Episode 133: The Morning After the War

“KEEP THE SOCKS ON, I BEG YOU!!”

Taro bolted upright in his seat, his scream echoing through the room. His hazy consciousness clawed its way back to reality, and he realized with a start that he was on his usual, familiar bridge.

“Exactly what kind of dream were you having?” Marl asked, looking at him with a mixture of pity and judgment. “Wake up, sleepyhead. We’re almost at Roma Station 1.”

Following Marl’s lead, Taro rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the primary viewscreen. Looming before them was the beating heart of the former Enzio Alliance Territory—the sprawling, massive Roma Multi-Connected Station.

The dead old man’s laboratory turned out to be nothing special. It was tucked away in a depressingly standard Industrial District within the station. Much like Katsushika, the area was a mechanical jungle, with heavy machinery and industrial components packed so tightly it felt like a forest of cold steel.

“Well, this looks like a giant pain in the ass,” Taro muttered.

The floor was currently a ghost town, but it was vast. A thorough search was going to be a soul-crushing time sink. A quick scan revealed four massive data-aggregation units; in any normal factory, having even one of those would have been considered overkill.

“Hey... nothing like that is going to happen again, right?” Marl asked, clutching the hem of Taro’s shirt. She looked genuinely spooked.

“Look, the BISHOP Control Device is disconnected, so we should be safe. Probably. Assuming that 'Great Mother' thing was actually related to BISHOP in the first place.”

Taro tried the handle of the machine control room, but it was locked tight. He took a tactical step back, watching as Phantom stepped forward. With a horrific, ear-piercing screech of rending metal, the assassin forced the door open with his bare hands.

“You know, if you just switch the control panel to the manual lever, even a civilian like you could open it,” Phantom quipped, brushing dust off his sleeves. “I am an operative, not a forklift.”

Taro offered a sheepish grin and stepped into the room that served as the factory’s brain. Normally, this place would be a hive of activity managed by BISHOP, but now it was just a Spartan room filled with dark displays.

“It’s no good,” Marl said after poking at the hardware for a few minutes. “Without BISHOP acting as a translator, this is all just gibberish to us.”

She turned to look at the ship's AI.

“Leave it to me, Miss Marl,” Koume said with a graceful bow. “I shall stream the data to the general terminals. You may view the results there.”

Koume extended a sleek cable from her wrist and plugged herself into the terminal. She stood perfectly still for a moment, her expression blank, before her eyebrows shot up. “Oh my.”

“What is it?” Taro asked.

“This is... peculiar. Several of the command sequences for these machine tools are written in a logic system entirely different from the standard BISHOP Assembly. Koume finds this to be a highly fascinating development.”

“Assembly... that’s the middleman software, right?” Taro racked his brain for his basic IT knowledge. “It turns BISHOP’s commands into... what was it? Machine Language? The ones and zeros the hardware actually understands?”

“AFFIRMATIVE, MR. TEIRO,” Koume’s voice chimed. “Hardware is fundamentally binary. BISHOP’s high-level commands are translated by the Assembly and then passed to the machine controls.”

“Okay, so what’s the big deal if it’s different?”

“It means, Mr. Teiro, that these machines were designed to receive instructions in a format that ignores the Galactic Standard entirely. It isn’t the whole floor, but roughly thirty percent of the machinery here follows this 'alien' logic. I have managed to decode a few strings. Shall we see what they do?”

Koume turned her gaze toward the massive observation window and began a low-volume digital mutter. The rest of the group followed her lead, staring out into the darkened factory floor.

“Oh, look. That crane is moving.”

A faint whir broke the deathly silence of the industrial tomb. One of the machines—a massive unit shaped like a walk-in bathtub—began to groan. Several hooks suspended from the ceiling started to retract their wires, pulling something heavy from the depths of the vat.

“...Good God,” Alan whispered.

Marl let out a sharp, horrified gasp. Bella didn’t bother with shock; she went straight to creative profanity, cursing out the dead mastermind to the empty air.

“That son of a bitch... what was he planning?”

The object being hoisted into the light was a nightmare made of scrap. It was a jagged, misshapen heap of industrial waste, compressed and welded together with a design so fundamentally wrong it made Taro’s stomach turn just looking at it.

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, a WIND.

For a while after the war ended, Taro worked like a man possessed, barely stopping to sleep.

The schedule was every bit as brutal as the wartime rush, but Taro found he preferred this kind of 'busy.' He didn't have to worry about a sudden hull breach venting his friends into space, and he didn't have to kill enemies who were just fighting for their own version of justice.

“Well, the financing looks solid. I’m just glad Sakura’s dad is a reasonable guy,” Taro sighed.

He had been negotiating a massive loan from Takasaki Shipbuilding. Because Takasaki was part of the EAP, they couldn't give him their full official backing, but they had promised a private loan that was basically the next best thing.

As for his relationship with Sakura, Taro had been blunt: I can't even think about that right now. Surprisingly, the old man hadn't pulled the plug on the money. The President of Takasaki had simply told him, “If you can’t think about it now, think about it later.” He clearly still wanted to marry his daughter off to Taro, but he wasn't using the loan as a leash. Sakura had thrown a tantrum, but that was par for the course.

“The Management Rights Auction is going great, too,” Marl said, grinning at her handheld terminal. “We’re looking at a massive windfall.”

They were in the Katsushika office. Usually, the place was a madhouse, but it was currently quiet during the lunch break.

“Democracy is truly a convenient tool, Mr. Teiro,” Koume observed. “It allows one to disperse responsibility across a crowd while simultaneously shaking them down for enormous sums of money. A truly magnificent system.”

“No, no, that’s... that’s not really the core philosophy of democracy, Koume. Or at least it shouldn't be.”

Taro had decided to auction off management shares of the new Alliance to various member corporations. Rising Sun kept the final veto power, making it more of a "Mayor System" like the one they used in Katsushika. The companies that bought in got a seat at the table and a voice in the assembly, which gave them a stake in the Alliance's success. For Taro, who had spent a long time dealing with the decentralized chaos of the TRB Union, this felt like home.

The result was a double win. Taro got the massive pile of liquid capital he needed to jumpstart the Alliance, and the member companies were suddenly incredibly motivated.

“The suggestions are already pouring in,” Marl said. “Everything from schedules for regular assembly meetings to concrete proposals for initial operations. It’s a huge relief.”

When a company drops that much cash on a seat, they want the investment to succeed, whether for profit or just for the bragging rights. For Rising Sun—who had been expecting a lot of post-war resentment over ceded territory—this corporate greed was a godsend.

“Some of these members are bigger than we are,” Taro noted, rubbing his neck. “We’ve got to make sure we keep a tight grip on the reins. By the way, how’s the investigation into the lab going?”

Koume stopped typing. “The intelligence department under Mr. Alan is still digging, but they’ve hit a wall. The sheer variety of different languages and Assemblies used in that facility is staggering. It will take a significant amount of time to produce a cohesive report.”

“Fair enough. But we need to be thorough. We still don't know how Enzio managed to field that many Electronic Warfare Craft. The answer has to be in that lab.”

“He’s right,” Marl agreed. “If we want to stop a second or third war from breaking out, we need to understand that tech. We might even need to loop the Empire in on this.”

“Yeah. We’ve got Lyza and Dean as bridges now. And after that Razor Metal business, they’ll probably be a lot more cooperative than before.”

Taro tossed his terminal onto the desk and stood up, stretching his back until it popped. He walked over to the large screen on the wall, scanning his own messy, handwritten notes about the future of Rising Sun.

“I guess things aren't getting quieter anytime soon,” he murmured.

“Is that a complaint?” Marl teased.

“Haha, hardly. Dr. Alsimov already took off to investigate the Empire’s early history. I’m expecting big things from him... Earth. The real Earth.”

In the center of the screen was a drawing Taro had made himself—a crude, blue sphere representing his home. A holographic projector caught the image, making the distorted blue star float in the air.

I don’t even know if I’m at the starting line yet, or if I’m staring at the finish line, Taro thought. Hell, I don't even know which direction I'm facing.

He turned back to look at the two women in the room.

“I’m going to need you both to stick with me until the very end. Don’t let me down.”

Marl and Koume exchanged a look, then turned back to him with smiles that clearly said: As if you had to ask.

Author’s Note: We are entering a new chapter, so the next update will be slightly delayed (likely about a week). I need a little extra time to hammer out the detailed plot points. I hope you’ll bear with me!