enough to get a better view into the gloomy hallway.

The second person was Doctor Nguyen.

Flat's mind exploded with questions. What could the Earth doctor possibly want from the Chairman? Alternately, with Saderan forces still over a week away, what did Delsus gain by inviting him over now?

The guard admitted Nguyen into the office, then, apparently on order, retreated back down the corridor. Once he was gone, Flat slipped out of Tarinium's office and moved across the hall, so that he was almost next to the door.

Inside, the two were just finishing up pleasantries. "...must try one of these Durian fruits at some point," Delsus concluded. "And now to business, you said that Japan operated this scrying device… radar you called it?"

Flat's eyes widened. He knew that Nguyen was from neither Japan nor America. Was his country meaning to form an alliance with Rondel?

"Scrying is an interesting way of putting it," Nguyen explained. "It's… a machine that uses an energy wave to find the position of objects in the air. You know how light from the sun can be reflected off of a mirror? This form of energy reflects off of airplanes, helicopters, flocks of birds… anything big enough, really, and then to a machine that shows you where the flying object is. Part of the reason why your MagThrees were spotted and destroyed at Italica was because Japan was able to spot them using radar arrays at their airstrip and aboard their F-2 fighter plane. As long as the Japanese have this device, your planes stand no chance."

A pause, then Delsus replied, "So these energy waves… they can be deflected?"

"In theory. The Americans have airplanes built with special materials that either absorb radar energy or bounce it away in a direction other than the enemy radar receiver, but I'm a doctor, I don't know how to build those. I do know that light is an electromagnetic wave, and if your magicians can manipulate light, then they should be either to deflect or jam radar."

The discussion was insane, and Flat wanted to run back to Shirai then and there to tell him the news. A means of defeating Japanese targeting systems was being leaked to Rondel? This had to be stopped!

Yet, he did not move, for one thing still bothered him. Fortunately, Delsus voiced Flat's thoughts aloud. "And in exchange, your demands haven't changed?"

"My demands are the same," Nguyen said. "I know you're in contact with him and I want to ask him questions."

The pause was longer this time. "Contact is one thing, but to run a channel is… draining."

"Can someone else do it?"

"No… not in Rondel, at least. You would need to travel to Auxthulpeka, thousands of miles from here. Just a moment."

Flat heard a mumbling, and the more carefully he focused, the rhythm of an incantation finally resolved itself.

He began to notice a subtle change in the air, almost a kind of buzz that reverberated in his chest and guts. It wasn't his own nervousness—no, that was cold. This was hot, like the engine of an Earth machine—like anger.

And then, a voice. At first, Flat thought that it was the Chairman's but it was altered in pitch. Channeling, he had said. Was it a spirit of some kind? "Speak, human," it said.

"I heard that you seek vengeance against the Americans and Japanese," Nguyen said. "I want in."

The response was cold, cruel laughter. "Your nation sent you with an offer?"

Nguyen snorted. "I don't speak for the Vietnamese National Assembly, the Party, or President Hoang. They're content to bend over for the Americans and Chinese, whichever is convenient on a given day. No, I'm speaking for myself."

"Hmmm…" Flat waited, his heart in his throat, as the voice continued, "The owner of this body came to me because their cousin was shamed by an American scientist and then executed. Why are you here?"

"I became a doctor because I saw the effects of the American and Chinese wars on my country, and thought that I could do something to help people, but years of touring Africa, the Middle East, and now here… it has made it very clear that self-destruction seems to be an ingrained part of the human experience. The only way to save everyone, I am convinced, is to render that destruction impossible."

"If such a thing is impossible, why would you be so foolish as to waste my time with it?"

"It can't be removed," Nguyen said. "But it can be rendered infeasible. Countries prevented major wars in the past through nuclear threats, but with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and rocket technology, those threats are no longer enough. The only way to prevent mass slaughter in the future is to render humans so durable to destruction so that warfare becomes meaningless. Such a method exists here in the Special Region, and the only people who know how it works are beings like you.

"What do I want?" Nguyen asked. "I want you to tell me the secret of Apostle regeneration, and how it ties to ascension to godhood. Isn't that your area of expertise, Palapon?"

Flat's jaw dropped. Palapon, Falmart's god of Revenge, was behind all of this? Fighting against Rondel was one thing, but an actual god? The Saderans stood no chance!

Harsher still, the American threat from seven years ago resurfaced in his head. Interfere with the affairs of humanity again, and we will burn you—

"But first," Palapon said, "Shouldn't you do something about that obnoxious elf listening outside?"

He needed no further cue. Flat ran for his life.