Chapter 18

Translated by SkyTL Edited by SkyTL

Chapter 18: Weightlessness

Lacey and Charlotte, who were shown around the Eos by me, had bright eyes of curiosity the whole time.

However, the girls’ reaction to the cryosleep pods we were about to show them was surprisingly weak, while they were more interested in the common room, the shower room, and other things of daily life.

The room we are in now, a multipurpose hall used for training and sports, is especially new for the girls. Since the ship’s artificial gravity system is off, the 20-meter-long multipurpose hall can be used for flying around in any direction.

On the other hand, even though Lacey and the others lived on a ship as large as the Astoria, or maybe I should say because they lived on such a large ship, they were not used to the weightless environment at all. That’s just as well, because now I try to give them light exercises to get their bodies used to weightlessness.

First we gave her a big ball, but she was very hesitant at first because she has never had the culture of playing with her body.

And so on…

“Tei!”

Charlotte tossed me the ball with a big grin on her face.

The sponge rubber ball is big enough to hold with both hands, yet it is very soft and light. Since there is air pressure in this multipurpose hall, the ball, although weightless, is slightly slowed down by air resistance and settles in my hand. The kinetic energy transferred from the ball to my body is slowly absorbed by my knees and released to the floor.

O-oh …?”

Charlotte, on the other hand, reacted like a ball thrown at her body, flying through the air and bouncing slightly off the ceiling, but coming to a stop about three feet from the wall, probably because it was slowed halfway up by air resistance.

Weightlessness is a tricky thing, and if you get stuck in the air, that’s how you end up.

Charlotte looks around with a smile, looking like she’s in trouble, when she finally realizes she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere. With a subtle smile of affection, she nods her head in my direction.

“…What should I do in a situation like this?”

“I wish it wouldn’t happen, but, well, it’s normal to wear a lifeline.”

“I don’t remember getting anything like that. A lifeline?”

“I was going to put it on you if you asked for it, but you didn’t, so I thought you should know how scary a weightless environment can be.”

“It’s terrifying!”

The way she was moving, Charlotte’s physical abilities weren’t bad, and she would be able to adapt quickly to life on the ship, not to mention working on the ship.”

Lacey, on the other hand, is not very athletic and has been glued to the wall for some time. That was to be expected, as her original Miss Whitford was not an athletic girl by any stretch of the imagination. If it were just a matter of helping her out during her stay in Astoria, it would be a bit of a nuisance if we had to train her to be a reserve astronaut in order to welcome her aboard the Eos.

—and that’s when I noticed Lacey looking a little anxiously back and forth between me and Charlotte.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Charlotte. Attacking Lyle-sama is an act of treason against my highest principles.”

“You can’t be so dramatic when you’re throwing a ball. I’m fine.”

I shrug my shoulders and placate the pale Lacey. Charlotte also rolled her eyes at Lacey’s accusations and didn’t seem to think she had done anything wrong.

The three principles of robotics, in turn, are ambiguous in their application, and even the most important first principle may differ between the sober Lacey and the open-minded Charlotte. In addition to the differences in their own behavioral norms, there are also major differences in the level of stress they feel when confronted with events that contradict the first principle – in other words, when a human is injured in front of them.

If I fall and scrape my knee, Lacey could have a stroke. That would be a real problem.

There is an acclimation protocol where the girls are gradually stressed through the three principles to help them cope with sudden problems, but there is no way they would have been exposed to such a protocol if they had never met a real human.

In this case, I would prefer to be as casual as Charlotte.

While I was trying to calm Lacey down, who still didn’t look convinced, Charlotte started waving her hands over me.

“Hey, I think it’s about time you helped me, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.

There are several ways to rescue someone stuck in mid-air in a weightless environment. For example, I can jump up and pick her up myself and bring her back, or I can throw a rope with a loop at the end like a cowboy in an old Earth movie.

But, well, I don’t want to spoil her too much, so I decided to give her a chance to help herself this time.

I threw the ball back in the same trajectory Charlotte had just thrown it in. The ball flew straight ahead without forming a parabola and landed in Charlotte’s hand.

“…What’s that?”

“You can use that to come back.”

“Hmm…”

She stared strained at the ball in her hands, then looked up as if she had just realized something. She turned her back to me, took a big swing, and threw the ball as hard as she could at the ceiling.

Well, that’s generally true.

The ball flew with much more force than the one she had just thrown at me, and Charlotte’s body swam through the air in response. She comes to me, spins around deftly, and lands with both feet on the ground, staggering slightly but holding onto a nearby plastic railing before I can help her.

She checks the railing briefly, then turns to me and smiles, wrinkling her nose a little to show how she feels.

“Yeah, I guess you passed.”

“Tee-hee.”

“I would have liked to see a little more of the area, though.”

I smile at Charlotte, who looks very pleased with herself, and then look behind me.

And this time, a small sigh.

The ball bounced off the ceiling and hit Lacey square in the face. I look down at Lacey, who has been flung helplessly into the air, and sigh.

Now we have to get her back.

“Charlotte is too careless with things.”

Lacey collapsed, sipping her sports drink through a straw.

Afterward, I left the multipurpose gym and ordered Charlotte to shower and change, and now I’m placating Lacey.

“Are you listening to me, Lyle-sama?”

Lacey is usually a woman of few words, but right now she seems very angry and strangely talkative.

I felt like I was getting a glimpse of a surprising side of her, and she was getting more and more nervous.

It was Charlotte’s fault, so of course she should be blamed, but I don’t think I should be the one blamed.

“I hear you. But I don’t think it would hurt for Lacey to get some exercise, too.”

“…Do you like sports, Lyle-sama?”

“No, I wasn’t very good at it, but everyone liked ball games. Soccer, for example… Oh, but…”

When the rest of the crew was alive, ball games were one of the most popular forms of recreation. The most popular was football — or soccer — and although I wasn’t much of a ball player, I was more of a soccer fan.

Captain Baker was the only one who insisted that basketball was a man’s sport, but when he tried, he was no match for the bigger Yuri. Yuri, on the other hand, was always concerned about his height, since it was considered advantageous for a starshipman to be short, and he always looked annoyed when the captain challenged him to a game.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, no. It reminds me of everyone.”

“Everyone?”

She didn’t seem to notice that I was trying to remain vague, and came up to me with a slight nod of her head.

I let out a small sigh and continued speaking.

“We all liked soccer. We promised each other that if we got to the planet we wanted and Riza built a habitable facility on the ground, we’d all play soccer. Under real gravity. Well, that’s not going to happen anymore.”

“…I understand. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Lacey’s expression darkened and she shook her head in panic. Not that I wanted to blame her.

After a while, she looked up as if she had an idea.

“…Lyle-sama. Well, I thought about it, but Astoria has artificial gravity and open spaces. Soccer is possible in Astoria. If that’s what you want, Lyle-sama.”

“It’s not that I want to play soccer myself. I just want to play on a new planet with everyone, so it makes sense.”

Soccer in itself is not the most important thing.

It could have been basketball, as the captain suggested, or baseball, or tennis.

It’s just a ritual to acknowledge that we’ve landed on new ground.

“So… For example… if one day we reach a planet … no, that’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not impossible.”

“What?”

When Lacey suddenly brought up the subject I had been wondering when to bring up, I nodded my head and she looked at me with a puzzled eye roll.

This is a story I’ve never been able to tell, and I was wondering how to bring it up. It’s a good thing, too.

I ask back.

“Rather, why did you think it was a bad idea?”

“Well, other than that, the likelihood is that the… Astoria to reach some star systems is already close to zero, and…”

“With this Eos, it is possible. And that’s the reason we’re fixing it.”

“Eos is… a ship for humans, and we’re not humans, and…”

Lacey shook her head in confusion. Apparently she hadn’t considered the possibility that she might actually be on board.

In fact — and Riza always shies away from mentioning this — there is no compelling reason to take Lacey and her friends aboard Eos. Our mission is for humans only.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them aboard Eos.

“We have extra space. That’s not a problem. Even Riza is on board.”

“But… it’s…”

She seemed to be searching for an impossible reason as her eyes wandered, but after thinking about it for a while, she seemed to give up and muttered anxiously.

“…Even if it were possible, I think it would be too unsafe.”

“As for safety, I’m afraid you’ll have to undergo training equivalent to a provisional license.”

She was probably trying to say that the mission in Eos was more dangerous than the one in Astoria, but I purposely brushed that aside because there was no point in arguing about it now.

For my part, I don’t want to force it. If it is possible to fix Eos and keep both functions of Astoria at the same time, that is the best way, at least that is the strategy.

But it is quite another thing to keep Astoria alive as long as possible, and that does not mean that Lacey and her colleagues should not be invited to Eos if they so desire, regardless of the state of Astoria.

I am willing to carry out the mission alone, but that doesn’t mean I want to be all alone, and if they want to help me, of course they are welcome.

“Don’t think too much about it, it’s just a way of life.”

“Uh, yeah, um, um …”

Lacey, thinking the conversation was going in the wrong direction, glanced around and then deceptively pointed to the back of the room.

“Um… By the way, what room is that?”

“I think it’s a storage room.”

The conversation suddenly changed, and I looked around the room.

The room where I was taking care of Lacey happened to be a guest room next to the shower room.

I don’t really know what this room is for. There are a lot of spare rooms in Eos, and this one has probably never been used.

In the back of the room is a stack of transparent containers. They were removed by Riza from a room that was being repaired. The crew’s personal belongings, or rather their belongings, seem to have been stored separately, and all that is here are things that were used in the common room and decided to be destroyed.

These will later be transported by material to a waste treatment facility where they will be crushed and broken down before being reused as material.

“O-oh, what’s that?”

“What is that?”

“That green…”

Lacey pointed to a small green… plant.

It was a cactus in a pot. It was a variety that couldn’t grow under any weight and it was always in the corner of the main conference room.

It had become a habit that they were placed at the Captain’s whim, and every time they reached the end of their life, Riza would put in a new plant grown from seed.

The cactus was banned from the conference room because of the renovation and ended up here. But now that I am the only regular member of the crew, there are no plans to restore the large conference room to its former glory, and the cactus now has a disposal label on its pot.

After that, they have no choice but to end up as organic material in the waste treatment plant, or they just rot here.

“Are you interested in this cactus?”

I took the pot in my hand and turned the cactus around in front of me.

It’s a small cactus, about the size of a fist. The seeds of this type of plant are collected in large quantities on Eos to research their growth potential. They are stored for local growing practices, for example, this cactus is said to be an edible vegetable.

When you think about it, organic vegetables from seed are a rare commodity, and I haven’t eaten one since I left Earth’s solar system. The cacti in the boardroom were simply decomposed at the end of their lives in the waste treatment plant. That’s quite a waste.

“Lacey, if you want…”

“Hey, Lyle!”

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