Rocket Girls: The Last Planet

by Housuke Nojiri

  Rocket Girls 2

  © 1996 Housuke Nojiri

  First published in Japan in 1996 by Fujimishobo Co., Ltd., Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged by KADOKAWA SHOTEN Co., Ltd., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2011 VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover art by Katsuya Terada

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by

  VIZ Media, LLC

  295 Bay Street

  San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.haikasoru.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-4111-2

  Haikasoru eBook Edition

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Homecoming

  Chapter Two

  Of Figs and Swallows

  Chapter Three

  Operation: Rescue Orpheus

  Afterword

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOMECOMING

  [ACT 1]

  “HEEEEY, EVERYBODY! It’s me, from Fujimi TV, Keiko-on-the-beat, your favorite reporter-on-the-street! Don’t touch that remote!

  “We’ve come all the way to the Solomon Space Center here in the South Pacific on the trail of everyone’s favorite astronauts, Yukari Morita and Matsuri! And what hotties—er, astronauts they are!

  “I know what you’re thinking: ‘South Pacific? That’s like right next door compared to space,’ but believe me, it’s a lot tougher getting here than getting up there. We’re talking trains, planes, boats…three days in all! Our crew is pooped, but we’re not going to let that get between us and the story.

  “And let’s not forget that Yukari came here all by herself during her sophomore-year summer vacation! Pretty impressive. And chasing after her long-lost father? It doesn’t tug on the heart strings any more than that, folks.

  “That’s right, she was searching for her father, but she found so much more here at the Solomon Space Center. You might even call it destiny.

  “It takes a lot to make an astronaut, and this little girl—who, by the way, dropped out of, oh, only the most famous girls’ school in Yokohama, Nellis Academy, to devote her life to space—is no exception. Incredible!

  “And then there’s Yukari’s half sister and backup crew, Matsuri. Raised among the local Taliho as one of their own, she’s a budding shaman and an astronaut. Not every day you meet one of those!

  “This is the fourth installment of our special report on these girls, and we’ve got something really special for you today. That’s right, a broadcast live from space! Yukari, you read me? I just love saying that! Oh, Yukaaaaari?”

  The fingernails-on-chalkboard reportage hopped through three land-based transmitters and two satellites and returned, bringing back a picture of...empty space.

  “Huh? Are we live?” said a disembodied voice from off-camera. The picture swooped until its wide-angle lens showed the sea. Nothing but sea from the bottom of the screen to the arc of the horizon near the middle.

  The camera tilted, and a girl in a white, skintight space suit appeared from the bottom of the screen. She was floating in space, a maneuvering gun in her right hand and a lifeline gripped tightly in the other.

  The orbiter drifted into view by her feet. One of the hatches was open, revealing part of the pilot’s seat assembly inside.

  “Hello, Earth. This is the spaceship Rambutan, Captain Yukari Morita reporting.”

  Behind her visor, Yukari’s eyes were wide open. She had something like a smirk on her face. “I’d like to introduce my copilot—”

  Another hatch opened, and Matsuri Morita called out, “Hoi! It’s me, Matsuri!” She waved, an exuberant grin on her tanned face. When Matsuri waved, it was a full-body affair. She shook like a dog wagging its tail.

  Yukari gave a short blast with her gun to straighten herself to the plane of the picture. “The camera you’re seeing me through is attached to a utility arm on the nose of the craft. What you see at the bottom—that is, toward my feet—is Rambutan’s hull. If you could see the whole thing, you’d notice it has an oval shape and is about the size of a sedan. It only seats two, so right now we’re at maximum capacity. And, er...”

  Yukari twisted, looking around behind her. “Right now we’re approaching northwestern Africa, er…about three hundred kilometers over the Canary Islands. You can see the Straits of Gibraltar coming up. A little farther and we’ll be able to see the Pyrenees and the Sahara at about the same time. Then we’ll be over the Mediterranean and Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—I’m pretty sure there is at least one war going on down there right now.”

  “But not to worry!” Matsuri chimed in. “Director Kinoshita says we’re totally out of Scud and Patriot missile range!”

  Yukari grinned. “That’s right! Let me put it in perspective for you: if we were flying as high as, say, eye-level, a Scud would have a hard time getting even as high as my knees.”

  What the hell are they babbling about? Nasuda frowned where he stood in the center guestroom. A single pane of glass divided him from the main floor of the control center. Just stick to the program, ladies. If they said anything about the surface, it should be the usual “From up here, there are no national boundaries.” Period.

  “There are some people who compare our rockets to missiles, but frankly, we’ve got ballistic missiles whipped in terms of altitude and speed, so good luck hitting us...” Yukari’s voice trailed off as common sense finally caught up with her. “Let’s get back to the ship and see how those goldfish are doing, shall we? One moment—”

  Yukari went inside and the camera switched to an internal monitor.

  Matsuri could be seen sitting on the left as Yukari came drifting into the orbiter to take the seat on the right. Once both hatches were closed, Yukari’s hand reached down toward the bottom of the frame and she began to adjust something off-camera.

  The two girls removed their helmets. Both of them had long hair, Yukari’s in braids on either side of her face and Matsuri’s in a ponytail down her back.

  “There—now where were we,” Yukari said, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “Right, the goldfish. They’re in this container-thingy...”

  The inside of the orbiter was small, about the size of a pickup-truck cabin. Yukari bumped into the wall several times as she moved to a new position lying across Matsuri’s knees.

  “Er, I know this isn’t exactly the graceful weightlessness of space that you might have been expecting, but as you can see, it’s rather cramped inside the orbiter—”

  Yukari fiddled with a panel on the side of a shock-absorbing chair, molded to precisely fit the curve of Yukari’s spine. The back of the chair fell forward, revealing a storage rack filled with test equipment.

  “This is the testing array for the goldfish. It’s very compact. The fish tank is on the upper level, here. There’s a monitoring and recording device in the middle, and the power and environmental support are near the bottom. Now for the fishies.”

  Yukari pulled out the fish container and yanked the CCD camera from its Velcro anchor on the instrument panel to give the viewers a close-up. “This tank is only about the size of a lunchbox, but it holds twenty-four goldfish!” She looked at the fish. “They really pack you in like sardines—no offense, guys.” She looked back at the camera. “If we just left them in there, they’d run out of oxygen quickly, so we have to keep the water cycling. Can you make this out? They’re all swimming nicely. Right after takeoff, all the poor things could do was spin around, but they seem to have gotten used to the low-G environment.”

  Yukari glanced down at her watch as she talked. Broadcast time was almost up.
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  “We’ll be bringing these fish back with us when we come home. Our planned landing zone is in the deep water off the Seychelles Islands. From there, they’ll travel by helicopter and plane until these guys are safely back at the Space Science Laboratory in Sagamihara. And...well, that’s it for our broadcast. So long!”

  The image of the two girls faded from the screen and the picture returned to the flight tracking chart. Nasuda glanced at the NASA bigwig next to him and inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. It hadn’t been a total disaster. He wouldn’t have understood the girls’ Japanese, anyway. Overall, the sight of them up there actually doing things had probably been good PR.

  “Well, Director Holden, what do you think?” Nasuda smiled. “As you can see, we are well past the testing stage with our manned flights here at the SSA.”

  “Impressive,” Holden grunted, a sneer in his voice. “You pick two of the smallest girls you could find—small even for Japanese—and specially design the orbiter to cram them in. Very impressive.”

  “That may be the impression our detractors would like you to have—”

  Holden turned and glared at him. “Oh, it’s public knowledge, Director.”

  “But what space vessel isn’t constructed with the utmost attention to reducing load? We are not in the freight transportation business. Our one and only objective is to get people into space at the absolute minimum cost. The cost of lifting that two-seat orbiter once is only two billion yen—one fifteenth of the cost to launch one of your space shuttles.”

  Holden shrugged as if to indicate he already knew this.

  “If the SSA were to participate in the construction of your planned space station,” Nasuda continued, “you’d realize a considerable reduction in both cost and time. You could use the leftover funds as you wished.”

  “I’m not as concerned about cost as I am about risk,” the NASA director replied. “I’ll be frank. Your SSA has only been sending up manned flights for half a year now. Your astronauts are charming little angels, to be sure, but you’re asking for a great deal of courage if you want me to place the fate of the International Space Station in the hands of two teenagers.”

  “I understand your trepidation, of course. That’s why I want you to take this opportunity to see just what we’re doing in space—to remove any misconceptions you might have.”

  Holden frowned. “You doing another broadcast?”

  “Only one more. While we’re preparing for that, I’ll show you around our manufacturing facility. I’m sure you’d like to see our solid fuel system. It’s not every fuel that can produce a relative thrust of three hundred twenty...”

  “Aaaaa—urp!”

  Yukari swallowed a yawn. It had been twenty-two hours since launch. She had taken naps in shifts with Matsuri, but with nothing to do besides the broadcast, being in orbit was pretty boring.

  Three hours till we land.

  It was time.

  Yukari had refrained from taking any solids—there were no toilet facilities in the capsule, which could make things really uncomfortable—but some things were worth the risk.

  “We have time until the next broadcast, right?”

  “Hoi?”

  Yukari pulled a duralumin case out from beneath her shock-absorption chair. Bringing personal items on board the capsule had been strictly forbidden, but claiming “womanly needs,” Yukari had managed to win this one small concession. The case was small, and its weight limited, but the contents were entirely her responsibility and most importantly, not subject to screening.

  She opened the case to reveal an assortment of carefully wrapped dim sum.

  “Ta-da! Shrimp dumplings, courtesy of Tianjin Restaurant. Tasty even when chilled.”

  Matsuri’s usually cheerful face broke into an even bigger smile. “Good call!”

  Yukari laughed. “You know it. I had Hanrei make one of her special midnight deliveries.”

  Yukari seized one of the dumplings and crammed it into her mouth. Zero gravity made everything taste bland, but after suffering through a regimen of carefully portioned, utterly flavorless lumps of protein, the oily, shrimp-filled dough balls were deeply satisfying.

  “Mmph, smell that shrimp! C’mon, Matsuri, you have some.”

  “Any vinegar soy sauce?”

  “Now don’t get greedy. You know how hard it was sneaking these in here?”

  “I thought as much,” Matsuri said, shaking her head, “which is why I brought this.” Matsuri reached under her own seat and pulled out a case, which she opened to reveal a tube of vinegar soy sauce.

  Yukari gaped at her. “When did you—”

  “There’s more!” Matsuri grinned, turning the case to show Yukari. “Let’s see. Mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard...all here!”

  “Hey, you keep those away from my dumplings!”

  Matsuri loved condiments, the more garishly colored and artificially flavored the better. Her condiment tool kit could turn the finest cuisine into junk food. Other than her flight training, this was the only aspect of Yukari’s culture that Matsuri had fully embraced.

  “Oh wait, there’s one more thing.”

  “It better not be relish.”

  “Dessert!” Matsuri crouched down and opened the storage space beneath their life raft. “Did you know there’s a dead space beneath here?”

  “Don’t they check that before launch?”

  “Oh, I asked the spirits to hide it so they wouldn’t find it.”

  “Um...okay?”

  Yukari’s eyes went wide when she saw the giant, spike-festooned tropical fruit in Matsuri’s hand.

  “A durian?”

  “I found one growing in the jungle off to the side of the runway the other day.” Matsuri reached up with her hand, retrieving the survival knife from a hatch above their heads.

  “Wait, Matsuri, you know how bad those things reek—”

  Oh, but they were delicious. Some people made special trips to the tropics just to eat durian. The smell, however, was appropriately likened to a pool of rancid custard sitting in a sewer.

  “Ooh. Perfectly ripe!” Matsuri held the durian between her knees and sank the knife into it.

  “Waah! Stop! Stop! You’ll stink the whole place up!” Yukari reached out and grabbed Matsuri’s hand holding the knife.

  “Hoi? What’s wrong?”

  When Yukari moved, the case had drifted off her lap. Then, when she grabbed Matsuri’s hand, her knee had gone up, scoring a direct hit on the bottom of Matsuri’s case and sending its contents flying—a Big Bang of shrimp dumplings and vinegar soy sauce.

  “Whee! That’s cool!”

  “It’s totally not cool! We have to clean this up!”

  “Look, Yukari, you can scoop it out of the air with your mouth! Yummy!”

  “Would you stop eating and start grabbing those dumplings! If we don’t hurry—”

  Director Holden stared at the screen in stunned silence.

  The wide-angle lens of the camera showed the entire capsule in unforgiving clarity. Dumplings and droplets of vinegar soy sauce and the durian swam around, like a slow-motion computer model of Brownian motion, sometimes colliding and fusing, only to separate again.

  In the middle of it all were the two girls, shock on their faces, arms flailing.

  “I’m uncomfortably put in mind of the Apollo 1 tragedy,” the NASA director said to Nasuda. “So tell me. What else do your ‘astronauts’ do?”

  [ACT 2]

  TWO HOURS LATER, the orbiter entered its final orbit.

  “Solomon, this is Rambutan. We’re preparing for reentry.”

  “Roger that, orbiter. You finish collecting the loose objects?”

  Yukari detected the faintest hint of sarcasm in Kinoshita’s cool voice.

  “All, er, objects have been collected…and all indicators are green. We’re ready to come home.”

  “Roger that. Over and out.”

  “All right.” Yukari glanced over at her copilot. “Let’s nail this splas
hdown and win back some of the reputation we’ve just squandered. All’s well that ends well, right?” She grinned. “Woo-hoo! Seychelles coral reefs, here I come!”

  Yukari opened her landing checklist. “So, what’s first? Helium pressure?”

  “Hoi, HePRS, open!”

  “Nitrogen supply?”

  “N2SPLY, on!”

  “Attitude adjustment…RCS-MAN.” Yukari set the controls to manual and began adjusting their attitude by hand. Once you got used to it, it was a lot faster than entering numbers with the sequencer. Control panels throughout the capsule began to chirp and blink as the orbiter rotated until its stern was facing forward.

  “Hoi, we’re in position.”

  “All right. Solomon, this is Rambutan. Standing by for reentry burn.”

  “Rambutan, you’re cleared for reentry burn.”

  “Starting reentry burn sequence.”

  Yukari flipped up the sequencer start switch cover and placed her finger on the button.

  Beep beep beep beep.

  “Hoi? We’re getting an error from the fish tank.”

  “Great, what now?” Yukari swore under her breath and undid her harness. Her body floated up into the cabin and she twisted until she was facing the control panel behind her seat. “Okay…so what’s wrong?”

  “Rambutan, this is Solomon. You have an error in your testing equipment?”

  “Hoi, we do. Yukari’s checking it out.”

  “We’re putting a hold on reentry until it’s fixed. Bringing those goldfish back alive is a success condition for your mission.”

  “We know, we know,” Yukari snapped. “We’re getting error code...115.”

  “Error code 115, roger. They’ll look into it at Sagamihara. If we can get that fixed within twenty minutes, you can come home as planned. Otherwise we’re going to our second splashdown target.”

  “No way! That’s in the South China Sea! There’s, like, pirates there!”

  “If you don’t like it, you’ll just have to make those repairs in time. But don’t rush it.”