Roger. B-3 will continue to investigate abnormal deceleration of 505th TFS.
There’d been a slight pause before the tactical computer had printed Roger out on the screen. To be fair, while the tactical computer might have been slightly obsessive about calling Rei back to consciousness, its desire was no more intense than that of Major Booker. He wanted to have a deliberate talk with the tactical computer, to ask it just how much it, a representative of the SAF’s machine intelligences, had learned about what had arisen between Rei and Yukikaze.
It seemed that Yukikaze’s attack on TAB-15 had been Rei’s idea, but the inability to identify the 505th TFS as friend or foe had been Yukikaze’s own problem. Seeing that, Rei had reacted, taking over her operations. If his actions didn’t have a rational motivation, then all Booker could say was that Rei had lost his mind. That was what a human would think. But neither the tactical computer, nor Yukikaze, thought that Rei was insane.
Major Booker realized that a discrepancy had developed between the humans and their combat machine intelligences. During the short conversation he’d had with the tactical computer, the situation had changed bewilderingly, leaving the major with no time to worry about Rei. The tactical computer was in a similar position.
TAB-15 radioed, demanding an explanation for why Yukikaze had strafed them twice. As the ranking officer, General Cooley had to answer. She paused a few moments, pressing her lips together, then told the major to report it as an accidental weapons discharge. The major, concentrating on his conversation with the tactical computer, didn’t hear her at first. The general got his attention, and just as he was realizing what was happening, TAB-15 replied.
This is TAB-15. Roger, scrolled out onto the screen.
However, an actual human voice that sounded like one of TAB-15’s comm officers radioed in, asking what they were talking about and demanding to know who had sent the transmission and what exactly they meant when they broadcast that the JAM were present at TAB-15. The tactical computer at SAF headquarters had digitally transmitted the message to TAB-15’s central tactical computer, and it was the computer that had sent the acknowledgement. The humans of TAB-15 hadn’t done so.
“We’ve got casualties in our ground crew,” the comm officer shouted. “SAF, are you trying to kill us?”
Before Major Booker could explain that it was accidental fire, the tactical computer sent a command to cut voice transmissions, but no one paid any attention to the readout showing this. This was because Lieutenant Mayle’s plane, the lone survivor of the 505th, had judged Yukikaze to be an enemy and was engaging her.
Detecting attack targeting waves from Alpha-1, Yukikaze reported, identifying Mayle’s plane by its code number.
Roger, the tactical computer responded. Investigate Alpha-1’s mobility performance. Initiate mock combat.
This is B-3. Roger.
General Cooley clasped her hands together as she glared angrily at the main screen. She seemed to be saying something under her breath, but the major couldn’t make it out. It might have been “God,” but it could easily have been “fuck” or “shit” or any number of expletives. And they weren’t directed at Lieutenant Mayle’s plane. Major Booker thought she was swearing at Yukikaze and the tactical computer as they chatted back and forth without acknowledging her.
Even so, she didn’t command them to stand down. The voice comm line was cut and the radio on Lieutenant Mayle’s plane was being jammed by Yukikaze. Even if the general had issued an order, there was no way for her words to reach anyone.
“Keep an eye on the 515th’s movements,” General Cooley quickly said. “Get Yukikaze back to base before they show up.”
“This won’t be long, General,” Major Booker replied. “Alpha-1’s practically at bingo fuel.”
Either way, Yukikaze and Alpha-1’s dogfight wasn’t going to last long. Victory or defeat would come in the next thirty to sixty seconds. They might be equally matched in a dogfight, but the plane with the most fuel remaining to get home would win. A plane with no fuel was going down, whether it was shot down or not. The two things a pilot was always fighting were enemy planes and how fast his plane burned through its fuel.
Yukikaze had jettisoned her huge auxiliary fuel tanks before engaging the JAM. She just barely had enough to return to base, but the major decided that she had more than enough to reach the emergency in-air refueling point they’d prepared.
If nothing went wrong, there’d be no need for an in-air refueling. That was one of the things Yukikaze had gained from her new airframe that made her superior to the Sylphid and Super Sylph. Her greater cruising range might be said to be more important than her weapons and maneuverability. Fuel to an airplane was as vital as oxygen to a deep-sea diver. If it ran out, the plane was dead. The constant need for the pilot to be aware of his remaining fuel was a major cause of stress.
“This is quite a show.”
Once again hearing a strange voice, Major Booker turned. There stood a lone SAF pilot, arms folded as he watched the screen. A Boomerang soldier. The newest member of the SAF and pilot of Unit 13: Second Lieutenant Yagashira.
The soldiers of the SAF needed no special permission to enter the command center, but none of them ever did unless ordered. Major Booker couldn’t recall any flight personnel ever entering the center of their own volition. To the major, Yagashira was an incongruous presence in the room.
Maybe he wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere of the SAF, being a new arrival and all. Certainly seemed like the sort of guy General Cooley would like, the major thought as he turned to ignore the pilot and focus his attention back on Yukikaze.
“Lieutenant Mayle won’t win, will he?”
From behind him, Lieutenant Yagashira had spoken again.
“His fuel’s critical. Typical how Lieutenant Mayle is engaging anyway. Good guy, but his combat reactions are slow.” Yagashira sounded like he was gossiping as he spoke. “There’s no way he can beat the latest and greatest unmanned fighter. Now, if it were me—”
“Shut up,” said Major Booker.
Lieutenant Yagashira hadn’t said anything out of line, but his chatter was irritating Booker, like fingernails on a chalkboard. He didn’t have time to wonder why. Yukikaze had just initiated combat maneuvers against Lieutenant Mayle’s fighter.
“Why isn’t the SAF stopping Yukikaze?” Yagashira went on. “Are you trying to goad Lieutenant Mayle into fighting? Is that why you had Yukikaze attack TAB-15? Mayle’s not the sort of guy who’d take that quietly. I know what he’s like—”
At that point, Major Booker faced Lieutenant Yagashira and ordered him to get the hell out of there. Yagashira seemed shocked. “Either go to your quarters or to the stockade. Your choice!” the major told him.
The FAF didn’t have an official stockade, but Yagashira seemed to get the point, although he looked bewildered as to why he’d been spoken to like that. Red-faced, he saluted silently and left the command center.
6
ONE INCIDENT YOU could write off as seeing it wrong, but Lieutenant Mayle had twice seen Yukikaze, at close visual range, open fire at the ground.
“It’s killed someone,” he yelled. As he tore toward TAB-15 with the throttle maxed, he heard a voice from the base on an open-air channel say that Second Lieutenant Lancome had apparently been killed.
He couldn’t confirm with anyone from the base. Lots of information poured in during the battle. It wasn’t unusual for someone not to hear someone else clearly, leaving you to rely on your own judgment. Of course, two-way real-time communication was possible using advanced circuits, with the transmitter’s code automatically sent to show up on a plane’s main display to identify the sender. However, in battle, there was no time to verify the facts. To the contrary, in battle, your ability to think deteriorates. The guy who stops to think winds up dead. You had to fly your plane with the same sort of instincts that jerk your hand back when it touches a hot stove.
So, with the high G forces and sheer terror
making his mental faculties undependable, a fighter pilot has to not only evade threats but also counterattack. That was just part of the job description, which was why Lieutenant Mayle pursued Yukikaze and locked weapons on her without a second thought. He told his flight officer behind him that they were engaging.
“That’s an SAF plane. It’s one of ours!” he shouted back.
“Fuck it. That thing killed Jonathan. You heard, didn’t you?”
Second Lieutenant Jonathan Lancome was one of Lieutenant Mayle’s subordinates. He was a pilot. He was one of them. The JAM had shot him down once, but he’d made it back. And now he’d been killed by friendly fire?
As a general rule, the plane you flew was assigned specifically to you. In an emergency you might fly someone else’s plane or a reserve fighter, but the 505th had lost its reserve planes. Consequently, a great many flight personnel weren’t operating with the squadron. Until a new plane was assigned to them, they were mixed into ad hoc teams to fly sorties, some were given leave, others moved into other squadrons, and some were even given non-pilot duties. Lieutenant Yagashira had been promoted, but that hadn’t been the case for Lieutenant Lancome. The FAF hadn’t approved leave for anyone, so he’d been put on maintenance duty. Lancome had said once that he no longer had the confidence to be a pilot. For Lieutenant Mayle’s part, he wanted to keep Lieutenant Lancome as flight personnel and just relax the normally rigid system of plane assignment, but he’d lost the desire to push for this new policy when Lancome had admitted his fears. It wasn’t easy to shake the fear instilled by having the JAM shoot your plane out from under you.
Poor Jonathan, Mayle thought. He died on the ground, killed by a friendly plane.
Without hesitation, Lieutenant Mayle maneuvered to shoot Yukikaze down. Gripping the flight stick in his right hand and the throttle in his left, he banked steeply at her. As Yukikaze flew away from TAB-15, she responded to Mayle’s combat maneuvers. She turned, as though inviting him to follow.
“It wants to fight,” the flight officer said. “What do you think?”
Lieutenant Mayle kept his mouth shut and ignited the afterburners. But then the plane began to vibrate again, a combustion status abnormality warning sounding. Yukikaze banked sharply and Lieutenant Mayle lost sight of her.
As he banked hard to follow, a shivering shock wave struck them. Unbelievably, Yukikaze had turned around and flown past them, almost close enough to touch. As the shock wave and the air currents it stirred up assaulted the left wing, it suddenly lost lift, sending Lieutenant Mayle’s plane into a quick left roll. At the same time, it apparently ripped the main wing’s forward flaps right off. The flight officer craned his neck around and confirmed that a fragment of them had damaged their vertical stabilizers.
Despite this, the plane’s flight computers instantly began working every control surface, dutifully stabilizing the plane as Lieutenant Mayle desired.
“The problem’s in the engine,” Lieutenant Mayle shouted, but even as he said it, the engine alarm warning lamp remained dark. The plane dove then climbed, its speed falling to barely two hundred kilometers per hour. Mayle dove into a turn at full throttle, trying to shake Yukikaze loose.
He ignited the afterburner again, trying to accelerate at full power. He managed to rev it to maximum for about three seconds, but that was followed by a loud bang from the engine on the right that shook the plane. It looked like the turbine blades in the engine had been damaged. At the same time, the compressor in his left engine stalled and flamed out.
Wrestling the plane out of the resulting tailspin took everything Mayle had, leaving him no time to attempt an engine restart. He managed to stabilize it scant moments before augering into the ground, using the speed of the dive to climb higher.
The right engine looked like it wasn’t on fire, at least, but it was completely useless now. He tried and failed to restart the left. Now robbed of any thrust at all, the plane’s climb weakened, then transitioned into a slow descent. The engine noise had ceased, and it was quiet now. Lieutenant Mayle looked to his right and saw Yukikaze flying next to them, so close that he could reach his right hand out and almost touch her. From her position, he got the feeling that she was flying to keep a constant watch over them. It managed to beat me without firing a single shot, Lieutenant Mayle thought numbly. It was possible in a dogfight to stall your opponent’s engines out, assuming you had absolute confidence in your plane’s maneuverability. That thing had just demonstrated the technique on him.
Mayle silently made a fist with his right hand and held it up, signaling his flight officer that they were about to eject. The light of Faery’s twin suns glittered off of Yukikaze’s canopy, her cockpit unmanned. It’s like the plane itself is laughing at us, thought Lieutenant Mayle.
He didn’t want to think about anything anymore. When they reached the right altitude, they ejected.
As he floated down beneath his parachute, Mayle watched Faery’s forests swallow up his plane and Yukikaze. She had lowered her engine output and flown alongside Mayle’s plane. Just as it looked like she was grazing the forest canopy, Yukikaze’s exhaust ports flared brightly. In a second, she was turning away at full power, afterburners lit, and a moment later she was out of sight. Then the roar of her engines reached him, followed a moment later by the explosion of his plane as it self-destructed.
Forget avenging Jonathan’s death, it’s a miracle I’m still alive, Lieutenant Mayle thought with a shiver. That thing, that Yukikaze… It’s a monster. Let it fight the JAM. The JAM aren’t human, so let one inhuman freak fight another. Why did he even have to be here in the first place?
As Lieutenant Mayle fell, looking at the canopy of his flight officer’s parachute a bit below him, he thought about how he never wanted to fly a fighter again. Now he understood how Lieutenant Lancome had felt. The enemy they’d come to fight, the enemy of the FAF, weren’t human. These unknown aliens they called the JAM. These unknowable opponents.
That was the first time Lieutenant Mayle experiened his true feelings in his flesh. The enemy was incomprehensible to humans. Terms like win or lose were completely meaningless as far as the JAM were concerned, so there was no way that humanity could ever win this war, was there? And in a flash, he understood just as well that all you could do was accept that your being alive didn’t matter at all in this world.
It wasn’t even the JAM who taught me that, but an unmanned plane called Yukikaze that had been created by humans, thought Lieutenant Mayle, a strange chill in his heart. As he thought about how the plane that had left him feeling so utterly helpless was of a kind with the JAM, the shock of landing on the surface of Faery’s thick forest was more intense than he’d expected. The sensation of striking the spongelike alien vegetation—it shone with a metallic brilliance like some beautiful illusion—felt pleasant to him.
7
WITHOUT ANY WARNING at all, Rei Fukai found himself aboard a plane.
His right hand grasping a flight stick and his left on the throttle lever. He looked around for the control button. He lifted his left hand and touched it to his head. He could feel a helmet through a flight glove. There was a mask on his mouth.
Outside were the skies of Faery. Rei looked around the interior of the cockpit. He’d never seen it before. This wasn’t the layout of a Super Sylph’s cockpit, but it wasn’t unfamiliar to him either. The control and display layout was essentially the same.
This was Yukikaze. He was aboard Yukikaze.
Rei’s left hand shot back to the throttle, needing to confirm through thought what he was doing by instinct. In his helmet, a warning alarm like a scream from Yukikaze was resounding: Wake up! it seemed to shriek at him. Wake up! Wake up! It seemed real to him.
Yukikaze needed Rei. A situation had arisen that was beyond her normal functions, and she was screaming for him to switch the combat maneuvering system to manual.
The words MANUAL CONTROL flashed urgently on the main display panel. It was the first time he’d ever seen th
at warning. It was as though Yukikaze were saying “Save me,” or perhaps even “I need you.” It was a bitter call; she was telling Rei that if he didn’t wake up completely, she couldn’t handle the situation and the JAM were going to shoot her down.
This wasn’t a hallucination or a dream. She was going to be destroyed. Rei could feel that the threat was real. The JAM were coming. They were after him. Rei quickly toggled the automaneuver switch off, telling Yukikaze that he would handle this. The display reading MANUAL CONTROL stopped blinking and stayed steadily lit.
Rei was awake, but what was he doing here? What had happened to Yukikaze? Dreams and reality were hard to separate in the past from which he had come, where he’d had no sense of time passing. It was as if he’d awakened with somebody else’s memories. He had to find some way to separate out the dreams and the fantasies in these memories that were not his own, to link the past to the reality he found himself in at this moment. He had to take these fragments of memory and reassemble them like a jigsaw puzzle.
But he wouldn’t need time or effort to assemble the puzzle. He was sure that, if he just got hold of the thread of his consciousness, which had awakened in this ocean called reality, his self would instantly crystallize into existence. Into the ambiguous dream space through which he’d drifted, fading, coming to the brink of extinction, had plunged Yukikaze’s shout to awaken. That alarm was the nucleus around which his self would reform.
“It’s the same as Lieutenant Mayle’s plane,” said the flight officer sitting behind him. It was like that other time, and Rei knew that these half-awake memories of the past were reality. And so, his thoughts now affirming that his complete self was properly crystallizing, he heard the voice from the rear.
“Hey, Jack,” Rei called out to the flight officer sitting behind him. “Calm down. Even with the engine output restricted, with a little skill, we can’t lose. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
Good Luck, Yukikaze Page 7
