Free Rocket Girls: The Last Planet by Housuke Nojiri

and the SSA survived. Not only that, but they were able to realize such a dramatic cost improvement that Nasuda’s lie had transformed into a truth of sorts overnight. They had realized his vision of a manned space-repair service. Now the eyes of the world were on the SSA.
    It was after this that they rolled out the MOB2 series of multiple-seat orbiters. However, they were still obliged to use the smallest astronauts possible. By reducing the weight of a crewmember by a single kilogram, they could shave all of seventy from the total weight of the rockets. By limiting crew height to 155 cm, they could reduce the weight of the orbiter alone by a whole seven hundred kilograms.
    Which is how the future of the SSA came to rely on short, female pilots. Of which at present, they had only two. Two pilots to NASA’s five hundred…
    Five days after the orbiter’s emergency splashdown in Yokohama.
    The top staff were gathered in the meeting room on the third floor of the main SSA building for a roundup of the last mission.
    “…Luckily, the soy sauce and vinegar compound did little damage to the cockpit controls. All of the electronic components are shielded, of course, to resist the effects of a small amount of moisture,” chief engineer Hiroyuki Mukai reported. “As long as nothing seeps in through the outer hull.”
    “What about the momentary loss of power due to water damage? Is that something we should work on improving?” Kazuya Kinoshita asked. Kinoshita was the number two man at the SSA.
    “I doubt there’s any need. After splashdown, it doesn’t really matter what breaks.”
    “Well, as long as the fuel cells don’t explode.”
    “Which is why they jettison them before splashdown.”
    “But Yukari likes hanging on to them,” Kinoshita noted. “Fuel cells make for a lot more power once you’re on the ground. You can operate the air conditioning and use the radio without worrying about your batteries.”
    “Well, we’ll just have to train her not to expect those luxuries.”
    “That’s a possibility,” Asahikawa noted. She was the chief medical officer in charge of every aspect of the astronauts’ daily lives. “But there are limits. Actually, the problem with Yukari is she’s been trained so well, she’s starting to look for shortcuts to everything.”
    The room filled with laughter.
    “Who would’ve thought that following fashions and studying for school tests would prepare someone so well for a career as an astronaut? Memorizing an orbiter manual is nothing to a homework-hardened schoolgirl,” Nasuda said.
    “Let’s not underestimate Matsuri, either. Recall that she was somehow able to smuggle an entire durian into that capsule.”
    “How did she do that, anyway? We checked that capsule completely before liftoff,” Mukai asked. He had been responsible for the prelaunch check.
    “Apparently, she used a sort of hypnosis. By placing the inspection crew under a kind of trance, she made them unable to physically see the durian.”
    “Excuse me? Is that even possible?”
    “I can’t see any other way that she could have pulled it off. The Taliho tribe claims to have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, after all.”
    Satsuki had already debriefed the inspection crew. She had even tried hypnosis on them herself to get to the bottom of what had happened just before the rocket took off—but no clear answers were forthcoming.
    “But wait,” Mukai cut in. “If they can do that, why don’t the Taliho all go off and make a killing robbing banks?”
    “Let’s just be grateful that they seem to have wisdom in equal amounts to their power. Mind you, I’m going to keep Matsuri confined to quarters until we’re ready to strap her in next time.”
    “What happens if she hypnotizes the guards at her door?”
    Satsuki frowned.
    “We just have to trust them, both of them,” Nasuda said. “Thankfully, the durian did no real damage, and Yukari jettisoned the fuel cells as she was