Chapter 4: Propellant Loading
Alnus Settlement, Alnus
While Schumer and Takagi talked, Carol and Greta were getting to know one another.
"My sister and I were orphaned at a young age," Greta explained. "For a while we served as maids in a household north of here. The family was rich and owned a lot of land, but despite the efforts of their parents, their children were more interested in war and fighting than books or politics. They could barely read by the time they finally went off for training, which was remarkable as the family owned a large library. Late at night, my sister and I would sneak into the library and use our master's reading lessons to learn how to read on our own. One day we were caught by the lady of the house, who was happy to see that her books were getting some use, and allowed us to borrow books to read at night."
"What kinds of books?"
"All kinds. Stories, records, speeches, theories and reports on natural philosophy and politics. I like natural philosophy-there's so much about the world to know, and so much to still find out."
"How did you wind up here?" Carol asked.
"Months ago, when the JSDF came through the Gate, they utterly destroyed the armies of five nations. The survivors and many mercenaries from these armies ransacked the countryside for a long time after that, until the Japanese ended them at Italica. Between the two, our lady's household was attacked. Everyone fled, and my sister and I were able to sneak into the Alnus settlement last month."
"When you say that you snuck in-"
The Japanese keep identification records for every resident, because they hope that it will help them prevent crimes and spying." She reached into a pocket on her skirt and pulled out a drivers-license-sized plastic photo ID card. In the picture, Greta looked almost comically confused, which made sense. The people of Falmart were far, far away from inventing digital cameras.
"If you came in without an ID, how did you get one?"
"The JSDF caught us, and an officer named Yanagida made us an offer-Teesa, my sister, would go to your side of the Gate for an interpreting job, and I would remain here with this card." She sighed. "One of us had to go, and she learned Japanese faster than I did. I haven't heard from her since."
Carol wondered if she should put in an inquiry with Mullan, and was about to turn to Foster and ask when Greta asked, "Are you a soldier?"
"Me?" Carol said. "No. I'm a scientist… I mean, I'm a nature philosopher."
"What do you study?"
Here we go. "I study the technique for throwing automatons outside the sky and making them fly to the planets."
Since Greta had mentioned an interest in astronomy, Carol had assumed that she would know about the planets. Despite this, she noticed the change on Greta's face from interest at "automatons" to shock at "sky" and finally incredulity at "planets." She might as well have said to an American, "I mine televisions from my ears to make pasta."
"How can that be possible?" Greta asked. "Surely anything you throw must come back down eventually. Or are you using magic to hold it up there?"
"No magic. There's a trick to it," Carol said. "Would you like to learn it?"
Greta nodded.
"Then let's start with the basics. For that, I'll need my equipment…"
As it turned out, there was a procedure to presenting at the auditorium, which allowed presenters to make their cases with a small fee. Even Carol, a foreigner as she was, was unable to secure a presentation slot without pay, or with priority.
That said, she was comfortable with the idea of waiting, having given plenty of presentations before and certain to give plenty of other presentations afterwards. It was a good thing, she decided, as she examined her prospective audience, as it gave her time to gauge the people watching for personal and academic backgrounds.
This time, she also had Greta and Takagi to lend a hand. "No elites today," Takagi said, glancing over those in attendance. "Decent number of demi-humans, which means a low income, low education, and debatable interest in academic topics."
"What would they know about?" Carol asked Greta. "Can I at least depend on them knowing archery and blacksmithing?"
She nodded, but said, "Surely the trick to flying beyond the sky isn't a giant bow and arrow."
"No, good guess though!"
The man on the stage ahead of them had been rambling about one topic for a solid fifteen minutes, and Carol had tuned him out initially, but now, as she anticipated her own performance, she asked Greta what the man was talking about.
"He's a follower of Hardy," Greta said. "He has been saying that the Men in Green bring doom upon themselves by interfering in Hardy's plan."
Carol had felt with plenty of fundamentalist nutjobs in her time, protesting or promoting everything under the sun. Conservatives decrying the use of NASA funding for Earth studies, Liberals demeaning the already-meager NASA budget in favor of diverting the funds to social services, religious advocates threatening over the NASA-supported theory of stellar/universal creation, and atheists damning NASA over religious lines delivered by on-duty astronauts. If the topic held public attention, then there would always be a group around to criticize it. "Is this common?" She asked.
"It has been more common since the incident with the Fire Dragon."
The scientist looked to Takagi. "What incident with a fire dragon?"
"Apparently, an Apostle of the goddess Hardy was responsible for awakening the Fire Dragon," Takagi explained in English. "Itami Youji lead an expedition to kill the monster. He succeeded, but the same Apostle tried to intervene by waking up two more, younger Fire Dragons. JSDF air and armor elements were in the area, obliterated these too, and sent the apostle fleeing in terror. We then dumped the Fire Dragon's head in front of the Imperial Capitol, to help illustrate the consequences of all-out war with us. While this led to the current civil war between Pina and Zorzal, it also led to a great deal of anger from Hardy supporters. Protests have been peaceful so far, but I can imagine that Zorzal or the Hardy worshippers would love it if this man started a riot."
"Can't you just throw him out?" Carol asked.
This time, it was Foster that answered, "Heh, no. You don't touch the religious guys. If we ever so much as breathed on an Imam in Iraq, the media and civilians would be up our asses and down our throats before anyone could get a word in. It sucks to hear, but it's better to let the guy yell."
She turned back to Greta. "How many people believe this stuff?"
The cat girl seemed surprised. "Everyone does. I pray every day that it does not come to pass."
Carol decided to back off the topic. No sense in getting involved with a religious argument. Besides, she had plenty of religious coworkers and their beliefs had yet to impede a mission or launch.
The man on the stage finished his speech and departed to some hushed conversations in the audience. Some of them, Carol suspected, were discussing the controversial speech. Others had likely noticed the group of foreigners and their boxes standing offstage. "Has the JSDF ever given a presentation here before?" She asked Takagi, and the interpreter shook her head.
As the scientist guided Greta in setting up the equipment, Takagi took center stage and addressed the audience. Carol damned her inability to fully absorb the language of the Special Region, but she knew what the Japanese woman was saying, as they had discussed it at length on the ride down.
"Hello everyone!" The interpreter would say, then, after introducing herself, "This is Carol Dawson, a scholar from the United States of America. She was invited here by the JSDF to help perform a natural philosophy study about the skies of Falmart. As a part of this study, she will be introducing a special tool that will be used to collect information about the skies."
Then, in Japanese, "Dr. Dawson, are you ready?"
Carol nodded and addressed the audience in her own Japanese, stopping periodically so that Takagi could catch up with her interpretation. "Hello everyone! Out of personal curiosity, how many of you have experience with bows and arrows?"
She raised a hand to demonstrate, unsure of hand-raising was part of the culture. Fortunately, a decent number of those in the audience followed suit.
"Excellent. I think that anyone who has used a bow and arrow will agree that the force that causes the arrow to fly is the tense bowstring pushing the arrow along, right?"
Bored nods. The bowstring threw the arrow, this was obvious.
"But what if there was another way to throw the arrow?" This time Carol presented a plastic dart. "For today's demonstration, this will be our first arrow."
She turned around and picked up her second prop, the air bladder, tube, and tripod. "This is something many of you should know about. It's a bellows, just like what you see at a blacksmith's." To demonstrate, she pointed the tube at her face and forcibly squeezed the air bladder. This caused a puff of wind to blow her hair back and drew a few chuckles from the crowd.
"Now, what if we could use a lot of air all at once to push the arrow? This is actually possible! Watch carefully." She placed the contraption back on the stage, setting the tube section so that it pointed straight upwards, then placing the plastic dart over the end.
Next she looked over at Schumer and said, "That's your cue!"
Schumer walked over to the end of the device and, once he was certain that Carol was safely out of the way, jumped with as much force as he could and landed with both feet on the air bladder.
The stomp-rocket worked as designed, and with a loud pop the escaping air hurled the plastic dart well over fifty feet into the air before it tilted over and landed on a nearby rooftop. The audience followed the object's flight with mild amusement and several chuckles, but Carol noted that they were paying attention. It was a good sign.
"Of course, you may be thinking to yourself that a bow must work better than this, so why bother? The answer is an interesting piece of technology from my world."
This time, she displayed to them a twelve-inch balsa wood model rocket, built from a cheap kit. For most of these people, she knew, this was the first rocket they had ever seen, and a limited display of the potential of the technology. "This is called a rocket," Carol explained. "It uses a kind of alchemy to super-compress air, then release it as a controlled explosion.
She turned and lowered the rocket onto the guide wire of the launching stand that she had set up during Takagi's speech. After taking a moment to connect the firing wires, she made her way over to the control box, where Greta was sitting, studying Carol's every word and each new item that she introduced. As far as Carol was aware, she'd set up every element correctly, and the armed light was lit. The only thing left to do was close the ignition circuit by pressing the launch button.
Except that, she knew, these model rocket launchers weren't exactly ICBMs like Midgetman. They weren't guaranteed to work, and she had been to plenty of model rocket demonstrations where the host had pressed the big red button, and the engine didn't fire. In English, she muttered to herself "please work," and pressed the firing key.
Nothing happened.
No, no, no, come on! She thought and jammed the button down, hard.
This had the desired effect. With a loud hissing jet of flame, the rocket leapt off the pad, going higher and higher until the exhaust plume gave out, and the rocket was nearly lost from view. High overhead, Carol knew, the model rocket motor had forced its way out of the nose cone, and the spent vehicle was on its way back down. Since it was a balsa wood rocket and under the drag power of multiple streamers, there was little chance of it injuring anyone on the way back down.
She quickly dropped her gaze back down to the audience. While the stomp-rocket had been a general miss, the model rocket with the solid fuel motor had gotten a far more powerful reaction from the audience. Some were standing in shock or surprise at the sound, others' mouths were agape at the sudden acceleration, and nearly all of them had their eyes turned towards the heavens to follow the rocket's descent.
Carol looked over at Greta, who had toppled over at the initial sound, but was now gleefully following the rocket before looking down and meeting her eyes. She knew the look on her face, the wide eyes, the excited grin, but she rarely saw it much outside of children. Somewhere between those cat-ears, the lightbulb has gone off, she thought. "And that's just one!" Carol exclaimed to her audience. "Would anyone like to see a bigger one?"
A few shouts of assent, which quickly picked up. Now more of them were standing, squinting and leaning forward to get a better look at the next rocket that Carol removed from her case. This one was even larger than the previous one, and where the first one had four fins around its base, this one had six, arranged in three pairs and stacked one on top of the other. After this one was set up, she turned to Greta and said, "You launch this one."
"B-but, I have no experience in this magic, how could I possibly—"
"That's the beauty of technology," Carol said, pointing to the launch button. "It's a twenty-first century design. Just press and go."
Greta gave an uncertain look and, feeling the eyes of the audience on her, looked down at the control box. The controls on the surface were labeled in a language that she didn't understand, but, as Carol had pointed out, there was only one button, and so she pressed it.
The second rocket shot off and into the sky and, just as it seemed to run out of fire to throw, there was a puff of smoke, the bottom of the rocket detached, and the second stage ignited, carrying the rocket even higher and further downrange.
More gasps of awe and amazement. "So let us take this a few imaginary steps further," Carol said, addressing her audience. "You will notice that the second rocket was bigger than the first, and flew further and faster. Much as a catapult is more powerful than a sling, the bigger the rocket you make, the further it can go… far enough, in fact, that a rocket that is big enough and goes fast enough can leave the sky behind it and go into the outer space."
It felt weird to say, "the outer space," like that, but it properly reflected the term's origin, and explained it in a way that the natives could understand. In the eager faces she could see the gears starting to turn as the possibilities presented themselves. "For this reason, it excites me to tell you that the United States Air Force will be assisting the Japanese Self Defense Force in launching a series of giant rockets that will travel into this outer-space, and use the height to study Falmart's air, weather, and the country below.
"If any of you have questions, I would be happy to answer them now."
A dozen hands went up in the audience. Carol selected a younger man first who said, "What kind of magic produces the explosion that throws the rocket? I have never seen anything like it before, even at festivals!"
Carol smiled. "Not magic at all...we call it chemistry, but you call it alchemy. We discovered that the right mixture of materials, when set aflame, burns strongly and powerfully enough to lift rockets into the sky. We call this fuel, because it's stuff that we burn, much like you would burn oils in an oil lamp."
"How big of a rocket will the JSDF and air force launch?" A large woman near the back asked.
"The biggest rocket we launched today came up to here on me," she said, pointing to a spot a few inches below her left hip. "The big rocket we will launch next week is about seven or eight times taller than I am. Thicker around the middle too, so it contains more fuel. The rockets we launched today... so I am about five and a half feet tall. Today's best rocket went up to about fifteen hundred feet. The big rocket will go more than two hundred times the distance of today's best rocket."
She could see them struggling with the math so, recalling the distance, asked Takagi for a rough translation for 2000km (though even this measurement was for the edge of space, not for the estimated apogee). Takagi's translation was, "About three times the distance from here to the Imperial city of Sadera."
To the people listening, this was still a mind-boggling distance, considering as most of them had never traveled much further than the nearby trade hub of Italica.
This time, an older man asked the question. "Won't piercing the heavens incur the wrath of Flare?"
This time, Carol looked to Greta for an explanation. "Flare is the god of the Sun," she explained simply.
Again with the Gods? She would need to be careful here, she realized. These people clearly held strong religious beliefs, and it would be important not to anger any of them. "Of course not," Carol said, trying her best to sound sincere and confident. "We take great care with our rockets and aspire not to anger anyone. In fact, the exact time that I have been given for launch will be when the sun is low in the sky, so we do not stand any chance of hitting it by accident."
The truth was that there was zero risk of hitting the SR's sun with a rocket, even if they aimed the rocket directly at it. Carol knew just how far away a planet needed to be to remain in the habitable zone of its host star, and that range was far, far, far beyond what Midgetman could reach. For that matter, Midgetman couldn't touch the Special Region's moon either.
A few other simple questions later, and Carol finished up by stating, "I plan on having this show every other day until the day of the big rocket launch, so be sure to tell your friends, neighbors, and employers about what you saw. I would be more than happy to explain the finer details of rockets to anyone that asks."
She finished with a formal bow to an eruption of applause, and they cleared off the stage. "Well, it wasn't exactly Hamilton on Broadway," she said to Schumer as they made their way back to the Humvee, "but I think it worked. The more the news gets around, the happier they'll be about the upcoming launch. Good going team, especially you, Takagi. And Greta, what did you think of your first rocket launch?"
The girl hadn't been paying attention, for she looked up at the scientist and said, "I also have a question about rockets."
"Ask away."
"Before, when you said that you fly automatons to the planets… are the planets far away?
"Yes."
"So you must have really, really, really big rockets to get them there, right?"
"Correct again.
"Big enough to put people on top?"
Carol raised an eyebrow. "Maybe. Why do you ask?"
Greta said, "The best way to learn something new is to experience it yourself," Greta replied. "And… and it would be nice if I could do something that my sister hasn't yet."
She grasped Carol's hand and continued. "I will do whatever it takes, learn whatever I need, to prove to my sister that I can compete on her level. She beat me in reading, in learning, even in Japanese… I want to learn about rockets and make them my own, Ms. Carol, so please, is it possible to take a rocket to the outer-space?"
The scientist hesitated, then said, "In our world, it's possible. On yours, we don't know just yet, and that's why the big rocket launches we have coming up are so important. They will let us know if we can do it in the future."
"I want to help, in any way I can!"
Carol allowed her an amused smile. "Then we have a lot to talk about, and let me tell you, it truly is one of the most exciting stories you'll ever hear."
Alnus FOB, Alnus
Later that evening, Takagi stepped into 1st Lt. Yanagida's office. Like most days, he was hunched over his desk, tracing out the positions of units based on new intel from the field. Seeing her glancing down at the map, Yanagida stated, "The situation has not changed much. Zorzal continues to operate out of Telta, and appears to be massing a force to counter us. Col. Kengun continues to drag the Italica government to victory… even if Pina isn't the best tactician, she is very cooperative when given instructions. On the other side of the coin, we still haven't made progress in getting the scholars at Rondell to declare for either side, and our long-range F4 sorties are still picking up that worrying surface signal from the Southern sea."
The bunny-girl at his side, Delilah, offered him a cup of tea and he waved it off. The entire relationship was eerie, Takagi reflected as she watched Yanagida sigh as the demihuman stroked the hair on his head with one hand, and placed the other on one of the officer's shoulders. No one could believe that Yanagida still kept her around, considering that the two had nearly murdered each other a few months prior, but in her drive to do better, Delilah had fully committed herself as an aid to Yanagida and the JSDF. Even if he did spurn her overt affection, the Lieutenant clearly valued the combat skill and regional knowledge that his attacker possessed, and had yet to complain about anything beyond the timing of her romantic overtures.
It was like Greta, in a way, which is what Takagi had come to report about. "Your instructions to professor Shirai were quite effective, and Carol has formed a fast connection to Greta La Sareteian."
"Has the connection turned up anything of substance?"
"Not yet, sir. It seems like Dr. Dawson is just as in the dark about the export program as most Americans are with Hakone. Regardless, it means that the subject is being brought up, and we can expect more responses on what The United States did with the population samples that we sent them."
"Very well. You are dismissed."
But Takagi did not move. "Sir," she said. "May I ask a question?"
"Make it a good one, Takagi-chan."
The use of the diminutive was not lost on the interpreter, but she pushed on anyway. "Sir, why are we investigating the Americans. Even with Hakone, aren't they our—"
"It is precisely because of Hakone that they deserve investigation," Yanagida pointed out. "First, Hakone is swept under the rug, then our government makes an offer to begin a space program while offering up Falmart's citizens to the United States for heavens-knows-what purpose? It is a complete reversal from where we stood at the time. I have a suspicion on what prompted this change in policy, and if I am correct in my assumptions then I will not intervene... but if America is involved for any other reason, then it is up to us to discover why."
The intelligence officer leaned across the desk and said, "Information is our specialty, Ms. Takagi. Dr. Dawson may be the sweetest American on Earth, but there will not be another Hakone. We will not be caught unprepared again, and we will most certainly treat their 'peaceful' space program with the skepticism it deserves until it is abundantly clear what the Americans desire from this place.
"Are we clear on the investigation now, Takagi-chan?"
The interpreter and combat intelligence agent snapped to attention, uttered a firm "Yokai." Roger.
"Dismissed."