Chapter 124: Space Bound

Summary: Behold, mostly naked Space Momo. The best skin for the best timeline, for the truly cultured...

Chapter 124: Space Bound

Momo and Izumi moved in near-perfect sync as they flipped switches and checked gauges in a pre-flight sequence they'd done a hundred times already. Not that they'd actually launched all of those times, of course. The vast majority had simply been practice to iron on the correct sequence. Today was their first attempt at reaching orbit for Inari 1, the not-so-small orbital craft designed for Momo to do her thing and build other infrastructure from. They'd made a half dozen purely atmospheric test flights to make sure everything was working so far, but today was the first proper test of the new ship. It was a ship, too, rather than the original orbital construction pod that Izumi and Momo had envisioned. There had been too many legitimate arguments against the pod design in the end, which has seen a direction shift toward a proper spaceship instead of just a minimally-powered orbital pod.

That said, it wasn't all that much larger than the pod they'd planned. Which probably said more about their construction pod design than the ship. With the need for Momo to be able to create fairly bulky components inside, the original pod had been intended as a solid 20 meters long and 10 in diameter. The ship that had replaced it in their planning over the last three months was a not-exactly-tiny 32 meters long by 9 meters wide and 8 tall. It was powered by a quartet of the largest Maso engines they'd had designs for, with Izumi and 2B having come into the project halfway through to sort out a QE concentrator. After, of course, finishing the sensor systems Izumi had been assigned to, her own project not having ballooned so much in scope.

That concentrator pushed the density of Quirk Energy up into the spectrum that 2B's systems recognized it as proper Maso, not QE. Which, in turn, had allowed them to create some of the more intense designs for energy throughput that YoRHa had known of. A possibility that had been critical for more than one of their current projects. Though it was most important of all for Inari 1.

The biggest, unfortunately legitimate, argument for the ship over the pod had been that relying on the combination of Uraraka and Izumi to routinely reach orbit was dangerous. Not in the short term, but the long-term. If anything happened to either of them, or even if they just weren't available when an emergency came up, it would create a dangerous situation. Thus, they'd changed their long-term design goals fairly early on in the development process. In the short term, in order to deploy a number of fact-finding satellites and long-range probes, they'd hastily revamped the pod design used for the Sport's Festival, using some of the early work from the scrapped construction pod concept.

Izumi and Uraraka had worked together to take that revamped pod into orbit for the deployment of hundreds of data-gathering and communications satellites. Among other things, the satellites they'd deployed that way had extended the HSN network to be truly worldwide, fully interconnecting the various military and Heroic efforts on a single high-security, high-bandwidth set of channels. Added to sending out fact-finding probes designed by various suddenly-relevant-again space agencies, looking for resources farther out in the solar system that they'd want for manufacturing, and they'd needed to run a couple of dozen loads with the older, smaller pod design.

All the while they'd worked on the Inari Project, which had rapidly grown from a proof-of-concept design into the first stage of a many-stage plan. As the Empire of Kurrick had quickly proven to have the brains to target industrial nodes, their plan to build manufacturing capability that the Empire couldn't reach had hit a note with a lot more of the world powers than they had initially expected. As a result, quite a few individuals and agencies had gotten behind the idea and pushed, adding their own projects like the deep solar-system mineral probes to the effort.

The shift had also caused some reworking of their priorities, though. Instead of a small proof-of-concept series of stages, they'd be diving head-first into a far larger building program than expected. Which had been the final nail in the coffin for the idea of building a lift vehicle that was heavily reliant on specific people and Quirks. Instead, Inari 1 was more than just a simple construction platform for Momo to work out of. It would also be the first of a small fleet intended to service the infrastructure that everyone was so deep into the planning of. Not to mention being a test bed for larger ships that would eventually head out for duty capturing asteroids for mining, or settling up mining stations on other orbital bodies. Mining the moon for water, rare earth minerals, and helium-3 were all high priority concepts for different groups. Just as a few examples.

"Everything is green on my end. How is yours looking Izumi, 2B?"

Momo's question prompted Izumi to make her last few checks, the ones that had needed confirmation from Momo's engineering panel before they were even initiated. Her girlfriend was the flight-engineer for the ship, not just because she'd been involved at every stage of its creation, but also to reduce the total crew they'd need to just Izumi, Momo, 2B, and Uraraka. Izumi and 2B, of course, were the pilots for the ship. Given there literally wasn't anyone else on the entire planet that could outperform her and 2B at orbital math, and they were the only living beings alive with current extra-atmosphere flight time, the choice had been obvious.

"All primary flight systems reporting green. 2B?"

2B was physically present in one of her adult bodies, occupying the co-pilot's chair in the small cockpit.

"Secondaries all green as well, weather conditions are also within optimal range for test launch."

That was good. Technically, the Inari 1 could bull its way through nasty weather. One of the many, many arguments that had caused a full ship to win the day over the original Constructor Pod design. That didn't mean anyone wanted their first attempt at an orbital launch to have to deal with the extra complications, though. If an outright storm had unexpectedly moved in, they might have scrubbed the test.

It remotely wasn't outside possibility, either.

One unfortunate side effect of all the massive worldwide Quirk usage, not to mention the Empire's own brand of QE fuckery, had been a much less predictable worldwide weather model. The profession of 'weatherman' was mostly a joke at this point, with all of the real talents in the area of atmospheric sciences having moved on to efforts at trying to stabilize the more radical shifts via controlled Quirk usage. An area that, like trying to build QE-based power plants, Izumi and Momo had reluctantly passed off to I-island and its greater manpower.

"Uraraka, all strapped in?"

Izumi threw that line over her shoulder. Ochako was in the cockpit with them, but was purely assigned to working the comms system if needed. At least in flight. Her real purpose for being there was that her Quirk was almost as bullshit as Momo's and Izumi's. What most people thought of as 'Zero Gravity' in space was a lie, at least in orbit. Objects still had mass and inertia, even in orbital freefall. Which meant that Momo's larger creations would have been an utter, stone-cold bitch to maneuver. If, that was, Uraraka's Quirk didn't give inertia the same middle finger it did gravity. With her on hand, they would be able to easily and safely create and maneuver large pieces of the space station that was their first serious goal. That wouldn't happen today, of course. But she was still along for the ride as they'd all be getting used to how to operate together in orbit. Assuming, obviously, that this mission went well and they didn't explode horribly instead. That was always an option, if one they'd very much like to avoid.

"Ready and strapped in, boss! I've got confirmation of clear airspace for us, too. We're cleared to launch when ready!"

Izumi smiled at that, the last thing on their pre-launch checklist ticked off with that confirmation.

"Right. Tell them we're launching then! Momo, spin her up!"

Her girlfriend laughed at her enthusiasm, but obediently released the Maso engines from standby. The entire ship thrummed as Izumi goosed the throttle and their power ticked upward. A quick check of the board again as they moved out into the long area cleared for them, and then Izumi engaged 'takeoff mode.' The Inari 1 wasn't a true VTOL craft. The power output from the engines pointed properly 'down' would have utterly wrecked just about any launch platform that could be built. That said, it had been built with a way to vector enough thrust down that it had a very short takeoff distance. As in, they needed barely over 50 meters for safe lift-off. Technically, you could cut even that in half, if you removed 'safe' as a requirement.

Given that they had three times that 50 meters available at the UA launch pad, Izumi had taken it easy, though they were still up off the ground in less than half the total distance available. Pouring on more power as they got far enough from the ground, Izumi calmly vectored the thrust into a more traditional alignment and pointed the nose of the craft firmly into the sky. Despite easing the power up smoothly to prevent undue stress on either the ship or its occupants, the raw power of the Inari 1 had it rapidly climbing, breeching the sound barrier once they were a decent way off the coast. That acceleration continued, despite the ship still being firmly nose up, for several minutes.

"95 Kilometers. Approaching Kármán line. All systems remain green."

2B's report had Izumi reducing thrust gently. Not because they were anywhere near their target orbital height, but because that theorical line was the rough 'edge of space' where the atmosphere stopped really being a thing. As a result, continuing to burn at the same power would have rapidly accelerated the ship in ways they didn't want. Izumi carefully managed their power and speed, hitting the sweet spot that would get them onto the orbital track they were eventually looking for. They could, of course, always flip end for end to correct for any major overburn. But all the better if they didn't have too.

"Atmospheric exit achieved, continuing to extreme Low Earth Orbit."

That had taken quite a bit of debate and fiddling. Previous manned space stations had all settled for staying under 500km, fairly modest even as LEO went. They'd done so for, as it happened, darn good reasons. Some of those, such as cost to reach farther orbit, were going to be negligible issues with their new approaches and technologies. Others, like the fact that higher orbits exposed you to a heck of a lot more radiation, had needed to be thought through thoroughly. In the end, the idea of pushing their construction area out to the far extreme of LEO, straddling the zone where Low Earth Orbit became Medium Earth Orbit, had won out. While this would mean needing to protect everything from the radiation of the inner Van Allen radiation belt, the truth was that no one was comfortable building at the scale they were considering building in the more typical ranges of LEO.

There was stuff there already, after all.

While space exploration had died off with the advent of the Quirk age, several nations had either maintained or regained the ability to at least launch things like GPS and Comm sats. There were multiple fairly large constellations of Comm sats in particular in the 300-500km orbital range. Building what would, eventually, be numerous skyscraper-sized space stations in the same general orbit as said constellations had ultimately been deemed a bad idea. Particularly when anything in LEO was technically sub-orbital and needed semi-frequent boosts to stay in orbit. Having a building-sized station fall out of space would be…bad.

It was thus that even the initial, smallest stations, were planned to hover around the 2,000km LEO/MEO orbital line. Later, even larger facilities, were going to be pushed out to either Geosynchronous orbit, or even clear out to one of the Lagrange points. Which would be the goal of each station would mostly depend on what the particular station was intended for. Their long-term planning had meant spending a lot more time figuring out how to handle the conditions out that far from Earth, but in the final calculus, everyone had decided it was the saner concept.

Several minutes longer of careful maneuvering and acceleration finally saw them reaching their target orbit and velocity.

"Orbital height, 2011.5km. Momo, how's the radiation shielding looking?"

The fact that the radiation alarms weren't screaming bloody murder at them to drop back out of the Van Allen belt was a good sign, but it was Momo who would be making the call on how sustainable things were at this orbit. Just because they could handle a few minutes here didn't necessarily mean they could sustain a station here. A combination of meta materials and QE-based radiation shields that built off the Guild team's research on smaller, more portable shields, were all in use by Inari 1. Thankfully, if the ship could handle it, then scaling up was actually quite a bit easier than it had been to scale down. At least to a point. The original shields they were copying from the Empire had been quite large, covering multiple city blocks of space as they protected Greater Gates from bombardment.

"So far it looks good. We aren't seeing particularly high levels at present, so the shields are barely being stressed. Honestly, these levels wouldn't be that dangerous even without the shields. It's storms and surges that are the real concern. Along with prolonged exposure. Still, the confirmation that they work is useful."

Izumi nodded at that. The alloys used in the ship were good for reducing radiation exposure, but not good enough for prolonged human presence within the Van Allen radiation belts. In theory, they'd been fairly confident that the QE Shields they'd adapted from the Guild's new Base Camp Shields would outright deflect the radiation. The generator for their modified design had been too big to take up in the pod they'd been using until now, and the pod wasn't armored well enough to risk it for testing even if the size hadn't been an issue. Meaning that this was the first practical test of the anti-radiation shielding system.

"Well, 2B and I can keep an eye on it. It's time for you to get naked for Uraraka to make mildly-phallic objects for her to chuck into space."

Izumi grinned at the sound of Uraraka choking on her own spit at the comment. Momo wouldn't actually be getting naked. Not fully, anyway. But the most efficient way for her to make large creations was to strip down as far as possible, using only some metal nipple shields and 'panties' made out of the special alloy her power armor was crafted from. Momo, exhibitionist that she was, had argued against even that much coverage. Despite being specifically designed to pass through the energy wavelength of her Quirk, that alloy technically warped the signature slightly. Meaning her creations could only reach the micrometer precision she was technically capable of if created from bare skin.

If something passed through the alloy, she could only manage millimeter precision, instead of micrometer. Which wasn't good enough for some of what they were going to make. Thankfully, the areas where that was true mostly involved microchips. Which were one of the exceptions to Momo's accuracy. Not because it hadn't originally been insanely hard for her to produce nanometer electronics chips. But because they were something that Momo had worked so long and so hard on that they were now almost as automatic for her as creating her beloved Matryoshka dolls. There were dozens of such processing chips in her power armor, after all. Not to mention their presence in HSN systems.

Ultimately, Momo had been batted on the nose and told to simply make those bits of whatever she was working on from bare skin. Yes, it was more awkward since she'd have to make sure that her tits and groin didn't pass through any specific sections of a creation where those chips were needed. But poor Uraraka was already embarrassed enough working around Momo's near-nudity. The poor girl might have popped an important blood vessel in her face if Momo had gotten her way and worked totally nude. Personally, Izumi thought Momo might actually look hotter in the resulting look from using the metal bits for coverage, but apparently Uraraka could somehow do enough mental gymnastics around that fact to deal with it.

One way or another, the pair were soon exiting the cockpit area and moving back into the Cargo/Construction module. Izumi and 2B remained, with 2B moving over to the engineering panel for better access to all the sensor reports and inputs. Their job was to keep an eye on everything and do any maneuvering the other pair called for. Not that there should be much of it this time, as they weren't doing complex construction on this trip…

… … …

"Alright, ready Uraraka?"

Momo tried really hard to keep a serious face as poor Ochako tried not to look directly at her. Really, you'd think the training would have desensitized the girl by now. Personally, Momo rather suspected it would have if the other girl were entirely straight. From the way she reacted it was clear she wasn't exactly a zero on the Kinsey scale, though. Even if she wasn't far enough along it to identify as bisexual. Well, whatever the case, she had at least gotten used to Momo's mostly-nude form enough to stay professional despite her difficulty in looking Momo's direction. Her still-suit-clad companion focused down on her control tablet for a last set of checks, before nodding.

"Looking good. Radiation levels haven't risen despite opening the outer doors and the magnetic field is fully powered. If you're ready, I'll pop the inner doors."

This was, in reality, the true moment of truth. Well, one such moment of truth, at least. Until now, they'd been using an airlock system to release all the satellites and probes that Momo could make. Others designed those around her known capabilities, then they'd brought Momo to orbit and had her make dozens of them in a single trip. They'd kicked them out the airlock one or two at a time, and kept working for hours to make far, far more of them than they could have simply carried up as cargo.

That, however, wasn't a viable solution for the sorts of large space stations they were talking about. The largest space station ever made until now was only 109 meters in length. The long-defunct and deorbited International Space Station had needed to be taken up in dozens of pieces, requiring something like 40 assembly flights. The 'small' test station that would be their first major build was, in comparison, over 350 meters long and quite a bit chunkier than the ISS had been. Trying to deploy it in segments would be utterly impractical for the Inari 1, and the Inari 1 was the best delivery vehicle they had for the moment.

Which is where Momo, Izumi, and 2B's plan had come in. Using a variation of the Plasma Window concept, they'd theorized a mix that could be held in place using a magnetic field, but which would allow physical objects to pass through. That mixture is what the 'transfer chamber' within the Inari 1 was filled with. It could, at least in theory, separate vacuum on the outside of the ship from a full atmosphere inside. Even, most importantly, while a physical object was fully penetrating the 5-meter chamber at both ends. If it worked, Momo could start the creation of large objects and, with Uraraka to help keep it moving the right way, push it through the transfer chamber and out into space while she was still creating more of it.

For this reason, Momo's feet were locked down via straps in the middle of the cargo area, with Uraraka only a few feet away. They'd long since figured out that Uraraka's Quirk could be applied to an object as it was being created, and would continue to flow over newly created mass as long as she remained in contact. So Momo would start creating, then Ochako would touch the creation and guide it using the limited gravity and inertia control aspects of her Quirk as it was threaded out through the transfer chamber.

In theory.

You know, unless they were wrong about the properties of the field they'd created and the atmosphere was ripped out of the cargo area the moment they stuck a contiguous object through both sides of the transfer chamber. In which case they'd have only seconds to react and reseal the cargo area before Bad Things happened to Momo. Well, here goes nothing…or everything, depending on how this went.

"Beginning Creation Test One. Marker Object One starting creation in three, two, one…"

Momo refused to close her eyes. Marker Object One wasn't all that impressive or hard to make. She could pretty much make the 10-meter buoy and its radio beacons in her sleep. Still, it was simple for a reason. The only two things it existed to do were test the transfer chamber and start the process of marking their work area so they could more easily return to it in the future. Honestly, the most complicated parts were a set of ion-based maneuvering thrusters and a simple-minded computer to help the buoy maintain station as needed. The only reason it was even so big was that they needed it to be so for the test.

The buoy was tapped by Uraraka half a meter from Momo's skin, a maneuver they'd practiced dozens of times on their other trips to orbit. The iris that was the exit to space spiraled open even as the creation headed for it, giving them a slightly warped view into space through the field keeping the atmosphere in place. They both instinctively held their breath, trying not to tense as the buoy breached first the inner edge of the field…then the outer edge two seconds later. Since they honestly could have made the buoy within the cargo hold, if just barely, they'd positioned themselves closer to the transfer chamber for the test.

Thankfully, despite their worries they'd gotten something wrong, the buoy passed through without so much as a whimper. The iris closed, and Momo looked to Uraraka, who was intently studying her control tablet. The other girl's face lit up happily as she read them, telling Momo all she needed to know, though it was nice to hear it confirmed a second later anyway.

"Less than .001 loss! Well within projections! We're clear for Test 2!"

Momo beamed and immediately began setting up for the next in their series of escalating tests. Nothing more important than a few support beams and a pair of assembly drones would be launched today. But if all went well, they would have the green light to start serious assembly by the end of the week…

... ... ... ...

A/N: Just as a small anecdote. The Inari 1 was named as it is due to trying to figure out which of the Japanese Pantheon fit. Apparently, Inari is also the kami of Industry, along with the whole fox thing that I think most people in the west associate him with.