Chapter 30: Astraea

“Woah…” Celia breathed out in awe as she gazed upon the space center that stood before them.

Around them were multiple small buildings connected to each other, each of them overgrown with tall grass and other plants. Behind them, a couple meters away, stood a bunch of flags of old countries that neither Celia nor Hikaru recognized. They seemed to lead up to an empty patch of grass, as if some important tall structure was supposed to be there, but was now gone.

The two of them stand on the airship for a moment, unsure of what to do next. Neither of them expected the space center to actually exist despite risking a lot of time and money to get there. Using her phone, Celia snaps a picture of the blue and yellow sign in front of the building, translating the French words into German so she could properly read them.

Jupiter Center, she reads the bigger yellow words at the top of the blue sign with a strange black and yellow symbol on it, before reading the smaller words at the bottom, Guiana Space Center.

“Well? What does it say?” Hikaru asks, looking over at her screen.

“From what it looks like, this is in fact a space center,” she said, “and the building that that sign is attached to seems to be the control center.”

Hikaru silently stares at the building as if still in disbelief from seeing all of this.

“Well? What are we waiting for? Let’s go explore the building!” he excitedly shouts as he prepares to jump off the airship.

“WAIT!” Alto suddenly shouted, causing the two of them to stop in their tracks, “it’s not safe to go inside. If this is in fact the space center the old lady mentioned then that means that the facility hasn’t been touched or properly maintained for over a century. The air inside the building could be toxic to breathe in, and there could be a lot of other dangerous substances like mold and asbestos. It’s best for both of you to not enter yet.”

“Oh… right,” Hikaru said.

“Then… what should we do now?” Celia asks.

“While the substances may be dangerous for you, they aren’t for me. If you would like to take a look around the facility, it may be best to equip me with a camera and connect the recording to a device the both of you could look at,” Alto suggests, “but do take note that anything brought inside cannot be touched without decontaminating it first, and the same applies to me. Once I enter, I should not come in close contact with either of you until I’ve been cleaned.”

Celia and Hikaru look at each other before they nodded their head in agreement. Hikaru goes down stairs and rummages through his backpack, picking up a spare camera he used to take pictures when his phone was down. He brings it up on the deck and hands it to Celia.

“Here,” he says, “I haven’t charged my phone in a few days so it’s about to run out of power. You should connect this to yours so we can take a look around the place.”

Celia connects the camera’s lenses to her phone screen and hands it over to Alto to carry around.

“Good luck in there she says,” as she gives him a pat on the back.

Alto takes the camera and heads inside the facility, weaving through the tall grass, before busting his way through the locked doors of the building using his brute strength. 

Upon entering, he turns on his built-in flashlight features, shining the light around the dark place as he navigates his way into a large open room that looked to be a massive red-colored auditorium with 5 rows of seats. At the center of the room was another room enclosed in a large glass structure. 

Celia and Hikaru slowly watch as Alto points his light into the room, revealing a large array of computers and chairs that sat in front of a large screen.

“Wow… that must be the control room!” Hikaru exclaims in a whispered voice, “I don’t know why there’s a weird auditorium area outside of it though…”

Alto continues walking around the facility, exploring the strange old building. Despite Celia and Hikaru seeing the place as a sacred relic of the past, Alto felt a sense belonging. After exploring and being overwhelmed by the large metropolitan cities, he was now back in the past, exploring a building with technology and architecture that he was familiar with.

A few moments later, Alto comes across a strange set of stairs that led somewhere deep underground and follows them downwards to a large, cavernous, tunnel-like area. Shining his light around the place, he sees that it looked to be a large railway system used to transport heavy materials and parts somewhere.

As he takes a look around the place, he steps onto a large gated platform above the tracks, examining the rust and mold that had built up on it. Suddenly, the noise of a small creature scurrying by startles Alto, causing him to turn around and accidentally bump into a button on the railing.

A loud whirring sound began echoing out, as Alto looked around in confusion while Celia and Hikaru watched with morbid interest, curious what was happening.

Just as Alto was about to walk off the platform, the gates to it close off, and the platform begins moving at an increasingly fast pace. The platform zooms along the tracks with a bewildered-looking Alto as Celia and Hikaru struggle to comprehend what was going on in the video with the amount of shaking that was going on. 

Soon enough after a few minutes past, the platform slows to a stop. Not knowing where he was, Alto takes a look around the place, and sees that he was now in a completely different facility.

“Alto are you okay?” Celia asks, but then realizes she can’t hear him through the camera.

The area Alto was in now didn’t look too different from the previous facility — it was the same exact tunnel-like place, except now instead of a set of stairs leading up towards the top, there was a massive doorway almost the size of the tunnel he was in. The entrance seemed to be blocked off by a heavy metal gate that descended from the top, and on the wall to the right of it was a white sign with words that neither Celia nor Hikaru could read.

As if knowing that the two of them were curious, Alto walks up to the sign and uses his translation features to read what it said.

“ELA-7 - Astraea Launch Facility,” he reads, “safety equipment must be worn beyond this point.”

Celia and Hikaru look towards each other.

“A launch facility?” Hikaru says, “that must be where the rockets are built and launched from. There might be machines inside that could help us build a rocket!”

However, Celia doesn’t respond, and instead tilts her head sideways. Despite being happy they found a launch facility, she still found the place to be strange.

“I wonder why it’s underground though. This feels more like a missile silo than a rocket launch site,” she said, “also rockets aren’t built at the launch site, they’re built inside dedicated payload preparation and integration facilities, which are also typically found above ground, but when we got here on the airship, we didn’t see anything else besides the control center.”

Hikaru thinks for a moment and agrees.

“That’s true…” he mumbles, “rockets aren’t typically built underground because trapping the heat from the blast of the launch in a confined area isn’t a good thing… I would say that maybe it’s because they wanted to secretly launch rockets from the facility, but that’s unreasonable since a rocket flying through the sky is kind of hard to miss. As for the payload facilities, maybe we just missed them because we were too focused on the control center, but it’d definitely be weird if the space center didn’t have any. That would mean we would have to build a rocket from scratch unless the machines are inside the launch facility instead.”

Celia and Hikaru stand there silently, each pondering their own ideas or explanations for why the facility was laid out in such a way. However, a sudden loud screeching sound that came from Celia’s phone immediately cuts the two of them out from their train of thoughts as they look over to see what was happening on the screen, only to be met with nothing but darkness.

The loud creaking of metal could still be heard from the screen along with the crunching of Alto’s footsteps on the concrete floor before an extra loud thump echoed out. A few seconds of silence shortly followed after, before they heard Alto’s footsteps walk over to the camera and pick it up.

“Sorry about that,” Alto says to the camera, “in hindsight I should’ve warned the both of you about the loud sound, but I managed to pry the large metal gate open.”

Celia and Hikaru look at each other in surprise before Hikaru gives a shrug.

“Sometimes I forget how strong Alto is,” he says, “I believe ALTOs were made to be able to lift 20,000 kg of weight right? Given that the door must’ve rusted, it wouldn’t be too hard for him to lift it up.”

“Still…” Celia says nervously, “his strength kind of scares me…”

The two of them then look back at the screen, waiting to see how the launch facility looked like. 

Alto flashed his light around, revealing 2 sets of stairs that led upwards in opposite directions. The stairs seemed to gradually ascend upwards one by one all the way to the top of the large, seemingly empty room. However, as Alto looks towards the center of the room, his light flashed over something that revealed that the room was indeed not empty as Celia and Hikaru gasped out in unison at the sight before them.

Standing in front of Alto was none other than a single, tall, rocket, and on the side of was a simple word.