Episode 208

"Evidence... evidence... honestly, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced we’re totally screwed on that front."

Taro groaned, sprawled across the bridge of the High-speed Ship with his legs kicked up over the back of the seat. The bridge was a glorified walk-in closet—barely three meters square—crammed with Taro, Koume, and Marl. All three of them were currently rotting with boredom as they killed time on the way to their destination.

"We’re talking about the connection between The Facility and the Mercenaries, right? Unless they’re grade-A morons, they’ve probably scrubbed every last trace. I mean, if even Alan and Phantom can’t sniff anything out, you know they’ve been pathologically thorough."

Marl spoke while shifting restlessly, her body clearly at war with the unfamiliar, uncomfortable seat. Taro offered a sympathetic, "Yeah, probably," but he wasn't ready to throw in the towel just yet.

"Pardon the intrusion, Mr. Teiro. You keep throwing the word 'evidence' around like a frisbee, but the concept is notoriously slippery. Just how much 'proof' does Gigantech Corp actually require before they're willing to pull the trigger?"

Koume, busy piloting from the front seat, craned her neck all the way around to look at them.

"Eh, they said anything counts as long as there’s a solid link. Looking at the data, there’s no way some random civilians just happened to be hanging out in that sector. Even if we can just prove the Mercenaries were looking the other way, that’s enough. Apparently, between their corporate status and whatever else, it’s plenty of justification to declare war. Seriously, though, isn't Gigantech Corp a little too eager for a scrap?"

Taro ran through the fine print of the agreements they’d hammered out after the meeting. Marl tapped her index finger against her cheek, looking thoughtful.

"I get that Enigma is a big deal, and I get why Gigantech Corp wants it. But is it really enough to make them this aggressive? They haven't gone to war with another company in over a decade. You’d think the sheer amount of red tape and overhead for starting a war would be a nightmare."

"Right? That’s what I’m saying. I did some digging before the meeting, and honestly, it looked like a total long shot. They usually have a 'don't poke the bear' policy when it comes to open conflict."

Marl was right. The last time Gigantech Corp had actually gone to war was twelve years ago. Their target had been a securities firm caught red-handed in a massive, illegal exchange rate manipulation scheme. By the time the Post-war Reparations were settled, Gigantech had cleared out the firm's entire board of directors and replaced them with their own staff. The astronomical losses from the manipulation were currently being paid back via a loan repayment plan scheduled to last for the next 288 years.

"I heard they've softened up, but they still have more regular employees than our entire Alliance has people. It’s what, four hundred million now? A small company would go bankrupt just from one of their executives sneezing in their direction."

Marl shuddered, likely imagining Rising Sun as the target of one of those corporate sneezes.

"Four hundred million... that’s such a stupidly high number I can’t even wrap my head around it. The Mercenaries have 1.2 million, right? So Gigantech is four hundred times bigger than them, and twenty thousand times bigger than us. What the hell is 'twenty thousand times'? I can’t even be bothered to feel competitive at that scale."

Taro, being a man with at least a shred of petty pride, usually liked to aim for the top, but even he wasn't delusional enough to think he could bridge a gap that wide.

"I figure if we have a five-hundred-year run of perfect luck while every other company in the galaxy gets hit by cosmic lightning, maybe by the time we hit the 10th Generation Ichijo, we’ll be in the running."

"Oh, please. I’m still not convinced we’ll even make it to a second generation," Marl quipped.

"Don’t say that! Don’t you dare say that!"

Taro clapped his hands over his ears and writhed in mock agony. The sudden movement sent him drifting off his seat, bobbing helplessly toward the ceiling like a sad balloon. Since the ship was prioritizing power for the engines and the drive units, the gravity control system had been unceremoniously toggled off.

"This is merely a hypothesis," Koume began. She tilted her head and stared up at the ceiling, a gesture that was far too human for a robot. "But Koume believes this may be a play for public relations. If they successfully secure Enigma and win a 'punitive war' against The Facility, Gigantech Corp’s stock value will likely skyrocket."

She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. When Taro interjected with, "Don't people already love them?" she gave a gentle, pitying shake of her head.

"In absolute terms, they are undoubtedly the peak of the galaxy. Aside from the Imperial Military, they are the largest organization in existence with no glaring flaws. Of course they are 'popular.' However, if you look at their relative value over time, their standing is clearly in a state of active decline."

Koume delivered the verdict with chilling precision. Taro frowned. He hadn’t seen anything like that when he’d been doing his pre-meeting homework.

"The largest corporation in the galaxy carries the largest burden of responsibility, Mr. Teiro. Over the last few years, the galaxy has been rocked by one crisis after another—the Neural Network Collapse, the WIND Crisis. Yet, while the Imperial Military achieved the 'heroic' feat of reconstructing the neural net—despite it being small and clunky—the Gigantech Group hasn't actually done anything flashy. They contribute more to society than anyone else, sure, but the masses prefer visible, easy-to-digest results."

Koume finished her lecture and leveled a gaze at him that practically screamed, Any questions? Taro met it with a wry smile, swallowing the urge to ask, Are you sure you’re just an AI?

"So basically, they’re trying to fix their fading 'cool factor' by doing something big... I guess that makes sense. The bigger the company, the more they live and die by their reputation. That’s the same reason the Mercenaries are so obsessed with us, so it’s probably a hundred times worse for the Gigantech Group."

Marl nodded, satisfied with the logic. Taro agreed with a "Maybe so," but decided to stop overthinking it. He was curious about Gigantech, but they had bigger fish to fry.

"Whatever their reasons are, if they’re offering to help, I’ll take it. The problem is the evidence. No evidence, no help... and our current defense force is a joke."

They’d managed to secure a loan from Gigantech by promising them an Exclusive Possession Contract for Enigma after the war. That money had bought them one brand-new fleet and another fleet made of the Volunteer Force. But even with a hundred extra ships, they were still bringing a knife to a planetary-bombardment fight against the Mercenaries’ Expeditionary Fleet.

"Excluding the two Battleships, those two fleets are almost entirely Full Module Types. In terms of actual combat weight, it’s probably more like one real fleet."

Full Module Standard Ships were built from universal parts, meaning training time was short and production was easy. They were cheap to buy and even cheaper to maintain. The downside? They had the combat effectiveness of a wet paper towel compared to standard ships—usually estimated at about 70% power. And with the Volunteer Force at the helm, that number was probably being generous.

But building a Standard Specification fleet—a Battleship, five Special Task Ships, fifteen Cruisers, and thirty Destroyers—took time they didn't have. Phantom’s reports said the Mercenaries were spooling up for war at breakneck speed. The shooting could start any second.

"It is what it is. I heard the Eighth Fleet gave up a ton of internal space just to fit in those Emergency Escape Devices, so we can’t expect miracles. I’d probably get struck by lightning if I complained after all that funding... Huh? What the hell is that?"

Taro pointed out the window. Marl followed his finger with a skeptical look. "What? You mean that glowing thing moving out there? The sensors aren't picking up a thing. It’s just a ghost."

"A ghost... oh, right. One of those Deviation Virtual Image things? I forgot those existed since the Plum doesn't have windows."

Taro watched the strange phenomenon, a byproduct of the delay in the speed of light. The sensors insisted the space was empty, and since the cameras were clearly seeing it, it couldn't be a Stealth Ship.

"The speed of light really feels like a crawl when you consider how big space is. If we didn't have Drive Particles, the Empire probably wouldn't have made it past the next star system," Marl said wistfully. A moment later, the light outside the window vanished into a blue blur.

"The distance to that light source was approximately 1,800 light-seconds. What you were seeing was a recording of reality from thirty minutes ago," Koume explained.

"Right, right. They always say the stars we see might already be dead. That’s actually true, isn't it?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Though with modern sensors bouncing Drive Particles off everything, nobody really pays attention to the 'lag' anymore. Koume, you got a good example?"

"One moment," Koume replied. She fell silent for a beat, then pointed to a particularly crimson star in the distance. "Do you see that red star? That is DAC_KLL55652. It was located 6.5 million light-years away from us. We have confirmation that it actually vanished in a Supernova roughly two million years ago. You can see it with your eyes, but it is a virtual image—a ghost of something that no longer exists."

Koume gestured toward the window, and the camera feed zoomed in, bringing the blurry red dot into sharp focus.

"6.5 million light-years... that’s 'neighboring galaxy' distance. It’s crazy that we can know what happened that far away just because of faster-than-light particles."

"Well, technically, even Drive Particles aren't 'faster' than light. They just jump through space, so it looks like—"

"Yeah, yeah, keep the science talk for someone who has a brain for it. I’ll just get a headache." Taro waved her off, staring out at the stars—a massive tapestry of light that had traveled from across the void.

To a guy from Earth, the Galactic Empire was already incomprehensibly huge, but the sheer scale of the universe made even the Empire look like a speck of dust. Countless galaxies forming clusters, clusters forming superclusters, and superclusters weaving into galaxy filaments that stretched forever.

There have to be millions of other 'Empires' out there, Taro thought, feeling a strange, hollow sensation in his chest.

"Looking at the stars is like looking into a history book... almost everything we see is just a message from the past... It's so strange... wait."

Marl, who had been looking all misty-eyed at the view, suddenly scowled. Taro looked at her, wondering what had broken the mood, but then the gears in his own head clicked into place. His body went rigid.

".................."

The only sound on the bridge was the low thrum of the engines and a faint ringing in Taro’s ears. He slowly, creakily, turned his head toward Koume.

"............Professor Koume. I have a question."

Taro’s brow was furrowed in intense concentration, his mind racing through a million possibilities. "Yes, Mr. Teiro?" Koume answered, looking quite pleased with herself.

"So... if, and this is a big 'if'... if we used the Overdrive to jump, say, five light-years away from a planet... we’d be able to see that planet as it looked five years ago, right?"

"Affirmative, Mr. Teiro. Though gravitational lensing and spatial distortion would make the image somewhat fuzzy. The further you go, the more the 'visual' degrades."

"Noise, right... okay. Does fixing that noise take a lot of specialized knowledge? Can you do it, Koume?"

"Affirmative and negative, Mr. Teiro. [RAY-TRACING NOISE REDUCTION] requires incredibly advanced astronomical expertise. Unfortunately, Koume does not possess that level of specialization. However—"

Koume stopped and let a small, knowing smirk play across her lips.

"Don’t we have a leading expert in that exact field on the payroll, Mr. Teiro? His entire career is dedicated to studying the world of the past."

Marl practically teleported to her feet. "Of course! Dr. Arzimof! He’s an archaeologist! Looking at the past is his entire job!"

She was vibrating with excitement. Taro nodded frantically. "Koume! Tell me what we need!"

"Let's see," Koume mused. "First, we need the exact timestamp of when the Mercenaries’ ship docked at that station. Then, we need detailed astronomical data for the Zayed sector to filter out the noise. Since light travels radially, we should take observations from multiple points. Also, we’ll need a credible third party—like a Gigantech expert—to come along so they know we aren't faking the 'video.' Our main hurdles are twofold: tracking the specific ship's flight path and the fact that the processing power required for the noise reduction will be astronomical."

Marl didn't miss a beat. "As for the ship, it doesn't matter how many times they transferred or took detours. They had to visit a Mercenary base eventually. People aren't data; you have to move them physically. We can track that. And as for the processing power..."

Marl glanced at Taro. Taro caught her eye and slammed a fist against his chest.

"Calculations? Oh, I’m the king of crunching numbers. Leave the math to me."

Taro flashed a wide, predator’s grin. "We’re in a hurry! Let's move!"

He yanked the ship into a gut-wrenching turn, burning rubber—or drive particles—as they screamed toward the star system where the Doctor was waiting.